On the club application form I created, there’s a place for you to put down a password so I don’t end up having to send a randomly generated “2foas2!v” to a million people. Being counterculture and all that, I don’t like passwords. Nobody does. I tried googling for an alternative way to identify yourself  or perhaps, I could come up with an alternative myself1. But in the end, I just went with a normal password + salted hash. Alright, well, underneath the place where you put your password, I write down “Your password is stored as a 512-bit hash. We do not know what you type”. I have to do this because, well, who would trust me with their password? It’s just too easy to harvest giant lists of email passwords. But still, including this bit is a bit troubling. Technically,… more →

I’m planning to start a development blog for the ruby-based NHS application that I’m writing this summer. I’ll like make it walnutnhs.com/dev, and then use /dev/null for the 404 page, and a /dev/stderr/ for reporting bugs. Ha, ridiculous. And maybe  When I think about this idea, it sounds like a blog with a genuine purpose. Summer seems like a bottomless repository of free time, but it probably really isn’t. I will never have as much free time as I do now. But that’s ridiculous! I’ve got homework and AP tests coming up and I want to go outside, and look at summer: absolutely nothing planned. Ahh, but I’ve resolved to stop putting things off and start what I want, right now. Followup: Since nobody did this for me last summer, here are some browser statistics about WHS’s student population, or at… more →

I’ve been considering what RogerHub is still doing up online. Blogging is a great experience and all, unforgettable really, but I just had to find a more definite mission. And here’s what I’ve got: Think about the role of the Internet in your life. When you’re brainstorming ideas for great programs and summer projects, you always hit this one wall: How do I get people addicted and coming back? And then you see it. The evil trap! It’s so easy to fall into. Every industry related to gaming or technology or internet, how can I get these dolts to pay me for my crap? Usually, you never consider the ethical implications when it comes to science. Science right? Fuck yeah. If those guys want to stand in the way of progress, well it’s as if science doesn’t have enough problems already. You… more →

How’s this? If you got a chance to defy reality and change your situation with a wish, just a wish, what could you even do? Cliché, cliché, but looking past the social stigma of trespassing onto this guard-patrolled fort of a forbidden subject, there’s a lot to be considered. First, we can accept that cartoonists (read: propagandists) had purpose in sticking this plot twist in every possible situation in our movies and books. They present it as pure fiction: plot, not a cause-effect precedent that should forever bind in your head. Most of the time, it involves greedy people doing their greedy things only to regret it always, and really, this is only a basic form of the idea. Then, there are rules: guidelines that correct for the faults created by the ambiguity of language, or perhaps that the idiomatic phrase… more →

Please understand that the decision isn’t as nasty and selfish as your speculations make it out to be. Simply, a sue-happy organization used two anonymous students from Orange county to spearhead yet another self-righteous name-dropping case about how education in California should be free down to the last detail. But they’re fighting high lab fees and workbook purchases and uniforms, not any advantage Walnut might have with GPAs. I don’t know the reasoning behind Walnut’s reaction, but please reconsider what you’re doing. The key point enforced by law is that teachers cannot force students to pay to learn. Fee-reductions do not apply here because (1) they still require some payment and (2) requesting a fee waiver counts as payment in itself. Simply put, fees must be completely voluntary. Considering that, releasing the Asian will not help here, and “not fair” is simply… more →

Genetic algorithms seem like another one of those cutting-edge discussion topics reserved for only the most knowledgeable and i-did-it-before-it-was-cool hipsters. It fits in the same category as non-relational, decentralized database hype (read: the cloud). But genetic algorithms may be what defines the future of programming, you know, the IA and evangelion MAGI stuff. Genetic algorithms work like evolution in biology. A group of “candidates” is created with slight variation between individuals. Each is assessed for its fitness. The most successful candidates are cloned and randomly mutated to form the second generation. The rest die off. This method works well for some problems, given that you have 1. a way to measure fitness, 2. a reasonable range of values to test, 3. an absurd amount of computing power. Now think about this: how do calculators compute sine? They can only do a… more →

With such a clean desk, I could be really productive and fast. If only I had something to work on besides homework and IA’s and distractions. I just had to clean up my desk after I found out about nerdfort. What a moving paragraph. I had chills after reading this. Instead of validation for web pages, how about validation for web browsers? If a browser doesn’t meet standards, everyone should agree to block it from their sites with a message on upgrading browsers. If the W3C said so, it would totally work. I’ve always found that physical books help me more than PDF’s. Maybe I’m just so used to screwing around in front of the computer screen that it’s impossible to focus with it there. Hey on a side note, RogerHub validates. But IE still sucks, so the result is insignificant. Seriously, the browser… more →

Saving time is an odd tendency. It’s great to conserve time finishing a task and allocate the time elsewhere, but if you’re so concerned with keeping those tiny few minutes, it must mean that you are absolutely strapped for time. In other words, you are already using every minute of the day to its fullest possibility. But that’s not right. We spend time eating, showering, in commute, shooting birds in the backyard. That time could supposedly be spent on working, since at one point, you were so low on time that you had to intentionally think to conserve it. But because you still spend time on daily nonsense, you could not actually be wasting time! You might think leisure likewise contributes to overall happiness and therefore is a legitimate ”time expense” equal to homework and project work. But come on, we… more →

Wordpress has this interesting feature where you can publish posts to your blog by email. Then think: when would you ever use this? I thought maybe if you’re heading to an inevitable death and you want to get out one last message, to friends or family. You pull out your phone and decide email would be fastest way. Oh man, the car’s coming up fast and there’s nowhere to run/hide. (You’re in a tunnel or something.) ”Bye everuo” crap, backspace backspace.. screw it, I’ll just leave it with ”Bye”. You toss the phone aside, safe, where it can deliver your last message with confidence. Okay, perhaps that won’t happen. What if you’re a tech blogger at some big expo and you’re giving up-to-the-minute updates to your eager, drooling audience. But then, you would probably be using Twitter. Hey how about… more →