Human Tetris?!

I’ve always been a big fan of Tetris.  And I can totally appreciate nerdy art.  Those two things combined make this video awesome: The Original Human TETRIS Performance by Guillaume Reymond.

Did you notice any mistakes?  No, not that the “player” was really bad at Tetris.. go watch 1:09-1:11 again.  That isn’t what would have happened to that one remaining white pixel…  Other than me being a perfectionist, it really was a great video!  And I love how the credits call all the people “pixels” – that would be so cool to put “Tetris Pixel” on my résumé!

I Love My Family

Quick post here —
I really love my family.  They mean the world to me.  I rely on them for so much, and I am always here for all of them.  I consider myself a very family-centric person, and that is something that I’ve always enjoyed about my life.

That being said, it’s story time!  Just now, Vinny was telling a story about the other day with an unmarked white van pulling past the house (delivering phonebooks).  He mentioned that he had his phone at the ready (in case they were kidnappers or whatnot), and Mike asked, “Who were you gonna call?”  Vinny, Mom, and I all said simultaneously, “GHOST BUSTERS!”

My family rocks. :-)

Oooouch Chaaaarlie!

In case you haven’t seen this yet, it’s my favorite Youtube video of all time – Charlie Bit My Finger.  Hhhhilarious.

Anywho, the reason I’m saying ouch is because I finally ventured out into the sun today, and being the nerd I am, my pasty whiteness got really burnt.  Now, I’ve mowed the lawn shirtless a couple times and I’ve played one set of tennis shirtless twice so far this summer.  But today, I made the mistake of playing more than two sets and then almost immediately cutting the grass.  To add insult to injury, this all took place between 11 AM and 3:30 PM (and if I remember correctly, 11-2 are the worst possible hours to be out in the sun).  And because I’m macho (and by macho, I actually mean forgetful), I didn’t put sun block on.

So yeah, my shoulders are really rather red, and my forehead somehow got red (I am yet to get a haircut since THON (don’t worry.. I’m getting one this weekend..), so my hair typically covers my forehead…).  In other news – my foot has two separate decent-sized blue spots!  It’s most likely from the blue shoes which I cut the grass in, but maybe I am turning into a smurf..

Notepad++ Rocks My Socks

If you enjoy being super productive, I strongly suggest you check out Notepad++ (download).  This program is absolutely amazing.  It’s a free text editor (like Notepad or Wordpad that each come by default in XP) which has so much functionality and extendibility.  It is especially useful for programming, but I use it for editing regular text files as well.

The first thing that Notepad++ has which should be required in every program these days is allowing multiple files to open simultaneously via tabs.  Each of the main programs I use (Firefox, Notepad++, and Pidgin) have tabbed windows and it really makes life a whole lot easier for a multi-tasker.

Next up, the easy-to-record easy-to-use macros in this program are rather solid.  Let’s say you want to separate every single line in a document with an extra line: all you have to do is press the magic little “Start Recording” button, hit the end key, hit return, hit the down key, and then press the “Stop Recording” button.  Now whenever you press the “Playback” button, it will go to the end of that line, add a new-line character, and go down to the next line.  But it gets better!  You can “Run a macro multiple times”, specifying either the number of times to run it or to run it to the end of the file.  How cool is that?!

An amazing capability which I saw was there previously, but didn’t have a reason to use until just recently is the use of regular expressions in the find and replace.  I always have a difficult time defining what a regular expression is, but it’s basically a way to match patterns.  I think the best way to describe them is to just use an example:

Let’s say you have a file which has people’s names in the “LastName, FirstName” format, and you want to replace it with a “FirstName LastName” format instead.  You can open up a find and replace, finding “([A-Z][a-z]*), (.*)” (without the quotes) and replacing with  “\2 \1” (without the quotes).  The find there is a regular expression:  inside square brackets [ ], you can put a range or set of values, so [A-Z] finds a capital letter between A and Z inclusively; the * after the [a-z] is called the Kleene Star, and what it means is that it will match an element in that set 0 or more times (similarly, a Kleene Plus would match something 1 or more times); the “, ” will match exactly a comma followed by a space; and finally, the “.*” will match the remainder of the line (the . is the wildcard character, so it will greedily find the rest of the line’s wild characters).  The replace uses the variables stored from inside the parentheses: the first set of parentheses “([A-Z][a-z]*)” gets stored in “\1” and the second set “(.*)” gets stored in “\2”; so by simply putting “\2 \1” in the replace, it puts the first name first, and the last name second.  Pretty cool stuff, huh?

