The Case Against Screen Savers

I don’t use a screen saver because:

• It distracts me.
• It doesn’t let the CPU sleep, hence generating heat.
• It provokes silly discussions like ‘OMFG, Wow, can you give me the .exe?’ [No, but here’s the .deb]
  

I use a power-off-monitor-after-two-minutes-of-inactivity scheme because:

• I want the backlight to last longer.
• I want it to save my kilowatts, not my ‘screen’.
• If it kicks in while I’m in front of the PC, I know I must have been wasting time / day-dreaming.

Pragmatic, heh? 8-)

Long Hair…

• looks great
• lets you shake your head like a wet dog :P

–but–

• takes more time to comb
• feels really uncomfortable, especially under a {cap, hat, whatever}
• seems to need washing more often
• stands in the way of headphones

Visualizer for IOI2007/day1/flood

Here’s another visualizer for an IOI problem, flood this time. It’s a bit more complex than the others, since I had quite a hard time debugging this problem ;) Requires GD.

Source, Makefile, screenshot:

And now the #1 reason I like Linux: here’s an entire checker / evaluator for this problem, in a single line of commands for bash. It took no more than 2 minutes to get together.

for i in tests/flood.in.*; do echo ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– && SUFFIX=${i:15} && rm out && time ./flood.e <tests/flood.in.$SUFFIX >out && cp tests/flood.out.$SUFFIX correct && rm correct_ && sort correct > correct_ && rm out_ && sort out > out_ && ll *_ && diff –q out_ correct_ || break; done

Visualizer for IOI2007/practice/chip

After doing it the first time, I got the hang of it and now I like doing visualizers a lot ;)

This is a quick-and-dirty one for the CHIP problem presented at IOI2007 during the practice session. I made it to also validate the solution, not only illustrate it. Requires GD to compile.

Here’s the source code, the Makefile, and the obligatory screenshot:

Quotes from ‘By the Light of the Moon’

Dean Koontz impressed me with his fantastic techno-thriller, ‘By the Light of the Moon’. Here are some quotes from the book:

• Eternity yawned before her, a great swallowing maw, and she drifted fast, faster, faster still, into this internal immensity, toward oblivion.
• Lots of people are hard, but not most. Most are just scared or lonely, or lost. They don’t know why they’re here or what’s the purpose, the reason, so they wind up half dead inside.
• You can’t make life come together like a puzzle…