mothership, mothership

Karmic Koala

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:34:08 GMT

Someone put up an on-campus mirror of the new Ubuntu. Daamn, 5.7 MB/s!

Halloween '09

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:05:41 GMT

I'm a Stick Figure. What are y'all tonight?

sooo

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:01:49 GMT

Yo Phil. I finally listened to Camera Obscura. omfg.

PS I haven't commented on your entries, but it sounds like you're doing awesome in Portland.

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:05:27 GMT

Are you guys having problems going back far in your friends history?

Stephen Status update: Awesome

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:00:36 GMT

Hey guys, what's cool in the music scene these days?

A few I've liked recently:

Emily Haines - Cut in Half and Also Double
Jose Gonzalez - In Our Nature
Everything by Easy Star All Stars
Ice Cube - The Predator
Ambulance LTD - New English EP
Rusko - Babylon Vol. 1
A ton of Ratatat, especially the remix volumes
A bunch of Nick Drake, especially Pink Moon.

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 06:32:54 GMT

Tonight I met this girl who graduated from Providence in '07.

Me: You don't remember Taylor Pitelka, do you?
Meredith: Haha, oh yeah, and his brother Stephen!
Me: You mean Hunter.
Meredith: Yeah, that's right. They were so dorky!
Me: By the way, that Stephen was me.

lol. College is so funny.

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:00:21 GMT

Dorm bandwidth during the summer. O_o

Update:

me: I would like to watch Weeds right now, please.
ncsu: okay

this time it's tweetie

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:37:56 GMT

tweetie is totally the hot new thing, so here's a keygen for you:

import sha

def killchars(s, allowedchars):
    r = ""
    return "".join(l for l in s if l in allowedchars)

def tweetieregistration(email):
    email.lower()
    email_alpha = killchars(email, "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxyz")
    digest = sha.new(email_alpha).hexdigest()
    key = killchars(digest, "0123456789")[:8]
    return key

print tweetieregistration("test@test.com")

outputs: 90218151

I'm clearly a coder

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:56:56 GMT

If this image was way too big for you, then you shouldn't be using IE.

geetar

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:57:51 GMT

Dear lj friends,

So I've been playing with my crappy acoustic guitar for a while and I love it. I was thinking about buying a crappy electric guitar. My plan was to go to craigslist and my hope was ≤$100 for the guitar. I'd need an amp too, I guess.

here are some I found.

Thoughts? I'm pretty helpless here.

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:46:51 GMT

If you have an apple mighty mouse, you might set the squeeze button for all sorts of things. I wanted to set it to be a back button in Safari. So I wrote this little script. It makes the squeeze button into a back button if Safari is open or does an expose all windows if it isn't.

If you want to use it yourself, download backexpose.zip, unzip it and put backexpose.app in ~/Library/Scripts. Then open up System Preferences → Keyboard & Mouse → Mouse. Pull down the squeeze button and choose Other. Choose ~/Library/Scripts/backexpose.app and you're good to go!

tell application "System Events" to set appList to name of application processes whose frontmost is true
set frontApp to item 1 of appList

if frontApp is "Safari" then
	tell application "System Events" to keystroke "[" using command down
else
	-- expose all windows
	tell application "System Events" to key code 101
end if

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:41:55 GMT

Here's a picture of the computer I'm working on right now. :P

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:27:11 GMT

Okay now I need ideas for a simple Mac OS X or iPhone program to write. Any of my Mac friends have a problem they'd like solved?

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:41:36 GMT

I want a new domain name. Something that'd make for a cool email. Ideas?

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:25:15 GMT

Hey guys, I'm home. If I haven't called you yet, I will soon. :)

Liverpool

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:03:06 GMT

I went to Liverpool yesterday. More pics later (probably on facebook). Here's a panorama of the River Mersey (click for full size).

Neat OS X trick

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 09:38:32 GMT

Here's a neat OS X trick. Let's say you have a document open and you want to open its containing folder. If you look at the top of your window and you see an icon with the filename, just right (option) click on the icon.