Also, the syntax high-lighting is phenomenal in Notepad++.  With tons of programming languages’ syntax already built in and more available to install yourself, you can use Notepad++ to program in just about any language imaginable!  It’s pretty awesome.

And finally, there are three great additional views available:  you can view FTP folders (allowing you to modify files through FTP with seamless downloading and uploading (you just open it like it’s on your computer.. and then every time you save, it gets re-uploaded)); the Light Explorer lets you browse your files without having to have a Microsoft Explorer window open (very handy when you’re working on multiple files in the same folder; and you can view a console dialog, having your very own command prompt built-in (for a command-line compiler for example).

All-in-all – Notepad++ is a really useful program, especially if you’re doing any sort of programming.  If you give it a shot, you won’t be disappointed!

Penguins Win Game 5!

Down 3-1 in the series, tonight was a do-or-die situation for the Pittsburgh Penguins.  We started off looking really strong, scoring twice in the first period and Fleury making some terrific saves.  However, the Red Wings got back into their normal perfection for the rest of the game.  When we were down 3-2 in the last 5 minutes, we had to make something happen, but it wasn’t looking too fantastic.  But with just over a minute left, Fleury came out of the net for an extra attacker, and Maxime Talbot was our man.  With just 35 seconds left, Max put the puck into the back of the net to tie it up and take it into overtime!

I was on the edge of my seat for two and a half extra periods while the players’ fatigue was becoming more evident every minute.  Although we got a few lucky calls with penalties against Detroit, we weren’t able to capitalize on them until Peter Sykora (the man who told the announcer in-between the benches that he was going to score the game-winning goal during the first overtime) took a beautiful wrister while a Red Wing was in the box for a high sticking double minor.  The Pens won it after just about 110 minutes of play, and now we get to bring it back to Pittsburgh for a game six which is sure to be exciting.

Innovative WiiMote Uses

I was talking to my older brother Michael yesterday, and he asked if I had seen the CMU student who was using a WiiMote and sensor bar for other things.  He pointed me to this Newsweek article and these two YouTube videos (Head Tracking and Multi-Touch Whiteboard).

A couple years ago, I saw this video of a multi-touch screen and some of the awesome things it can do (like the Minority Report stuff – I always thought that was cool).  I always kind of assumed that this technology would be insanely expensive, but with this multi-touch whiteboard made from a WiiMote, this is much more affordable!  Attach some IR LEDs to a pair of gloves, and do some hardcore coding, and voila! $50 is all it takes! ($40 for a WiiMote and $10 for a pair of gloves with the LEDs — although, I need to go out and buy a Bluetooth adapter for my laptop, so that’ll most likely run me another $40-$50 it’s looking like).

So I just want to say “Thank you Johnny Lee!”  I can’t wait to see what all I can do with this!

Oh Spelling Bee…

I got to watch a part of the Scripps National Spelling Bee this evening, and it was so worth it.  First of all, I’m a huge nerd, so it was really awesome to get to play along (though without DVR, I wouldn’t have been able to play along as I would have wanted) and it was great to see the amazing talents of those kids.  Secondly, there were so many hilarious moments.

The first thing that comes to mind was the word “thymele” — Vinny pointed out that thymele is pronounced the same as “simile” would be pronounced by someone with a lisp.  So I could just picture the Youtube clip now: someone edits Dr. Bailey’s words to be those pronouncing and defining the word simile; the judges feel bad about the contest’s lisp, so they just pretend she was saying it correctly and let her go; she spells out the lisp with the “t-h”; and then instant Youtube fame.

Second up was the word “prosopopoeia” — this was the second to last word in the competition (the word which the runner-up missed).  When the word was said, the commentator could be heard muttering “Oh dear god.”  It was hilarious.  But then the kid missed it by leaving out the i.  I don’t know how or why he forgot the i.  It’s exactly like onomatopoeia, which I would imagine is a staple of any competitor’s study routine…

The last word that I remember being a funny one was “opificer” — the back-and-forth went by normally from contestant to Dr. Bailey, but when the girl went to spell it, she misspelled it (started it with an e instead of the o), and then butchered the ending pronunciation (she swapped a couple of the last letters to make it “opicifer” and gave Vinny and I a good chuckle).

Again, I am not trying to be mean to these kids or anything of the sort – these are amazing talents that they have to make it that far in the National Spelling Bee, and I know that I wouldn’t have stood a chance (I doubt I would now, even — just read more of my blog for proof of my terrible speeling).  It was fun to watch them spell words that I would never dream of spelling correctly, and I tip my non-existent hat to all of them.

