Posts from — November 2005

Tonight’s riddle isn’t too hard, I think. I’m pretty sure my answer is right, but maybe someone will come up with something better.

You are a prisoner in a foreign land. Your fate will be determined by a little game. There are two jars, one with 50 white marbles, and one with 50 black marbles. At this point, you are allowed to redistribute the marbles however you wish (e.g. swap a black marble with a white marble, etc.): the only requirement is that after you are done with the redistribution, every marble must be in one of the two jars. Afterwards, both jars will be shaken up, and you will be blindfolded and presented with one of the jars at random. Then you pick one marble out of the jar given to you. If the marble you pull out is white, you live; if black, you die. How should you redistribute the marbles to maximize the probability that you live; what is this maximum probability (roughly)?

Don’t forget to white-out any spoilers (as described in the previous post) if you comment.

OK, so mentioning riddles in the last post got me excited, so I’m going to do a riddle of the day periodically. If you’re going to post a solution or any sort of spoiler content, comment like this:

Here comes some spoilers:
<font color=”white”>Spoiler stuff goes here</font>

That way, people have to highlight in order to read it and nobody gets the fun ruined.

For some reason I think I remember reading about this one in Applied Cryptography, but maybe I’m just making that up.

A bunch (three or more) of coworkers want to find out their average salary, but each of them don’t want any of the others to know their salary. How can they find out their average salary without anyone sharing their salary with anyone else?

If you already know it, there’s no need to comment… this one’s kinda neat once you figure it out. It’s not a trick question, there isn’t anything involved that isn’t mentioned in the question.

Some of these fuel economy tips are worth considering (specifically the second and third sections).

I ran into that link after looking at this riddle that was posted on the site. I had seen it before but didn’t remember the answer. I didn’t get the answer on my own, but once I heard the answer it made a lot of sense… so if you’re curious for an explanation, let me know. I should start doing riddles again. Maybe posting a riddle of the day on here would be entertaining.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/11/11/television.shows.reut/index.html

New York Magazine has a list of the President’s nicknames for people. They’re all pretty funny, I don’t think one stands out as my favorite. Maybe Putin’s, though.

Next semester’s schedule (currently):
- Software Architecture, Monday 4-7PM
- Semantic Web Topics, Tuesday/Thursday 9:20-10:35AM
- Thesis

I expect the classes to be dry, but tolerable. I’m vaguely interested in both of those topics, so I hope to learn a lot. My thesis work will expand upon my work over the summer and this semester. I’m excited about having a lot of control over my schedule. All of my courses will be at the graduate level, so I expect it to be challenging, but hopefully it’ll be enjoyable.

Whew.,, Beta 1 of Runstoppable is finally here.

A lot of the pages that don’t require an account don’t have much content yet, but feel free to poke around. We’re looking for a small group of committed beta testers right now (people who would use a running log and would be willing to provide feedback on the system). If you or someone you know are interested, please email beta@runstoppable.com or just talk to me. The beta requires an invite code… the final product will just have open registration. There’s a bit more information on my blog post…. poorly worded as always.

Lots of features still left on the todo list and the bugs list, but now we have something relatively stable to work off of. Tim and I have been using basecamp to keep track of pending tasks and bugs. It has been pretty useful so far, I think.

I might need some help with some writing for the site, if you’re interested in some work, let me know.

Nearly 100% of the site was written in vi, for the record. After spending all that time using vi, you’d think I’d be pretty good with it, but I’m not. Oh well.

Microsoft employee: “Developers – feel free to dig into the framework by building your own Microsoft Gadget that can be dropped into your Live.com experience.”

The buzzword “experience” is now up there with “solution” and others, as far as I’m concerned. Web page, web site, web application… any of those would have been fine. How do you drop something into an experience? If you’re going to make up definitions, don’t be lazy, just make up the entire word. I’m going to drop Microsoft Gadgets into my Live.com… picalillo.

Agh. Anger.

Humberto took this picture of our house on Halloween:

What a great angle and lighting.