Jongleur's New Writeups

Our tomorrow starts today: one minute to midnight in Iraq (idea)

2007-10-05T23:13:32Z

First it was the threat of weapons of mass destruction, but the current raison de guerre is that we deposed Saddam Hussein to bring democracy to Iraq. Which succeeded — or, at least, a vote was held and people voted and got a purple thumb and then everyone went back to having a big ol' civil war. Let's hold another vote. I propose that this ballot will have a single question on it: Should the foreign troops leave within 1 year? 1 year is a nice round number, and it allows for an orderly goodbye. If they say yes, then we train people if they want the training, accept refugees if they want to come and be US citizens, and we leave in a year. We can even split hairs on whether it should be a year of the Islamic calendar or a year on the Gregorian calendar, but that ends up being a pretty small difference. That's democracy: people vote for something, and then the government does that thing (modulo various checks and balances).

By all accounts and all…

One-pixel transparent GIF (idea)

2006-06-02T20:32:03Z

One-pixel transparent gifs may be a web developer's crutch, or they may not be. One thing they often are, however, is a subtle way of eroding your privacy. Because the HTTP spec (the thing that defines how web pages are accessed and transmitted) allows a site to attach cookies to images, users of a website may be transmitting all of their browsing information not just to the website they intend to browse, but also, unknowingly, to a third party that only serves up one-pixel transparent gifs. This way of tracking people was, for a time, so common that these were referred to as web bugs.

Whole services have been built on the idea that a person won't notice a one-pixel transparent gif. If you want to track whether a person has opened and read your email, then there exist (or at least used to exist) services that will give you an image to put in your html email. If that image ever gets downloaded, then your email's recipient has most likely read your message. This tactic is also…

Linux is free only if your time has no value (idea)

2005-07-14T07:55:38Z

Linux is free only if your time has no value
Linux is free only    your time has no value
              only         time has no value
Linux is      only    your time
         free              time has no value
Linux                           has no value
                      your time
      is
         free

Dijkstra's algorithm (idea)

2005-03-01T03:13:33Z

Imagine a graph - by which we mean dots and lines, vertices and edges, not x vs. y. Now imagine that each edge has a weight. This weight tells us how much it costs to go across that edge. It tells us what that edge's toll is. What is the cheapest way to get from point A to point B?

This problem stymied computer scientists for a while, and they came up with all these good ideas that never seemed quite right. Eventually, Dijkstra figured it all out, but there was still a problem: it was really hard to understand if you weren't already a computer scientist. So here is the best explanation of dijkstra's algorithm I have ever found. It is not 100% right, but it is much more right than it is wrong, and intuition is important here.

Imagine that instead of edges with costs, the edges are bits of string of different lengths. If the toll was $5.50, then the string is 5.5" long, and so on for all strings in the the graph. The strings' ends are then tied to little…

These sad pathetic words (idea)

2004-08-27T10:47:09Z

I just got into an argument with a friend of a friend about a very sensitive subject. That's not the point of this node though. The point is that we wouldn't have been fighting if we were in the same room. It's not that either of us are assholes online, the problem seems to be that when you are in an online discussion, the time put into each message is minimal enough that there are often gaps in the content. These gaps leave just enough room that after dealing with trolls we assume the worst about each other.

Were we in the same room, talking and gesturing and expressing with our faces, then these gaps would not be gaps at all. Our facial grammar would build bridges, and other nonverbal cues would help proceed to greater understanding and we would walk away knowing a little bit more about each other and with a slightly different view of the world around us. It could have been a stimulating and interesting…

Buying a house (thing)

2004-08-22T23:34:53Z

Buying a house is very very strange*. The mechanics have been dispassionately laid out extremely well by TallRoo, but actually doing it is another thing entirely. Here is how it happened for fuzzy and blue and myself all wrapped up in a first and second person description of the process.

We saw a house for sale that looked really nice, and we were like "wouldn't it be neat if we could afford one of those", and then laughed and walked away. Then, on the sly, I did the math and figured out that if we were careful we could afford it.

Well. That changed everything. So we started looking around at houses. Unfortunately, the process we were about to embark on was going to be really painful - we could already tell. First, you have to deal with some frantic type A realtor who wants you to buy as huge a house as possible because their commission is a percentage of the sale price, then you have to find someone to lend you…