Edit: Looking back at the Round-by-Round Results, the only kids I pointed out were the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd place finishers.  So I guess I only got to see about 15 words spelled – I’m really wondering what all I missed out on!

I Thoroughly Enjoy Lost

I know I’ve said this many times before, but I don’t think there is any way I can fully stress just how much I enjoy Lost. Tonight was the season finale of the fourth season, and it was quite an amazing episode. The two hours of awesomeness made it like a movie — a really really good movie! But now, I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself until season five starts in January. I’m not sure how I’m going to make it.

Maybe I’ll just go get addicted to some other show which has already ended. Doogie Howser was a great series for me in that sense, because I knew that there was no waiting game involved…

Also, I was trying to figure out a spoiler tag in case I wanted to say something about this episode of Lost, but it turns out the spoiler tag in forums is not actually HTML… So instead, I used my newly developed CSS skills to make my own spoiler tag. So highlight the grey box below to find a spoiler (unless you haven’t watched the season 4 finale of Lost yet – in which case – DON’T READ THE SPOILER! Go watch Lost!!!):

Spoiler! Come on Mare (or anyone else who cheated) – you didn’t REALLY want to ruin the finale, did you?!!?

Edit: Also, in case anyone missed the Alternative Endings on Good Morning America, they weren’t worth watching. It was less than one minute of the 2+ hour show, and that one minute included showing the ending they used. The other two endings were: Sawyer in the coffin, and Desmond in the coffin. So yeah, I think the ending that was shown was the one that made the most sense.. but I’m kind of wondering why one of the endings wasn’t Frank in the coffin! Oh well – we’ll just have to wait until next season to see what happens next! :-\

eLion is Really Nerdy

In case you are not  Penn Stater, eLion is the Pennsylvania State University’s electronic paperwork system.  Everything from scheduling to grades to loan information is all managed through eLion.  So in order to be a Penn State student, you must use eLion (at the very minimum) once a semester (in order to register for classes).

That being said, of the tens of thousands of people who have used eLion, I really would like to know how many have noticed the binary in the header of every page.  I hadn’t noticed it until I was obsessively checking my grades a couple weeks ago.  And once I did notice it, I instantly realized that it was a binary-encoding of ASCII characters.  And once I noticed this, I didn’t even have to use one of those converters to figure out what it said.  The fact that it was 5 characters long gave me the initial gut feeling that it said “eLion” and then all I did was compare the last two characters (01101111 and 01101110) noticing that the first character is one value greater than the second.   Since “o” comes right after “n” that was almost verification enough.  I checked the second character (“l”) to these, and the fact that it was 2 less than the last character, I was convinced.

Bonus points if you can figure out another word that would have fit that pattern to disprove my verification!

I Love Computer Programming

That’s all there is to it.  Computer programming is my true love.  I know that that makes me a huge nerd, but I am perfectly okay with that.  On Saturday night, after the hideous Penguins game, I hunted down a beginner’s guide on CSS and how to use it.  I worked through that and the same site’s intermediate and advanced tutorials until 4:30 in the morning and felt enlightened.

Now, CSS is something that I’m familiar with – (pretty much) every website I go to has its own CSS describing the look of the content: this blog has a CSS (which I imported and then modified a few characteristics), the Pass System (for THON) has a CSS, and the Math Club website that I maintained had a CSS.  Basically all I knew about CSS was that you define the characteristics of different objects (tags in HTML, selectors in CSS) and that way you don’t have to use different font tags all over the place and whatnot.  I had also heard rumors about how CSS should be used to design the layout of a page (instead of nesting tables inside of tables inside of tables).  But I didn’t know how to create a CSS from the ground up, and I sure as hell didn’t know how to do the page layout.So at 4:30AM, I finished up the tutorials and now I know how to design a CSS (I feel like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix – “I know CSS.”).

The big project on my plate right now is the development of Pass 2.0OOOOhYeeeeah (the initial Pass System was coded in ASP, and no one at Penn State knows ASP, and I don’t really enjoy ASP, so we’re recoding it in PHP – also in order to universalize the THON Technology Committee).  So I’m recreating the CSS (which is currently pretty much used only to modify the font for error messages) for the new Pass System, and it’s rocking thus far.

The only thing I love more than programming computers is learning a new programming language.  So learning CSS on Saturday night put me in seventh heaven.  :-)