n-Dimentioanl Minesweeper

I find it horrible, but interesting enough to share.

Minesweeper that can be played in 2-6 dimensions.

RSS Feed for Gmail

I just accidently discovered this recently - you can get your email messages on Gmail as an RSS feed.

25 Weirdest Animals

http://divaboo.info/

We have a Gremlin or two and a Jabba The Hut. Any more associations?

Contet-Aware Image Resizing

A new way to resize images based on the content, while maintaining the way "important areas" appear.

Watch the YouTube demonstration.

World of Warcraft

I just realized I haven't checked my RSS feeds all week. This reason for this is not a 4 day hike or lack of internet connection (though I have been having trouble with the latter).

I finally found some time to play World of Warcraft. I've been wanting to do this for several years now, and finally I got the time.

It's very addictive - I'm especially impressed with the graphical design and the sheer size of the world. You have a town, inside a country, inside a continent, inside a world, inside a multiverse. Lots of space to explore. The capital cities are also very impressive. I would attach some pictures, but they don't really represent the 3D experience.

Playing alone would get old after a while, luckily I have Aya that enjoys playing with me. If any of you have some time to kill and wanna try this out and play together, let me know :)

BTW, I'm still on the 10 days free account, but the ways things look I'm going to purchase an account, and possibly Aya as well.

Fwd: : סיפור אמיתי

:)

 

Infinite Patzpatz

Never ending bubble-wrap!

Deleting Gmail Messages

In an effort to free up some Gmail space after running out of it, I searched for ".ppt" and ".pps" to find all powerpoint slides in my box. ALL ".pps" files and almost all ".ppt" were indeed well-intended spam. Deleting some of them helped me get down to only 91% full, and then I encountered the following message. It would have been amusing under different circumstances.

Reminder - Email Subscritpion

Apperantly some people didn't see this, but you can register to receive email updates on this blog, by clicking here (or the button on the right that says email).

Geni

Geni is a free genealogy website. It has an extremely easy user interface, and allows you to build and maintain a family tree in minutes.

Your tree is shared among your family, who can edit and expand it themselves. A classic Web 2.0 website - too bad I didn't think of that :)

Soul Geek

As I assume a great deal of my readers are geeks, here is a dating website dedicated for geeks.

A New Form of Spam

In the constant evolutionary battle between spam and spam filters, we keep seeing new tricks spammers are using. Today, I got this message (passed my Gmail spam filter).



Update
I tried just copying the text from my mail, but this malformed HTML messed up not only this post, but also other posts on my blog - so instead I'm attaching an image.

Starcraft Board Game

Money milking, 79$ Starcraft board game.

Cool Computer Science Stuff!

First, the simpler one. A really cool algorithm that finds holes of any shape in a given image, and "patches" them from an exiting bank of other images. This might be similar technology to Photosynth.

Second, a historical moment for Computer Science. It appears the first NP-Complete problem has been solved in polynomial time. They use some sort of "optical solution" and not a Turing machine, and the number of photons used is proportional to N^N. I don't know if this will have deep theoretical implecations (haven't read the article yet), but it's interesting (to C.S geeks).

I Don't Like Google Today

If you remember, when Gmail first appeared, Google promised us "we'll never have to delete another email". It's now all about searching your email, and Google will take care of the storage problem for you.

This sounds reasonable, considering file attachments take up most of the space, and Google can easily detect identical files through a (really big) hash table and store only a single copy of every file.


However, I'm currently at 95% capacity of my alloted storage. It's not my fault, I'm getting big emails, and not deleting them, just as Google asked. I even tried to search for all my large mails so I can delete them in one swoop, but it's impossible using the current Gmail interface.

Today, I login and find this message. Gmail is kindly offering me to purchase additional storage. Thank you very much! What's the matter, AdSense not bringing in enough revenue anymore?

This gives me a really bad taste, especially as Yahoo! are now offering unlimited storage for free, for the last couple of months.

A bad one for you, Gmail.

Dotnet Web Crawler Speedup

I'm writing a web crawler in C#, and getting it to perform well was really annoying.
I tried simply using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem() to queue up my requests to multiple threads. Each thread just ran WebClient.DownloadString().

While the threads did run in parallel, it turned out WebClient had an inherent lock.
I tried messing with the ConnectionManagementSection, but that turned out read-only.
After some Google, I found that the configuration can only be changed by modifying the machine.config or user.config files! Seems pretty stupid to me.

After doing that simply didn't work either, I found this code that helped me through. I still don't know exactly why WebClient.DownloadString() doesn't work, but after some tweaking I got to about 2.5 pages pre second. Still not top speed, but way better than the 0.5 pages/second I started with.

Minesweeper: The Movie

http://www.destructoid.com/minesweeper-the-movie-37770.phtml

My Kind of Couple

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/08/0029252&from=rss

Extended Birthday Week!

Yay, I'm getting a super birthday this year!

This week started with my Kung Fu team moving to a fresh new dojo and celebrating it with a 2.5 hour practice.
Yesterday we played some 2 headed giant Magic: The Gathering game.
Today I'm having a Release Drink (שתיית שחרור)!
Tomorrow there's another practice.
Thursday I'm doing an "Out Trip Form" (טופס טיולים יוצא - לפעמים אנגלית זה נוראי). Aya is organizing some secret game. She won't tell anyone the details, but I managed to guess it :) You're all invited, by the way.
Friday I think I'll celebrate with my family
Sauterday, we'll christen our new surfing half-board (בוגי).
Sunday, I'm getting reassigned to the Kirya, then vacation for 2 months, then I'm a true civillian!

That's all folks

Japanese Transfomers

Subtitles like these always make me crack up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSsXlRytRDs&mode=related&search

Weird Dancer

http://www.militantplatypus.com/blog/archives/3790

Aya, Eran and myself watched this one very closely, to make sure she doesn't change the direction of the spin, and that it's all in our heads.

It was hard to convince ourselves, but we finally admitted it. We humans are fucked up.

Poker Night

After playing some poker one on one versus Aya on the train today, we played some Texas Holdem tonight. Since we're not playing for money, I keep an imaginary balance of my wins/losses. If I pay 10 imaginary dollars per game, I'm currently at -30$ total :(

Shimi and Aya won the Holdem games, and it was, as poker nights are usuelly, as very funny night. My personal favorite activity during poker games is trying to guess other players' cards, telling them what I think they have, and advising (commanding :) them on how to proceed. For some reason, it seems to convince the other players I actually know what I'm talking about. If I did, I wouldn't be at a -30$ balance, wouldn't I?