Anyway,  today’s XKCD is another stroke of genius, analysing the ratios of google searches for games with their “strip” counterparts.

(image credit Randall Munroe of xkcd.)

After getting over the initial hilarity of it all, I went through and actually read the list.  Really, out of these games, the best options for a “strip” alternative  (yes, including poker) I find to be Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chess, Tennis, and Poohsticks. That particular order is due to the high likelihood of being arrested for public indecency with the last two ( although if you have a private tennis court or bridge…), and I have chosen to disregard beer pong because it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the list.  Anyway, I realise the likelihood that many people have not heard of Prisoner’s Dilemma, so here is a quick description.

Prisoner’s Dilemma

This is an exercise/game used in game theory, psychology, and statistics, and is surprisingly fun to play.  The situation is this: two criminal partners are being questioned (independently) by the police.  The police offer each prisoner a deal if they co-operate and betray their partner.   The rest is best explained by this consequence matrix (how long each prisoner goes to prison):

In a game of “Iterated Prisoner’s Dillema”, multiple turns are played (hence the word “iterated”). A prisoner who stays silent is usually allowed to punish one who betrays the other after each turn.

The game is played by each player having two cards, one marked “defect” and the other “stay loyal”.  Players each place one card face-down, then they are turned up at the same time. The optimal situation would be for each player to stay loyal to their partner, but if either defects, the other will have to deal with the large consequence. Because of this, if a player always defects, they will be “safer.”

If you don’t remember Poohsticks (shame), it was a game that Winnie the Pooh invented, all players drop sticks into the water off the side of a bridge, then run to the other side to see whose stick reaches the other side first. (I imagine this would be easiest if you tied a coloured string to each stick).

-aliencam

another crazy dream

I was working in an NSA retail store (?) on a busy street in a large city (NY?) high cielings, nondescript carpet, a few conference tables around the room, and sometimes we sold clothes.  A few stores down was a CIA store where a bunch of gadget nerds (like Q in bond movies?) worked one  guy with glasses, short curly black hair was named robert or patrick.  NSA & CIA constantly played tricks on each other, stealing things, etc, but were still friends.  a weird gypsey came in to buy clothes (?) and we gave her a job.  she freaked out about something, so they fired her.  I was over at the CIA store to play a prank on them once, tried to steal a fiberoptic camera, but the security alarm went off.  I hung out there for awhile chatting with them, and the gypsey lady came in. she was browsing the clothes, and I thought she might steal something. She had elaborate long gold scisors, and I thought she would stab me with them, they said yeah probably because I was sometimes a smug/prick, and was always too nice/happy about everything (citing the time I once gave everyone I consiter my friend a penny).  she snuck a brown scarf with beige tassles onto my shoulders (I wouldn’t set off the alarms if I walked out with this?) but I noticed and threw it to robert and told her she would ring him up (after I passed the sensors). she got crazy mad, pulled out her scisors and chased me, so I ran out of the store and she chased me back toward the NSA store on a fairly uncrowded sidewalk (cloudy or hazy day). that is all.

This was after some pretty fitful sleep, I went to bed at  midnight, but my roomates kept me up past 2 with loud TV, then my roomate came into the room and watched family guy on his iPod even later, and then it was my typical sleeping problems, I woke up at 4:00AM, couldn’t get back to sleep, and eventually just decided to write this down at 6:00 (waking up my roomate with my laptop screen’s light and typing noise lol, I totally did not mean to do that).

The wacom control panel setup in Ubuntu 9.10 is, of course, different from what it was in 9.04, moving closer to what it was in 8.10…

anyway, wacomcpl is a very useful tool for changing settings and recalibrating your wacom tablet, and the “touch” is miscalibrated by default with a karmic install, so this is necessary to get much use of “touch”.

start by installing wacomcpl:
sudo apt-get install wacom-tool

now, create the wacom configuration file:

sudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/wacom.fdi

and paste in the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="input.x11_driver" contains="wacom">
<match key="input.x11_options.Type" contains="stylus">
<merge key="info.product" type="string">stylus</merge>
</match>
<match key="input.x11_options.Type" contains="eraser">
<merge key="info.product" type="string">eraser</merge>
</match>
<match key="input.x11_options.Type" contains="touch">
<merge key="info.product" type="string">touch</merge>
</match>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

save and close, reboot your computer, and run wacomcpl by hitting alt-f2 and entering “wacomcpl”. From here you can change settings or calibrate as you wish.

