I have recently started using Digital Ocean for hosting. I was previously using the free Heroku hosting, which I liked very much. The DNS was a bit tricky to set up, but once it got configured, it was smooth. I was able to get a one second load time for the archetyp.al index. It’s all static files, but I was still happy with Heroku, especially for free. However, I’ve been diving much deeper into web development lately, and I’ve decided I need a larger base of operations on the web, and Digital Ocean was at the top of my short list of candidates (along with dreamhost and linode). The SSD’s on every machine is what finally sold me.

I’ve been working on a rails project lately, and I need a dev machine on the cloud for testing purposes. So I found myself needing to set up a rails environment on my new Digital Ocean instance. I naturally went with my friend chris’s excellent blog on setting up rails for Ubuntu 12.10 with NginX, etc. I decided to go with MySQL instead of postgres.

This is the first Bruce Sterling talk that I encountered. Now I’m an inveterate Sterlingite, but at the time, 2006, I had only barely crossed intellectual paths with Sterling. I downloaded it with some long dead, precambrian cousin of google reader that lived in the swamps and estuaries of windows computers and survived by allowing the user to view RSS feeds on his desktop. Then pushed it to my equally antediluvian, single purpose device, an Archos mp3 player. I listened to this talk many times before the Archos died off. I thought this audio was lost to the bit bucket of history, until one day… archive.org. These people are the new Library of Alexandria, with podcasts instead of papyrus.

The full mp3 is available here.

In the first article of this series, I introduced the four in a row game concept and linked to my code for an AI to play it. I will now set about explaining how I did this.

Algorithms make/help make an increasing number of decisions. How to get from one place to another, who to go on a date with, which movie to watch next, even the rapid on/off patterns of anti-lock brakes.

A month ago I was hanging out with my friend Chris. We were having our weekly meetup, talking about our approach to our work, recent experiences, and just enjoying our surroundings. I noticed a connect four game sitting in the corner, on a dark wooden ledge. The old, disjoint of additive and subtractive primary colors, blue and yellow plastic version of the game would have done the trick, but this was even better. It was a wooden version of the board. There were two wooden dowels, each half the width of the board, inserted just beneath the bottom row, which held the pieces in the board. When you draw them out, one from each side, the game is reset and the pieces fall to the bottom of the game board.

“I’m sure there’s some simple heuristics to this I’ve long since forgotten.”

Textruder is the next installment in a long line of one-dimensional cellular automata implementations on various platforms and various media. This adventure begins like so many, on the command line. The inspiration for this project came from reading one of Stephen Wolfram’s papers on cellular automata. The original output of the programs testing the concepts of cellular automata was not graphical in the sense of directly mapping each cell to a pixel or block of pixels. Instead, they simply used the command line to emulate this behavior, printing out a new line for each iteration of the row of cells, with an “*” character representing the on cells and a space for the off cells.

While reading Artificial Life: A Report From the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology by Steven Levy, I came across a reference to self-reproducing structures built by Lionel and Roger Penrose. These structures were small plywood cutouts fitted with various shapes and levers which allowed them to link up, or not, when coming into contact with another block of the same make. See the following two part short film about this project:

I recently decided to re-read a book I had read long ago, in order that I might filter it through the knowledge and experience I’ve accrued since I first read it. It occurred to me that so much of what I have done in the intervening years has an impact on my understanding of it, that I could scarcely hold a conversation with my past self on the topic. The book in question is The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

A week ago I received my results from 23andme.com. Aside from the obvious points of interest, health risks, heritage, neanderthal composition, etc., I was also interested in getting my own data in raw format. While 23andme does provide a way to download your “raw” data, they are not really providing raw data. One cannot access the image data from the microarray sequencer that they used. What they do provide is formatted as follows:

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# rsid  chromosome  position    genotype
rs4477212   1   82154   TT
rs3094315   1   752566  TC
rs3131972   1   752721  AA
rs12124819  1   776546  AC
rs11240777  1   798959  GA
rs6681049   1   800007  CC

The cae.js project is a distillation of the cellular automaton built into the earlier cellular automata explorer project. It is a self-contained javascript class. It can instantiated thusly:

First, include the cae.js source in your html:

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<script src="/javascripts/cae.js"></script>

While attempting to embed the coderwall badges via the provided coderwall includes, I found that the default coderwall css/javascript was not playing nicely with octopress. So, to the internets! There I found a nice post on this very topic, from the Code Alchemist blog. He rolled his own solution, which even includes an “endorse” button. Not bad. Thanks!