Archive for March, 2006

“Yeah!”

Published
by
Zz85
on March 19, 2006
in NS and Stories
. 0 Comments

Cheered from the men in my unit as my name was announced for internal posting.

I was glad that there was this support I had. Days ago, I was still wondering how bad I was at relationships, not knowing how to speak or handle people, or how to prevents enemies not to think getting acceptance from others first.

Words were juggling in my mind “COS, DCC, SSP, Sentry, Escort..”. This week was my first time I did COS. One day ago, was my first time I was a escort to Tekong. Brings back memories as I cross the sea, bypassing the blocks in BMTC. I enjoyed sea breeze on the shipment ferry/platform- its takes all the heat away even though how the sun scorches you.

As I start to wear out, its good there are events that still motivates me.

More Sudoku

Published
by
Zz85
on March 19, 2006
in Hobbies, Interesting Stuff and WebLinks
. 0 Comments

This is another article due for posting for a long time, but I always never want to click the “Publish” button.

This 2nd post on Sudoku of mine will attempt to show you more ways to waste time on it, or nicer said, give the grey cells a little more workout. Some of these puzzles I would be touching on, each have a capacity for give you something to think about a few hours, 1 or 2 days, or maybe more. One of it can keep you occupied for your guard duty, another for all the waiting and travelling time, and one to keep you headaches. In some of my completed puzzles, the byproducts is lots of numbers scribbled all around the paper, which reminds me of John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind” scribbling codes all over the place.

Web Sudoku
This sites gives you countless of classic 9×9 sudoku. Chose one of the 4 level of difficulties, you can play online and time yourself, or just chose to print to keep some copies to work on in your free time. This site is a fravorite amoung my campmates.

Killer Sudoku
A guy was sitting on my right in the train, holding a book and a pencil. I glanced at it, and I thought, another Sudoku lover? I wanted to break a conversation with him, then noticed that the puzzles was not really what I seen before. I silently observed a little more, peeked at the title which was something like “Killer Sudoku published by Times”, then got down the next stop. I did a search, I soon I was introduced to a new dimension to killer sudoku.

The completed killer sudoku puzzle complies with the classic soduku rules. The difference is in its clues, instead of prefilled numbers, the clues are sums of the numbers covering specified boxes in the sudoku. What I like about variation is that you get to use mathematics (each box or row sums to 45, try adding 1 to 9). When you figured enough boxes, you would like to use the classic sudoku logic and methods to complete the puzzle.

Visit killersudokuonline for dozes of puzzle each week. Puzzles come in flavours of easy, medium, hard, mind-bending. Also of interest found on that webbie would be the “Great Than” sudoku. In each small 3×3 grid, you only know which is bigger in number of 2 boxes side by side.

My favorite site for sudoku would be DJ Ape .Net - The Home of Perfect Sudoku. You get daily sudoku and killer sudoku. You would be able to learn of different solving techniques and other brainteasers time to time. You might be able to find these other variants of sudoku too.

Butterfly sudoku
5 Sudokus intersect at the corners, or more accurately, 4 sudokus intersecting the corners of a center sudoku, forming a big sudoku which shapes like a butterfly. If you see a X across the diagonals, each diagonal contains 1 -9 uniquilty. This is a important clue to solving some the puzzles.

Samurai sudoku
Upsizing the 9×9, you get 12×12, but its actually 4 overlapping 9×9 sudoku puzzles.

These are more variations, esp if you mix variations together, eg. Butterfly-Samurai-X, Harakiri-X (2 Butterflys linked)

Kakuro
Now this is another puzzle, not a sudoku in my views, but I think shares the same creator and simlar rules of sudoku. It looks and works more like a crossword puzzle, you get clues (sum of numbers) for horizontal and vertical (right and down) “words” (number sequences which each digit can appear once only).

I first came across this on a book title in Kinokuniya, and later I spotted it appearing in The New Paper daily. Its quite fun, a little like a killer sudoku, and it can take you hours playing, but for me I prefer killer sodukus (maybe i just love the squarish grids and the familarity).
Well, if you are interested, the net is always full of Kakuro

I was hoping I could release my Sudoku Solver Midlet version 2 with this post, together with instructions, but I’m afraid that would be the next time.

[update:March 26 Sunday] I was working on my Harakiri X Sudoku on the mrt train. A gal (about my age I think) approached me asking where I got it from (she must be bored with the classic puzzles too). Sensing another Sudoku fan, I gave her the links mention above and introduced some variations too. Well now that I think, maybe I should have gave her the link to my blog too.

Dust

Published
by
Zz85
on March 17, 2006
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I’ve some questions on Dust.

Why do dust always appear? Behind, on top, inside furniture.
everywhere you think of, anywhere you don’t want it to occur, yet it finds its way there.

That’s also one reason why housekeeping and cleaning has to be done regularly. When we were in BMT, no matter how often we did area cleaning, the dust does not seem to disappear, coming back always maybe by the wind.

