Jlulian’s (New) Stuff

The ‘Boo Scary Ghost’ Index is defined as the following: “As system designed to help identify people who may require medical attention if they are further deprived of sleep. Say, in a monotone voice, ‘Boo Scary Ghost’ and if the ‘target’ bursts into laughter, or laughs excessively, then you can be sure this person needs sleep, quick.”

How did I come across the ‘Boo Scary Ghost’ Index? My own sleep deprivation of course. I have 3 hours a day to do my own work, or I will cut into my much needed sleeping time. Naturally, I fall out of this time rather often, going 2-4 hours over the time I intend, consequently I’m tired, obscenely so. In this tired state I talked to a mentor I’m working with, about the mental state changing qualities of sleep deprivation of course, in particular, everything or nothing is funny when you’re deprived of sleep. So it only makes sense that we invent something to see if someone is tired enough for this to be a factor.

And thus the ‘Boo Scary Ghost’ Index was born.

(Consequently another effect of sleep deprivation is inability to properly speak or understand speech, so if both, or one of the participants in the ‘Boo Scary Ghost’ Index test is deprived of sleep, the words may be misunderstood, ala ‘Blue Scary Ghost’, or, ‘Boo Scaly Ghost’.)

A disease of many programmers I would assume, I have a horrible tendency to do things the easiest possible way (requires the least amount of thinking on my part) even if it means doing more work.

As an example, this is how I do simple linear equations.

Mathz

It probably would have taken less time to bash that into a calculator, or even do it in my head, especially considering I’ve made a mistake (or 2) writing that function, and I had to retype it (which is a horrible time consuming task in this interactive shell)

I’d imagine this is what contributed to my poor grades on Math tests too. I KNOW I know how to factor that dead simple problem, or solve that in nearly 2 steps, but holy shit I cannot remember multiples (and thus factors)

This habit certainly isn’t limited to the domains of math and fun, instead of managing my music like everyone else–manually ripping and naming files (or organizing them)– I spent 2 days writing a system that would rip-split-tag-rename and then dump all my ripped music into a folder, Where foobar2k (or any other player with a decent library system) would build collections automatically and let me access my music in style.

Of course, OCDing in automation form isn’t the only thing that’s come of this. I’m trying to teach a group of monkies how to program, and I can’t find something for them to do for the life of me. I could try to teach them how to write a Tetris game, but even then they’d be writing code just by listening to what I say, instead of learning how to do it themselves, like everyone learned how to program (right?). Continuing with my topic here, I’ve found that pet projects of mine (like the automated music splitter) helped me learn sillily large amounts of things. For example, I now know how to do “Interprocess Communication” (read: read stdin from a program I’ve started), for simple data parsing. I also know how to parse a CUE sheet, and do all this parsing without ruining UTF-8 encoding (Trickier than you might imagine).

Moral of this story? Silly, ‘quick’ programs help you learn how to actually program. (Especially when you actually want to do something)

As with any recently set-up system, there’s some test data floating around in it.

This would happen to be it.

#include

int main() {
   std::cout<<"Hello World!\n";
   return 0;
}

Fun. (WordPress loves fucking up my code formatting by the way)

It looks like the DNS changes finally propogated, changed them at 8PM last night, and they're updated at 8AM only 12 hours, neat-o.

There’s a new flymoore server afoot. An amazing 256MB SliceHost box (slice). So far the lack of service has been amazing. It’s just me, a terminal, and several hours. The way you’re supposed to run things.