Everything’s been going well with the new computer. I’m having a bit of a web design block, maybe brought on by the lethargy of summer. That’s why this site hasn’t been redone yet. I need a design that doesn’t need to be pixel-perfect. I want it to be decent-looking in all browsers, and this one definitely isn’t. I’m working on it.

Anyway, here are some programs nice programs I’m using on my PowerBook:

• Chat Client - Adium: I used Trillian on my old Windows computer, and this almost seems like Trillian for Mac. It’s a very nice multi-protocal (AIM/Yahoo/MSN/whatever you want) that has some extra features. I haven’t actually tried iChat, the Mac chat client that comes packaged with OS X, so I can’t compare, but I like Adium very much.
• FTP Client - Cyberduck: I originally downloaded Fugu, but never got it to connect to my FTP server. Cyberduck connected just fine, so Cyberduck it is! I don’t do a lot of fancy FTP stuff, I just need something that’ll let me upload things and fool around with CHMOD.
• Image/Photo Editing - The GIMP: The GIMP is the open source equivalent of Adobe Photoshop. It’s available for OS X, Windows, and Linux. Documentation for OS X users isn’t very good, but I’ve managed. It’s a great program, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do.
• Color Chooser - iColors: I LOVE THIS PROGRAM. Maybe it’s that I’ve never used a decent color picker before, or maybe this program really is as cool as I think it is. It can grab colors from anywhere on your screen, and save them in a menu over to the side. And it’s very, very simple and easy to use. No bloat at all. If you need a color picker, I definitely recommend it.
• Text Editor - SubEthaEdit: A basic text editor that I use for coding CSS and HTML and such. It’s very simple, but has automatic tabbing and syntax highlighting for about a million different languages. While I would appreciated CSS auto-completion, I dont need it. SubEthaEdit also has a lot of features intended for files that are being edited by more than over person.

I am now the proud owner of a 12″ PowerBook. I love it beyond belief. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever owned.

I was originally planning to get an iBook, either the 12″ or 14″. When I visited the Apple Store yesterday, I liked the 12″ model much better than the 14″. The 14″ looked big and clunky andd ugly, but the 12″ was cute and perfect. I initially dismissed the PowerBook because of cost, but the 12″ isn’t actually very expensive. It ended up costing less than the 14″ iBook would have, mostly because I wanted to add more RAM and disk space to the iBook, but the PowerBook’s standard configuration was good enough. And with my student discount, it only cost an additional $100 to upgrade to the superdrive (which gives one the ability to burn DVD’s) and get an extra 20 GB of space.

Here is it, because it gives me joy to type it out:
12″ PowerBook
1.5 GHz G4 Processor
SuperDrive (DVD-RW, CD-RW)
80 GB hard drive
512 Mb RAM

This is the first time I’ve had my own computer. It’s very exciting.

A while ago I posted a note on the info page of my photoblog telling loyal Opera users to email me and explain why they chose the browser they did. About a week ago, Jason became the first to do so. I thought people might be interested to read some of what he said.

I don’t pretend to sit here like some would and preach that my browser of choice is better than yours (Unless you happen to be an Internet Explorer user, in which case I’d find it almost impossible not to after I’d stopped laughing at you). Firefox is, as far as I’m concerned, a brilliant browser, and one that I happily and regularly recommend to friends, family, and colleagues. It’s raised the game for browsers, and really thrust its way into the market as a viable alternative to IE, and because of that you can’t help but respect it.

Firefox is superb, but I’ll always prefer Opera. From the first day I sat down and decided to try it I knew I’d found the interface that I wanted to use to browse the web. I don’t use Opera or indeed any browser because I want to “Rediscover the web”, I use it because I want to surf the web, and I want the tool that allows me to do that easily,
and efficiently.

Mouse Gestures, Customisation (But quickly! No Options menu, just one button press), the Wand (Opera’s Password Manager - All I need to do is go to a page that requires me to log in, and gesture forwards. If I’ve got multiple usernames, it’ll ask me which I want to use, if I haven’t it’ll log me in), they all work together to allow me to surf without thinking about how I’m doing it (That’s me personally, I’m not saying anyone else would have the same success using Opera as I do).

