Marshall’s Weblog

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 and displays its thinking process right on the chess board. Processing is also a pretty cool cross-platform [...]

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

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Where is gas cheapest in your area?

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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 abuse@ mail address and then blocked the senders at our Barracuda email filter. I [...]

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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 $1 }’
The -H option in grep makes it display the file name before the text that [...]

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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 the rest of the class, I was right around the class average. The professor never [...]

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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.

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