Context menu after clicking the icon in Finder

It works in any program with a document icon

It also works in Safari if you option click on the title text

Highlights of the night

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:38:01 GMT

President Obama. :-D Some highlights of the night:

"So you think Palin's daughter and that babydaddy STILL going to get married?"
"Al Sharpton has a look on face that says 'Wtf, what does he have that I don't?'"
"this really is like credit music. Joe: "I'm getting the fuck out of here, see ya"
Weed is decriminalized in Massachusetts.
"I like how the Clintons are noticeably absent" (from the victory speech)
cnn reporter: "and cnn projects the winner goes to mccain" (he forgot to say 'Utah')
cnn.com reporter to a john mccain supporter: "i can only imagine what you're feeling"

If you supported McCain, I'm sorry. I'm totally rubbing it in your face. It's all in good fun. :) If things go like normal, you'll get the house back in 2 years and the presidency in 8.

If you supported Clinton, well, fuck you.

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:13:11 GMT

Happy Halloween. I miss all of you. (OMFG LOLZ)

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:27:01 GMT

For those of you who miss stephenroller.com, I redecorated it.

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:43:49 GMT

I've never fully realized the size of my network of computers is in the US. It pays to be a sysadmin here and there.

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:24:27 GMT

I voted absentee.

Another update from England!

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:45:42 GMT

Shit's pretty great here. Last time I wrote, it was Fresher's week, but now Uni has started. People have calmed down, but I still go out too much. :)

I wrote about AI last entry, so I'm enjoying that a whole lot. I'm also taking Intro to Film, which might as well be English 101. The professor is really laid back and is letting me just do two essays and that's it. I'm also taking Data Engineering, which is more or less PL/SQL and Oracle. I'm not too worried about it, but so far I've completely blown it off. Chris Jones has got my back. ;-)

I've really settled in at this point, used to most of the accents and such. The place I'm living is cook for yourself, so I'm enjoying the cooking a lot. I'm also enjoying chips, baked beans and squash. Wikipedia does a good job with this one: "It is worth noting that the concept of squash is generally met with confusion when put to North Americans (often to the surprise of UK citizens to whom squash made up a large part of their liquid intake, especially as children)."

Oh and the new Her Space Holiday album is primo and OpenOffice.org 3.0 for the Mac is actually half decent! Not as nice as a totally Mac app, but it no longer makes me want to puke just looking at it.

Everyone doing alright? I'm letting myself idle on skype a lot. My username is stephen.roller. If you see me, give me a ring. I'd love to hear what's going on across the pond.

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:58:30 GMT

I love AI. We're learning Prolog, which is pretty different from everything I've learned in previous courses. I absolutely love it though. Already I've used it to write two programs I've always wanted to write: tic-tac-toe that the computer always wins/ties and a semi-sophisticated unit converter (how fast is 54 mph in nautical miles per fortnight? It's 15766.704933045359 if you were curious). Neither of those were for class. I just did it to learn Prolog and because it interested me.

Of course, Prolog isn't any more powerful than any other language. You can write tic-tac-toe in any programming language. It just seemed like a good nail for the hammer.

I also programed Dots and boxes in Python. It's very pretty. It has colors and a nice display and everything, but no AI. You can only play against another human. I'm going to eventually write a computer player that's hard to beat. I say hard to beat because I'm pretty damn good at dots and boxes. ;) I haven't decided if I want it to be written in Prolog or Python, but I think Prolog would be easier.

It feels really, really good to be programming for myself again. After a whole summer of working on boring problems in my job, I had begun to think I hated programming and had lost all my motivation. I'm glad it was just a sucky job after all. :)

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:13:01 GMT

So England is pretty crazy. This week has been Freshers' Week, which is basically get-fucked-up-every-night week. They really know how to drink here. Since coming, I've been with lots of international students from all corners of the earth. I've also spent a lot of time with my flatmates, who are all British first years.

Besides partying, I've also spent a lot of time standing in queues. I say that with endearment because queue is better than line. The students are fun and the city is always more intense than Raleigh or Charlotte ever feel.

My classes should be fun and hopefully not too difficult.

I hope I get my absentee ballot in time!