quamaretto's New Writeups

anime roulette (idea)

2012-06-03T23:35:34Z

Depending on who you ask, anime roulette is either a variation of casino roulette or a variation of russian roulette. It is played as a group of any size. Here's how to play:

Pick an anime randomly. (tool)
If anyone in the group has seen it, start over.
Begin watching the first episode.
If half or more of your group 'taps out' (as in wrestling) of that episode before it ends, start over.
When you finish the episode, start over.

Have fun.

(Note: Playing the anime drinking game at the same time will probably result in death or, worse, a lot of anime roulette.)

infinite loop (idea)

2007-08-15T06:47:06Z

Quam's really long list of infinite loops in many languages

Horrible. Awful! Thousands of programming languages, and you guys only come up with infinite loops in two? Not to mention that we don't even get a whole C program! You think we can just dredge up that #include<stdio.h> int main(int argc, char** argv){} stuff from memory? Really, really unfit behavior.

Well, here's the list. The real list. Infinite loops in every language I deem significant. I plan to eventually include examples in erlang, bc, bash, Mumps, xBase, SQL (some dialect), lua, Javascript, assembler (probably MIX), Tcl, OCaml, Pascal/Delphi and whatever else looks good.

If you're already thinking of this as a waste of time, think of it not as a dictionary of totally useless programs but as a series of fetal Operating Systems.

Operating environment will be Ubuntu. I'll provide install and build instructions where necessary.…

Portland Pattern Repository (thing)

2007-08-14T03:05:39Z

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki

http://www.c2.com/cgi/RecentChanges

(Anytime you see a WikiWord - a word with caps in the middle - you can go to it on the wiki at (for "WikiWord", as an example) http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWord . I'll try to point you to interesting stuff.)

Before Wikipedia was, EyeAm.
--Wiki

This is the original Wiki, as well as the first Wiki software. The so-called Portland Pattern Repository was built as a point of collaborative writing about PeopleProjectsAndPatterns (This is a WikiWord; see below). It goes by other names including Ward's Wiki, just "Wiki" within itself, as in AcceptableCriticismOfOoOnWiki, and often just "the first Wiki". I've always thought of it as just "that wiki on c2.com."

Wiki was distinct at the time for allowing anyone to simply jump in and contribute. It maintains the distinction of not requiring or even allowing…

Cave Story (thing)

2007-08-08T00:50:57Z

http://www.miraigamer.net/cavestory/

This little "game studio" in Japan - just a guy in his basement or something, really - creates some little PC game about some shitty fishes. Calls it something Japanese. No one cares, right?

And then, Cave Story. Wonderful, beautiful, enchanting freeware 2D platformer adventure game. It's sort of like Megaman crossed Zelda only really pretty, with an open scrolling platform world. Suddenly, everyone and his sister knows about this game.

The weird thing is you can't even get it from Studio Pixel, you get it from some English fan site. And the site has a running contest of how fast you can get through the secret end. Er, spoilers. Sorry.

No, really, it's a beautiful game. An instant cult classic. There's, like, erotic fan art. It's second to, maybe, Shadow Of the Colossus. If you haven't played Shadow Of The Colossus, you probably need to play that too. Seriously. Gorgeous.

What I'm saying is,…

Sphere Online Judge (thing)

2007-08-03T05:20:09Z

http://www.spoj.pl

Sphere Online Judge is mainly an automatically judged, ongoing programming competition consisting of lots of problems you can solve in one of a wide number of languages. There are also periodic sub-contests, and the ability to run your own contests.

The Problems

The problems are arranged as a long, sortable, paged list; there are a few thousand, in a wide range of difficulties. Each problem has a fairly short, all uppercase name (such as KAMIL) used to refer to them in URLs, on the submission form and on the forum.

Difficulty: Some of the problems are extremely easy, so long as you understand the specified input and output. There is an introductory problem (worth no points) for which a solution is provided by the site itself. On the other hand, some problems have not yet been solved, or have stumped all but 10 or 12 of an audience of thousands. There are a good number of problems that are in between, that have been…

dc (thing)

2007-08-03T01:00:30Z

How To Program In dc

And Actually Have A Program Run

And Also Do What You Meant It To Instead Of Always Printing "Stack is freaking empty" Or segfault Or Some Shit Instead

Because I'm Warning You Right Now, It Will Drive You Batty And You Will Want To Probably Leave And Go Live In Harmony With Nature If You Use It Too Long, I'm Serious

Part one: What the hell is dc and who hated me enough to make it?

A question well asked. dc is the oldest language for Unix, written before C itself! It is, in fact, a reverse-polish-notation arbitrary-precision stack calculator, with special features for writing macros and storing results.

This means, in layman's terms, "It's jibberish that can do math with really big numbers".

As an opening test for you and me, if you're on a Unix system of any sort (including Mac OS X), open a terminal and start dc. (The command to start it is 'dc'.) If you're on Debian, you may have to install…