Today I solved my long puzzling problem of my nosily fan sounds coming from my computer. The culprit: Dust. Perhaps I forgotten the trade off, I thought turning on the cool looking neon fans in the casing would have better ventilation and lower temperature. It turned up, the large amount of air going through the casing meant there were more dust travelling through it too, many stuck at the vents and fans. In between my cpu heatsink and fan, the dust was so thick and hard that my screwdriver can use to scrape the “dust-paste” off.

I saw this label on one of the mattress in my camp’s bunk “100% dust-mite free”. Is it the fabric that prevent the dustmite from entering? Would a water-cooled pc be free of dust? Till I find out the best way (blower? vacuum?) to combat this enemy, damp cloth rag is what I be using.

Distractions

Published
by
Zz85
on March 5, 2006
in Ideas, Technology, Updates and WebLinks
. 0 Comments

Some long time since I even visit my own blog, but I’m really happy and grateful to all those who visit, esp. those who check here regularly. I’m not faithful on my site, not to mention other blogs, and thank you to those who link over here even I dont border link to you. Thank you all for all the comments, sometimes I don’t even look, a greater sin than ignoring to reply. Those who are interested in my plugins, thank you again, although I dont have the interest, time, endurance and consistency to carry on any of them at the moment. And yes, I updated the new SK2 (Spam Karma not shop name nor the facial product) to get more accurate spam assination.

A little update on my camp life, I still find guard duties causing me restlessness and dis-orientated-ness. Sometimes I dont even know my dates or days, but I need to get use to things. Understanding and getting along well with people is not simple especially for me with low E.Q. You can please everyone, and for some reasons someone make dislike to for maybe no reason. My campmates education levels range from O’levels (Secondary), ITE, Diploma(Poly), A’Levels (JC). And with my promotion to Coporal, responsibilities and work loads increase.

On my geeky (IT/computers) side of life, I have upgraded to Singnet 1500 after a renewing of contract. Its $58/month, but with 4 months free in this 1 year contract, it averages up to $39/month, not that bad after all. It comes with other free services too, but the catch is if you dont explicitly terminate after the free period, charges come in. On the browser side, I using Opera to surf the net because I still find it the quickest and now opera is free and ad-less. I have too much extensions and scripts in firefox that its slightly slower and consume much memory.

Back to the Title topic of Distractions.

Discussion on how on-board screen distracts attention from driving.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/02/21/2330239.shtml

mynotes:
Gearing towards a centralized processing means a centralised controls and screen.
Engine, Aircon, Seats, Radio, GPS, Computer, TV, Locking System, Sensor, Alert system all comes together on the computer in the car. Might actually means system can be broken easily (single point of failure), or even harder to use, unless good UI is done.

Some projects that I’m been distracted with recently, and sadly never got to do much :(

1) Blogs and plugin. The content, the template, the plugins..

2) LilyTool.. I’m supposed to work on the NoteVisualiser aspect, allowing user to have a graphical display and input frontend to Lilypond’s syntactical code. But since I have been able to compile Bert’s new parser engine, it sort of hung there.

3) Mobile App I: Since I already started creating a Sudoku application for my nokia phone, I should have touch and finish up with it. However, with the lost of some of my project files and last of patience and time its on hold again.

App II: Pitch producing midlet. I managed to create one, but its UI: display and input needs brushing up.

App III: I’m not very satisfied with the current TODO list. I wanted to create one, but so far its only implemented in brainwaves or in-fact more dreamwaves.

4) 2 ideas I got for mobile phones which I really like.

a) motion detection. sort of turning ur phone left and right to navigate in a game.. sort like the new concept nintendo “remote control” joystick. I thought processing images on the camera can sort of “motion detect” like how a optical mouse works. It turns up that image recognition/process and motion detection issnt that simple. Idea passed.

b) Using the mobile phone as a instrument tuner. now this is a cool idea, although there are alreay pc applications which can do that, i have not found any for mobile devices. dealing with this subject means diving into a deep topic: DSP.

The last time I found myself swimming (or drowning) in foreign waters in the idea of implementing a network 3d badminton shockwave game. I soon found out there I needed the knoweledge of the toics of networking, human anatomy, 3d modeling, texturing and animation, game programming, director/lingo scripting languages.. all requiring indept knowledge and experience in order to do so.

Anyway the topic of DSP(Digital Signal Processing) is “cheem” or complex. Application areas range from speech, audio, music, telephony radio, signal analysis, instrumentation, image processing, multimedia, radar. sonar, control, biomedical, transport to navigation. I thought what I needed to know was just DFT (Discrete Fourier Transformation) but I see engineering mathematics, signals, electronics and a whole bunch of stuff.

5) I had an idea of creating some excel macros for some scheduling forecast.
After some weeks I needed to find out if the yields can justify the effort to create one. Sometimes humans can just do things much efficiently if they put in a little of work. Technology cant solve everything.. sometimes the root of the problem lies with laziness. Anyway this is diving into yet another topic: timetable algorithms. It seems that the best way is using Genetic algorithm which uses some genetic biology ideas. In my rough understanding of it, it means getting a random sequence, then manipulate/evolve it until solutions are present.

In closing, you might understand my plight of “trying to be a jack of all trades, master of none”, I’m a mediocre, but maybe with much discipline, I will change.

Here’s an addictive weblink somewhere if you want to get yourself distracted too.