The whole point is though, that I think it comes down to personal preference. Right now I’m sat in front of a little Powerbook using Safari (A Mozilla based browser), and though I’ve tried Opera on it, it didn’t click like it did on my PC. It doesn’t bother me though. When I do surf on the Powerbook, I can surf almost as well as I can with Opera on the PC, and with time, I’ll probably be able to match it (Held back only by the touch-pad and screen size, one reason I use a USB mouse andexternal screen when I’m at home!)

“….in my experience, it is the best one out there for Windows.”

People say exactly the same for Opera too, and they’re right. It all comes down to personal preference, provided you don’t use IE, then it’s just blind ignorance. (Or you happen to be updating windows…)

I was very happy to get this email from Jason. It was exactly what I wanted: the opinion of someone who gave up on IE but ended up with Opera instead of Firefox or some other browser.

I guess my dislike if Opera is a personal preference. Honestly, I haven’t used it that much, but to me it seems ugly and bulky. Maybe that’s just my inherent distrust of feature-heavy programs coming out, though.

IE7 is coming.

I hope that Firefox has enough of a loyal base that it won’t matter too much. I think it does. I know a lot of people who have had bad experiences with IE, and would never switch back.

Most of me wants IE7 to be terrible so that as few people use it as possible, but part of me is thinking about how much easier my life would be if it had improved and standardized CSS support.

And you know what? Even if it’s “better” (however you want to define that) than Firefox, I won’t use it. Because I believe in what the Mozilla Foundation is doing, and I think it’s noble and good. It’s something I can get behind. Microsoft just wants to make money. It’s a matter of principle, however foolish that might be in this situation.

Harvey Mudd College invited me to a Mathemagics show, put on by one of its math professors. It was pretty cool, and I learned how to square two-digit numbers in my head. I will share my knowledge with the world!

Pick a number- let’s use 47.

1. Add numbers to 47 to make it end in a zero. Two-digit numbers ending in zero are easy to multiply. So we’ve added 3 to 47 to make 50.
2. Subtract from your original number the number you just added to it. 47 - 3 = 44.
3. Multiply 44 and 50 in your head. This is the hardest part. In this case, we get 2200.
4. Square the number you added to and subtracted from your original number. In this case, it’s 3² = 9.
5. Add the number you just got (9) to the number you got last time (2200). You get 2209, and that’s 47²!

It’s really easier than it seems.

The metric system is very efficient. The English language, on the other hand, is not. We have multiple words meaning the same thing, we have obscure words that some people don’t understand, we have no reliable way of comparing some adjectives to others… it’s not a very aesthetic way to communicate- so messy. But never fear! The clean efficiency of the metric system can be applied to language.

It’s simple. A certain length, of more than a meter, can be called a hectometer. Everyone who knows the basics of the metric system (not too hard) knows that a hectometer is one tenth of a kilometer and ten times as much as a dekameter. If I call something “hectocool,” you know exactly what I’m talking about. Since “hecto-” is a prefix denoting a slightly larger than average amount, I think that the thing in questions is pretty cool, but not amazing. If we’re going to be strict, calling something “hectocool” would mean that it was 100 times cooler that something that was just “cool.” However, I don’t think that we need to follow those rules exactly. As long as the hierarchy of preficies is understood, there is no confusion. A table of all the metric preficies I’ve ever heard of is included below.

When using this method of commumication in everyday speeach, it is advisable to pronounce the entire prefix before the word. In written language, however, the symbols for the preficies may be used. I suggest a hyphen between the prefix and the word it modifies. Be sure to pay attention to the capitalization (or lack thereof) of the prefix. Note that the symbols for many opposite preficies are the same letters, with one of them capitalized (see yocto and, symbol y, and yotta, symbol Y). This is a good reason to use full preficies when speaking.

Examples will clarify.

