Harmonica Player's Dream

An analysis on the Bilski case has taken a little longer than I expected, so I will put that off until Wednesday. An update on Humm and Strumm will come sometime in the morning.

So instead, I am just going to share an awesome link I found on the Hohner website. As you may know, I am a harmonica player, specifically, a player of Hohner harps. So this obviously caught my attention. I introduce to you the Hohner and Bob Dylan Collection! The descriptions on the website (emphasis mine):

Bob Dylan Collection

The first item in the collection consists of a complete set of seven Marine Band harmonicas in the natural keys of C, G, D, F, A, B, and E, which

Yo dawg...I heard you're concerned with efficiency in your linked lists...

...so I put a linked list in your linked list, so you don't have to iterate while you iterate.

I call the idea Service Centre linked lists. In essence, we have a linked list that links to every tenth node of the list, and allows the list to be iterated even more quickly. This has great implications in making a list act like a vector. We can cut the number of iterations by at most 90%! This idea will be implemented in Humm and Strumm.

Why would we want to make a list act as a vector? How exactly does this work? Read here on our wiki for the idea in full.

A Rant on Zeitgeist, Emacs, DBus, and Documentation...(mostly that last one)

Another blog entry very early in the morning...

<rant>

As you may know, I am a heavy GNU/Emacs user. I often find myself hitting instinctively C-x C-s to save in any program. It doesn't so much work in Chromium when I am blogging, but I besides a web browser, I probably spend most of my time in this editor. It is not, however, well integrated with anything except itself. Not exactly an official GNOME editor.

So, I've been trying to make a simple script for GNU/Emacs to integrate it with the new Zeitgeist Project from some GNOME developers, which aims to track the documents opened and closed on your computer, then later intelligently relate these data points to allow you to more efficiently use your computer. Now, it's pretty much only good for tracking documents by times, because of the lack of documentation and UI. This project does look very promising, and may be in GNOME soon enough.

Humm and Strumm Update: 2010-06-24

Update on the development of the Humm and Strumm video game:

• Linked List: The linked list is only in its infancy (it doesn't have an iterator yet, nor the optimisations I would like. However, this follows nicely before the work on the String, which will use an iterator concept to access Characters.
• Logging features: I've begun working on a simple XSLT stylesheet for making the XML output into an easy-to-read HTML webpage. Soon there will also be timestamps in each log entry.

Humm and Strumm Update: 2010-06-17

Update on the development of the Humm and Strumm video game:

• Unicode support: I've finished a fully featured Unicode character that supports all UTF-8 characters. This will integrate with the String through iterators. Additional methods allow it to convert to native types and to UTF-32 codepoints, which will help integrating with Freetype and other libraries.
• Additional profiler features: After a little discussion, we've decided to expand the functionality of the profiler. By adding a PROFILE_ITERATION() method, we can allow for a loop of the same code, and take statistical analyses of the resulting times.

An Unbreakable Substitution Cypher?

The inventor of the Abu Dhabi cypher. (Image by Abdul Rahman/Gulf News.)

Mohammad Gaith Bin Mahah Al Mazroui (pictured left) has created a substitution cypher of such complexity that he says it is "almost impossible to decrypt any document" encrypted with it.

Sounds unreasonable to you too? A simple substitution cypher being unbreakable? Not just that, but this Abu Dhabi cypher is supposedly able to work for any language. Ever.

<sarcasm>Of course.</sarcasm> There are several problems that lead me to believe this is an ignorant attempt at creating a cypher. Of course, I could be wrong, but these claims seem far fetched.

Daily Posts

You may have noticed that the blog is finally done its major facelift. With this new look is going to come a new policy in my posting.

First off, there will be a new post everyday. That's right, every day for the summer. Come back, or better yet, subscribe to my feed for updates as each post comes out.

Second, here are the plans for each entry:

Mondays and Fridays are article days. These articles will always deal with the topics of this blog: Free Software/development, United States law, and music. The topics will vary, but expect them to be substantially longer than a normal post.