Now, I like the button on the side of the stylus to be right-click, so go to stylus > tool buttons > then set “button 2″ to “right” and “button 3″ to middle.

sorry if this isn’t as coherent, wrote this entry really quick as a response to a comment. let me know if anything needs clarification, or if it doesn’t work.

awesome… I spent all weekend setting up all the computers to the network printer, including at least 6 hours hacking the stupid HP scanning program to get normal filesize (it was 1MB+ per page when scanning 30 page documents with the lowest available settings… that wasn’t working out for my dad emailing real estate documents…) Then on Monday, the qwest guy came and disassembled our network in order to upgrade us to 7MBPS FIOS, and they unhooked our router/network and want us to use their set top box as the WAP… (which broke the connection to the printers/xbox/direct tv/ everything) (they also have strange ideas like “only one wired device may be connected” which doesn’t work for our Direct TV, old desktops, Xbox360, and videophone, so who knows how or what is even hooked up to the network now)
So Monday night, my dad freaked out that the printer didn’t work, and called HP tech support (instead of me) and spent 4 hours reinstalling the printer (wtf it shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes) and the nice HP tech support people disabled my hacks. Next time he has to scan and email a document I am going to get a frantic phone call and I will have to walk my dad through the fairly difficult process of the hack…

ugh my life.

Here is what I have done as of 3:00PM on Saturday, Oct 31, 2009 (approaching 24 hours after I started the install).

_________________________________________________________________________
Programs Installed:

bootchart
sysv-rc-conf
seahorse-plugins
flashplugin-installer
vlc
mozilla-plugin-vlc
ubuntu-restricted-extras
ttf-droid

GNOME DO ——
deb ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
install the key (hightlight, right-click, use fireGPG to import the key)
—————

________________________________________________________________________
Configurations:

CTRL-ALT-Backspace: ————–

Select “System”->”Preferences”->”Keyboard”
Select the “Layouts” tab and click on the “Layout Options” button.
Select “Key sequence to kill the X server” and enable “Control + Alt + Backspace”.
———————————-

Gnome-Do: ———————–
open do (win-space), click arrow key in top right> preferences
General > check “start Gnome Do at Login” and “Hide Window on First Launch (quiet mode)”.
Appearence > Theme > select “mini”
Plugins > select (addtionally to the defaults) “files and folders”
———————————

_______________________________________________________________________
Customizations:

system>preferences>appearence>interface check “show icons in menus”

system>preferences>appearence>fonts select “best contrast” rendering

system>preferences>appearence>fonts >details change “resolution: 96″ to “72 dpi”

right-click on panel >properties>size> change 24px to 19 px.

WINDOW PICKER: ——————-

sudo apt-get install window-picker-applet maximus
startup applicatoins: “maximus -m”
add “window picker” to panel
right-click window picker (the lines on the left) preferences, uncheck “show windows from all workspaces”.
in “startup applications, edit “maximus” and change the command to be “maximus -m”

————————————-
remove bottom panel remove menu bar, add main menu, trash bin, cpu frequency monitor, workspace switcher, remove firefox and help shortcut icons

MIDDLE MOUSE SCROLLING:—————————
sudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi
paste in and remove the spaces after the < :
< match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
< merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true< /merge>
< merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2< /merge>
< merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5< /merge>
< merge key="input.x11_options.ZAxsisMapping" type="string"> 4 5< /merge>
< merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7< /merge>
< merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true< /merge>
< merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelTimeout" type="string">200< /merge>
< /match>