Hat!

I started work on Saturday on a hat based on the Rule 110 Cellular automaton. I had bought yarn for this particular hat two weeks ago, but I hadn't allotted time to work on it. As you can see, it's finished! Well, mostly. There's some dangling yarn that I hid behind my head for that picture, which I will need to weave into the underside of the hat.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, in terms of the design. I'll definitely be making more as gifts for people who I think might appreciate it. This iteration stays with me, though, for a couple of reasons: First, it's the first hat that I've made that I actually want to wear, and second, its dimensions and surface geometry are... non-standard. This is partially due to poor planning, and partially due to my lack of experience with fair-isle knitting (the preceding VT hat was my first attempt at that, and that was a lot less complex).

Apart from hats, I'm also thinking about knitting a blanket with squares from each of the 88 non-equivalent elementary cellular automata. To help design it, I'm learning to use GNU Octave, a free (as in freedom and beer) programming environment and language designed to be compatible with Matlab. Since downloading the manual 24 hours ago, I've learned enough to write a function that generates, based on a seed array, a matrix representing n generations of any of the 256 aforementioned elementary cellular automata. I hope to use this in combination with Matlab's/Octave's graphics capabilities to choose an ordering and a color scheme for this blanket.

I've also been learning some stuff I'll need for my alarm clock project. Thanks to Pete Soper and Drew Nelson of Splat Space, I've figured out the basics of a circuit to drive four 7-segment displays (that's 28 LEDs) using only the 12 pins on my Arduino (hint: four BJT transistors and a chip specifically designed for the task that Pete had lying around). Updates on this as I figure out other components (like the audio components necessary for the alarm, and the actual timekeeping function).

I'm still enjoying work, but I'm also glad it's temporary. Cubicle life doesn't agree with me. I miss everyone from home (everyone from everywhere, actually), and can't wait to see you all!

Posted via email from Ben Weinstein-Raun

Clean

Finally, everything is in place here in my room in Durham. I'm typing this on my clean install of Arch Linux, on my clean desk (laptop, tea, mug, water boiler, pen, lamp, and copy of SICP), in my orderly room, in a clean house, on a quiet street amidst pristine night-time white noise.

I've been working on a web adaptation of the Virginia Tech Honors "Course of Study Planner," or "cosp." It's functional and I've been using it to figure out what courses I need to request, but right now there's no way to save your changes. I'd love any suggestions you have, but first take a look at this README for a list of the things I'm already planning to add.

I finished the hat mentioned in the last post, but it turned out badly because of the issues I mentioned, and because I overestimated the size of my head. If you know anyone with terrible taste and a big head (who goes to Virginia Tech), let me know! (What's that? Why yes, I guess that is a pretty good description of myself, isn't it? :)

You may have heard of Twitter's recent acquisition of Posterous, which seems to have spelled doom for this incarnation of my blog (Twitter's acquisitions have historically been talent-seeking). I've started setting up a self-hosted blog, over which I'll have more control, but I'm stuck here for now.

On yet another unrelated note, it's getting too hot to wear sweaters and I don't have anything work-appropriate that's cooler. Anyone in the area want to go shopping with whatever is the taste-opposite of a metrosexual?

Posted via email from Ben Weinstein-Raun

The longest words Jesus would be able to touch-type

If your left hand knows not what your right hand does:

The longest Scrabble word spellable with your left hand (if you're a touch-typist on a standard American keyboard) is SWEATERDRESSES.

The longest word spellable with your right hand is HYPOLIMNION.

Posted via email from Ben Weinstein-Raun

Third week in the Chelsea

If you're reading this and didn't know, I'm currently living in Durham, North Carolina for a six-month internship ("Co-op") with IBM's Rational Gearbox team.

I've been exploring my environment as much as a 9-5 will allow, including several trips into downtown Durham, a lovely dinner with some friends from Virginia Tech, joining the local Hackerspace, vaguely-creeps-inducing meetups to play Cthulu-universe boardgames, and a short shopping spree (three items) at the aptly named Hillsborough Yarn Shop. 

The latter trip was to stock up for my third hat, pictured above: It's my first time doing stranded color, and I hope I'm keeping the carries long enough to avoid the dreaded scrunching issue that everyone seems to warn me about. What you see there is actually inside-out from the end product: I'm using a variation on this pattern, with stripes on the folded part. I realized about two rows ago that I'm going to have to either knit inside out or switch directions (thus leaving a weird step at the seam) in order to keep the pattern the right way around. Oh well.

I'm also learning me a Haskell (whether it's for Great Good or not has yet to be determined), and I'm planning to read through The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths, and Programming as soon as that gets here.

Work has been really good so far. My team is extremely friendly, and everything about the actual job is looking good so far. IBM is just one of a huge set of three-letter acronyms I'm still absorbing. Lots of meetings, no code written yet, but I think I'm slowly getting there. Internal information is spread out through a very large number of resources that are very time-consuming to search, so I'm grateful to have such a helpful group of people I can bother relentlessly (Thanks Joe!).

I'm thinking about coming home over spring break (for some value of spring break), and maybe taking a trip to visit some other friends, so I may see some of my Blacksburg friends then, but if not I'll be sure to catch up with you when I do see you!

Posted via email from Ben Weinstein-Raun

What's the difference here?

I realized, when trying to explain it to a friend a week ago, that while I can correctly select between "which" and "that" in context, I can't enumerate rules.  In interpreting language, I think nearly everyone can tell that there's a difference.  To illustrate, two sentences with clearly different meanings:

"I feel an intense need to do something that is challenging."
"I feel an intense need to do something, which is challenging."

Here's a formal description of the difference (with appropriate skepticism of any difference between the two).

Posted via email from Ben Weinstein-Raun

Time for Some Reflection

Today is April Fool's Day, the most revered holiday in the hacker tradition. I think it's time for a bit of introspection, soul-searching, and asking some tough questions about ourselves and our profession.

To start things off:  What exactly is a velop?  Why are we so obsessed with removing them?  These are questions too often met with blank stares in the development profession.

Posted via email from Ben Weinstein-Raun

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Posted via email from Ben Weinstein-Raun