See? It’s very easy, and lets you add meaning and emphasis to your words without making them too complicated. So who will join me in the noble quest? Use the metric preficies, and use them well! Feel free to ask any questions about usage and the like.

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One evening Rene Descartes was relaxing at a local tavern. The bartender approached and said, “Ah, good evening Monsieur Descartes! The usual tonight?” Descartes replied, “I think not,” and promptly vanished.

Math Humor from Platonic Realms

A lot of the jokes on that site are pretty lame, but I liked this one- even though it doesn’t really have to do with math. If you ever have any really good math jokes, or even bad ones, make sure to tell me.

First, let it be said that I love Monopoly. I love buying property and building it up, I love that there’s real skill involved, I love how every game’s different, I love that it’s about more than just the role of the dice.

One of the things people always talk about it how it’s strange that some spaces seem to get landed on more than others. St. Charles Place gets tons of business, but Boardwalk hardly seems to get any. Tonight I was motivated enough to see if anyone had ever done a frequency count, and found some interesting results.

It turns out that Illinois is the most frequently landed on space (other than In Jail, which is fairly obvious because you get there by actually going to jail just as often as you do by landing on it), and the Chance between Oriental Ave and Vermont Ave comes up the least often. Park Place is pretty low, too- only 33 out of 41. Very interesting that numbers 41-37 are all Chance or Community Chest- probably because the cards often direct you to another space, so you don’t actually “land” on the original space. Mediterranean Ave. is the least frequently landed upon property- also the cheapest.

Another interesting observation: I noticed that for the yellow spaces, the most expensive property (Marvin Gardens) is ranked signifigantly lower than the other two. It’s 22, the others are 14 and 16. I wonder if this holds true for any of the other colors- I forget which are the most expensive and my board is at school, so I can’t check. I must remember this chart for the next time I play.

Apparently there were some articles about this in Scientific American a few years back. Unfortunately, you have to pay to download them. Alas.

I have completed my masterpeice! Math pants! The math on them isn’t very advanced, because I’ve only had through trigonometry and didn’t want to use anything I don’t understand.

They include the first 2,014 decimal places of pi, the first 40 terms of the Fibonacci sequence, Pascal’s triangle, Sierpinski’s triangle, lots of random trig equations, the rules of logarithms and exponents, some equations having to do with sequences (both geometric and arithmetic), matrices, graphs of trig functions, a diagram of all the types of numbers (irregular, natural, complex, etc.), some graphs of conics, an 8x8 magic square, a program I wrote for my graphing calculator, and some geometry equations (<3 geometry), among other things. I love them, and fear the washing machine. How well does permanent marker hold up?

Edit: For posterity’s sake, I will link to livejournal entries that link to this blog entry: Here and here.

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For some reason, that entire sidebar over on the left there isn’t working. I have no idea why, only that it has something to do with the div layer. I took the tag for that layer out, and it was fine- but in the wrong place. And this layer, that this text goes in, is working. I have no idea what’s wrong. I’m gonna email the Dreamhost guys, I think, because they’re nice and they’ll probably be able to fix it. I just email them like three days ago but I need them again and that’s what they’re there for, so there.

I went out with my father earlier to get my mother a birthday present. We went to Taco Bell, for the first time in years. I like Taco Bell. We went to Barnes & Noble (I bought her a cookbook she wants- a moosewood thing, I think) and I started reading The Elegant Universe. Ahhh, I want it so much. If Stacey still wants to buy me a book for by birthday, I want that one. ::is geek:: I love all that ground-breaking physics stuff. And I love how I can just walk into Barnes & Noble and buy Newton’s Principia That’s so cool. I would want to, because it looks far too complicated for me right now, but I love that I could. I adore the science section of B&N. If you’re reading this, you should probably hope that I don’t read TEU, because if I do I’ll start babbling about string theory and reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity in every entry.

There’s a 3-part Nova special starting on Tuesday that’s hosted by Brian Greene, who wrote The Elegant Universe. ::excited::

Argh, the DH site isn’t working. I guess I’ll have to email them tomorrow. -_-;;;