RouseWorld | Main -- October 2003 Archives

Guns and safety

Aaron Swartz, a gifted young programmer, has an interesting idea — remove society's need for guns by inventing a fast-acting tranquilizer. He has invited emailed responses to his proposal, but I'd like to present my response here. I've wanted to write down my thoughts on the Second Amendment for a while now, and this seems like a good opportunity. This is still a response to Swartz, however, so please do read his proposal.

On the lighter side

While searching for something totally different, I stumbled onto a marvelously funny BBC Radio 4 program called Dead Ringers. The show is mostly political and social comedy delivered through a team of talented voice impersonators.

Sort of like Saturday Night Live, only funny.

And of course, you're too late. The season has ended and you'll have to wait till next year. When, I'm sure, "David Perkins" and all the rest will be back.

Solvable games

I'm not much into math, so maybe this problem is way too difficult, but...

Consider the set of possible perfectly played Klondike Solitaire games. By perfectly played, I mean the player knows where all the cards are (even the ones in the deck and face down on the table) and doesn't make mistakes. The number of games should be equal to the number of ways a 52 card deck can be arranged, which is huge (52! is 8.06581751709439e+67 on my calculator).

But what is the number of solvable (okay, winnable) games?

Is there a way to calculate the number of winnable games without running through every probability? Can you build an algorithm that can determine the winnability of a given game within X moves?

By the way, after 301 games I have 26 wins at Klondike (draw three, no limit on the number of cycles through the waste desk), which is almost 4 games in 52 or 1 in 13.

It's all about style

I've done some tweaking to the site's CSS, partially in response to some errors in the file and partially to fix some presentation quirks and color issues that have bugged me.

I've also told MT to display the last five posts. Previously it was displaying the last seven days, which under some circumstances resulted in a blank entries column.

Automatic for the jewel case

The folks behind AutoStylus has made something neat, but to me a little scary — CoverStar.

CoverStar is application that takes an iTunes playlist and automatically builds a CD jewel case insert, booklet and CD disk print. Please note that it doesn't just build a plain text, white paper listing — the program experiments with different layouts, uses any of the fonts on your computer and a bunch of included artwork.

The finished layout can be tweaked, or you can just press a button and have it build everything all over again.

Okay, that is the neat part — the scary part is how well CoverStar does it. Apart from a few times where it made bad decisions about color, the automatic designs it created were readable and funky.

So, is design just math? Probably not — the program can't select artwork and layout that reflects the color of the music. but there is math in symmetry, balance and repeated forms.

A suggestion for AutoStylus: have the program do a Google image search using keywords pulled from things like the artist, track name, CD title, etc. and use those images in the design.