UltraNurdage

Category: Computers

  • Robot Evolution

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    Although it’s been almost a month since the end of the semester, I wanted to share some of the final project that consumed most of my time and mental capacity in April. I was taking CS266: Bio-inspired Multi-agent Systems from Prof. Rhadika Nagpal. It was a very fun course, emphasizing seminar-style discussion of research papers, with labs…

  • Captain Picard Doesn’t Have an iPad

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    It should be of no surprise to any of you that I am a huge Trekkie. You are probably also aware that I am a total MacAddict. What better binding of bailiwicks than to blather about both? Star Trek has been at various times credited with inspiring a number of modern gadgets, including the mobile…

  • Back That Thing Up

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    Introduction Three Sundays ago, my primary Mac OS X hard drive failed. Those of you who follow me on Twitter got somewhat of a play-by-play as I discovered the depth of my drive failure I got home to the Spinning Pinwheel of Death (SPOD), and discovered quickly that my computer would not wake from screensaver…

  • Is the iPad for me?

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    What’s the question? Like every other critic and salivating fanboy, I feel compelled to chime in on yesterday’s religious experience in which The Steve descended from on high bearing a tablet. However, this is not a review, but merely a (lengthy) answer to a simple question: is the iPad for me? I won’t be talking…

  • I Found a Twitter Bug!

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    I found a Twitter bug! Hah! Specifically, certain characters which much be escaped in the GSM 03.38 character encoding are getting treated as the wrong encoding when posted to Twitter from Verizon Wireless SMS, and showing up as ? in text messages sent by Twitter to Verizon Wireless customers via SMS. I should add that…

  • BackSnapper – My First Chrome Extension

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    BackSnapper On a whim tonight, I whipped up my first Google Chrome extension in about 2 hours. A non-trivial amount of time was spent writing it up and making the icons. It’s obviously very simple, but it replicates one of my favorite features of Safari 3: SnapBack (the feature got eviscerated in Safari 4). Basically…

  • Top 200 Video Games of All Time According to Game Informer

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    Introduction Oh yeah, I have a blog! Lots has been going on in the intervening months (see my Twitter feed for short attention span details), but I figured a video game post during NaBloPoMo would be a good way to get back on the wagon, even if I’m not actually posting every day during November.…

  • Satisfy MacPorts Dependencies Locally

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    Introduction Like many Unix geeks, I have software installed that I’ve built manually from source. A good example is my post on compiling django; a number of the relevant dependencies were built in /usr/local/src/ and installed in /usr/local/. I also like using package managers, because if I’m not doing any customization (and the package is…

  • Tweetworks Python API

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    Tweetworks Python API Version 1.0.0b1 of the tweetworks package for Python 2.6 is now available. This package implements the web service API for Tweetworks, a Web 2.0 service that facilitates threaded conversations on top of Twitter. This is definitely a beta, because while I’ve tested everything I can think of, I haven’t tried writing anything…

  • iPhone 3GS

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    Yes, I am an Apple fanboy and preordered the iPhone 3GS, which arrived today. To be silly, I recorded a quick video of Spot’s unboxing from its own point of view. Be forewarned: the sound of packaging being opened might be a little loud, depending on your audio setup. Note on the name: all of…