tollie.org/blog

• Adobe Photoshop Express
  (tags: free photos pictures editing editor online tools services)

I’ve just written and uploaded a very alpha version of a program that will calculate the odds of drawing a particular card (or its copy) in a deck of a given number of cards. In particular it’s designed for Magic the Gathering. I still have a number of things to do with it, including making it look decent and making the opening hand size variable.

Updated: I’ve fixed the code and it works nicely. You can use it and see the code both at: www.tollie.org/files/cardcount.php

In particular, and here’s where I’m asking for comments: my math is a little off in the way I’m accounting for things. Presently, the numbers are high for situations where the target card has copies (ie. cards > 1) due to double accounting for the multiple copies in the same deal. In other words, if you draw two of the target cards in the opening hand, it essentially treats that as two cases of "in opening hand = yes", but only one iteration. Likewise, the numbers are more skewed as the number of cards increases. This explains the > 100% figures.

There are ways to account for this, but I’d like suggestions on ways to do it cleverly without making the code much more complex. For now, the percentages are based on 30,000 "deals."

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. I hope this helps you construct your Magic the Gathering decks mathematically.

Find it (working) and the code here: www.tollie.org/files/cardcount.php

• Google Moon - Google Maps for the Moon
  include Apollo landings
  (tags: science maps google moon NASA apollo history tech tools edutech education resources learning teaching)
• Google Sky - Google Maps for the Sky
  (tags: science maps google NASA astronomy sky tech tools edutech education resources learning teaching)

• TwitThis
  (tags: blogging tools twitter plugins blog wordpress)
• Kansas woman sits on toilet for two years, didn’t want to leave bathroom | KATU.com - Portland, Oregon | National & World News
  Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman’s skin had grown around the seat. “We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital,” Whipple said.
  (tags: news article bizarre strange abuse disorders)

I took these photos after having heard from a friend driving home that the intersection was flooded with soap. This is original reporting. I had no part in the activities, nor do I have knowledge of who did.

More photos here.

• The Associated Press: 1 in 4 Teen Girls Has Sexual Disease
  A virus that causes cervical cancer is by far the most common sexually transmitted infection in teen girls aged 14 to 19, while the highest overall prevalence is among black girls — nearly half the blacks studied had at least one STD. That rate compared
  (tags: issues culture sex std studies statistics stats reference news articles)

With a tip from Leo Laporte that Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, was over at techcabconfessions.com telling Digg secrets, I hopped on over into the chat room to see what I could catch. I picked up enough bits and pieces here and there to discover what the easter egg was.

If you enter the Konami Code first thing when visiting a Digg page, Digg’s comment system will fetch and display all comments. Yes, you do in fact use the arrow keys, and instead of a start button, follow it up with the Enter key at the end.

Now, this will surely be old news to some - a google blog search seems to point at June ‘07 as the earliest mention (which may be when the new comment system was implemented), but it was new to me.

Facebook’s creator and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, being “interviewed” by Sarah Lacy at SxSW. Now infamous.

Example:

7:50 - “What we’re doing as a mission is very interesting…”

Mark attempts to continue pulling together his thoughts.

8:04 - Sarah interrupts Mark, saying “That was such a [someone?] moment.”

Awkward chuckles.

8:22 - Sarah “We’ll get back to you in a minute.”

9:33 - Sarah finishes her story. Mark, “So what was the question?”

I’d like to see her try and “interview”, I dunno, say, Steve Jobs this way.

It gets worse.

Then she responds, post-interview:

She comes across as an arrogant neophyte, IMHO. But I think what people are most upset about is that they feel like they missed out on a chance to have a real Zuckerberg Keynote / Q&A, because Sarah wanted to sit on stage, lean back, twirl her hair, and chat with her buddy Mark. That’s how people feel, I believe, and I’m not sure they’re not justified in feeling that way.

Coming in June:

iPhone / iPod Touch Enterprise Features

iPhone / iPod Touch SDK - 3rd Party Apps

Java Apps on the iPhone / iPod Touch

Website:

Epocrates - one of the Apps to come to the iPhone already available on the web. Excellent Drug and Medicine reference.

Rumor:

iMac and MacMini updates coming soon

Personal Story:

Installing DVD playback “for research purposes” on Edubuntu. How to article here. Note: I had to modify the terminal command slightly, to sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh as the script was no longer in an examples folder, when I pulled it off the repositories. I also used VLC instead of Xine as my DVD player of choice.

• Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard
  (tags: apple development guide howto leopard opensource programming software ruby osx mac rails)