Visualizing Computer Chess Movements

by Marshall on May 31, 2005

Thinking Machine 4 is a Java applet built with Processing, a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. Make moves on the Thinking Machine and watch as the computer builds its decision tree (…)

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2004 POV-Ray Competition

by Marshall on May 31, 2005

The 2004 POV-Ray Competition results are up, complete with the source for the renderings.

Cheap Gas Google Map Hack

by Marshall on May 24, 2005

Where is gas cheapest in your area?

German Propaganda Spam

by Marshall on May 23, 2005

For the last week or so, we’ve been hit with a rash of spam mail in German. The mail was coming from 2 IP addresses, one on RoadRunners subnet and one on Comcasts network. I sent complaints to the respective (…)

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Searching in Files Using awk and grep

by Marshall on May 18, 2005

Sometimes it is handy to have a list of files which contain a certain string (or a regex). You can combine grep and awk in the following manner: grep -H “string to search for” *.txt | awk -F: ‘{ print (…)

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Big Sigh of Relief

by Marshall on May 17, 2005

Today I had the last exam worth mentioning of my Undergraduate study. Physics 210, I can honestly say, was the hardest class that I have ever taken. I had a fairly low grade going into the exam, but relative to (…)

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Polygons and Points

by Marshall on May 13, 2005

Here is an interesting article, circa 1987, which provides a nice explaination, and some C code, on how to programatically determine if a point in a 2-D or 3-D space lies within an n-sided polygon.