What?
No, really.
I decided to take a leaf from NYC Resistor and create an edible QR code. The one thing I don't like about theirs is that, while edible, it certainly wouldn't taste the best. I wanted to make one that would actually taste good.
6 hours of work later, I had finished my task. I made it out of graham crackers, chocolate chips, and marshmallows, with a thin layer of frosting on each graham cracker. The only problem was, I just didn't have the heart to eat it after putting that much effort into it. My dad suggested gluing it to a piece of cardboard and taking it to work to hang up at my desk, which is what I'm planning on doing at present.
The code is actually scannable (and results in a URL that redirects to this blog post). I'll post pictures soon.
My next idea: QR fruit snacks. A single snack would be in a package, and it'd have some message (a joke, perhaps) encoded on it. Expect to see this on the market in ten years.
2011-02-17
2011-01-28
XKB and groups
This is really short because of the time, but I just found out that Gnome's keyboard switcher uses XKB's notion of groups internally. If you have USA as your first preference and United Kingdom as your second preference, it maps UK in as Group 2.
This messes stuff up if you've doctored up your own custom symbol file that uses multiple groups. I just spent a good day trying to figure out why this didn't work, and it turns out it's because of that.
The moral of the story is: keyboards added in Gnome's keyboard switcher (System → Preferences → Keyboard → Layouts) will get mapped in as groups and override any groups you have in your symbols file, so make sure and use only one layout, or modify your symbol file to use, say, groups one and four, instead.
I'll write a post on how to configure the control key to switch groups tomorrow or something. And a post on how to actually add new symbols to a keyboard. There seems to be a lack of XKB documentation out there.
This messes stuff up if you've doctored up your own custom symbol file that uses multiple groups. I just spent a good day trying to figure out why this didn't work, and it turns out it's because of that.
The moral of the story is: keyboards added in Gnome's keyboard switcher (System → Preferences → Keyboard → Layouts) will get mapped in as groups and override any groups you have in your symbols file, so make sure and use only one layout, or modify your symbol file to use, say, groups one and four, instead.
I'll write a post on how to configure the control key to switch groups tomorrow or something. And a post on how to actually add new symbols to a keyboard. There seems to be a lack of XKB documentation out there.
2011-01-22
Threading, locks, and Tkinter's after_idle
I've been getting into Tkinter lately. It's one of the few Python widget toolkits that works on PythonCE. It's actually quite nice. The UIs are not the most friendly, and there are some other things I don't particularly like about Tkinter, but all-in-all, it's been fairly good. (I still like GTK+ better, but it doesn't run on PythonCE, and thus far my applications have all needed to run on my Pocket PC.)
So, I was going along, happily writing and testing, when I hit a slight problem. That slight problem came in the form of an application that just seemed to up and hang for no apparent reason. And when I say hang, I mean the entire Tkinter main loop froze up. What?
I started sprinkling print statements throughout my code to try and find where the freeze-up was occurring, and I eventually found it: it was on an attempt to acquire a lock. Aha! Deadlock! Not the most unusual thing ever. The only problem was, there didn't seem to be any other code that could block after having acquired this lock, and I wasn't using any other locks in my application.
The reason I'm posting about this is because of what ended up being the cause of this. The code that was deadlocking was code bring run on Tkinter's main loop due to a call to tk.after_idle. It turns out that a call to after_idle outside of the event loop itself will block until the currently-running event, if any, finishes. External code was obtaining this lock and then trying to use after_idle. Because the event that would then proceed to attempt to acquire the lock itself was already running, after_idle would block. The event itself would then block.
The solution I'm going to implement is to have a queue of events and a function that runs itself on the event loop 5 or so times every second, processing all the events in the queue. This isn't optimal, but it's the simplest solution I can see at present.
So, the moral of the story is: after_idle doesn't just run its argument when the main loop is idle; it blocks completely until the main loop is idle. So be careful if you're using locks, and when in doubt, use your own queue and a periodic task that runs events in the queue.
I also apologize for sounding like a dope in this post. I'm rather more tired than I usually am for some reason...
So, I was going along, happily writing and testing, when I hit a slight problem. That slight problem came in the form of an application that just seemed to up and hang for no apparent reason. And when I say hang, I mean the entire Tkinter main loop froze up. What?
I started sprinkling print statements throughout my code to try and find where the freeze-up was occurring, and I eventually found it: it was on an attempt to acquire a lock. Aha! Deadlock! Not the most unusual thing ever. The only problem was, there didn't seem to be any other code that could block after having acquired this lock, and I wasn't using any other locks in my application.
The reason I'm posting about this is because of what ended up being the cause of this. The code that was deadlocking was code bring run on Tkinter's main loop due to a call to tk.after_idle. It turns out that a call to after_idle outside of the event loop itself will block until the currently-running event, if any, finishes. External code was obtaining this lock and then trying to use after_idle. Because the event that would then proceed to attempt to acquire the lock itself was already running, after_idle would block. The event itself would then block.
The solution I'm going to implement is to have a queue of events and a function that runs itself on the event loop 5 or so times every second, processing all the events in the queue. This isn't optimal, but it's the simplest solution I can see at present.
So, the moral of the story is: after_idle doesn't just run its argument when the main loop is idle; it blocks completely until the main loop is idle. So be careful if you're using locks, and when in doubt, use your own queue and a periodic task that runs events in the queue.
I also apologize for sounding like a dope in this post. I'm rather more tired than I usually am for some reason...
2010-03-21
Mathematical Hugs
I was at the FIRST robotics competition at the Huntsman Center up at the University of Utah with the rest of my team last Friday. We ended up not doing so well in the competition, but hey, it was way fun, and that's the main thing that counts.
This is our first year competing as a team. Most teams have adult mentors that help them out; we managed to get 25 members for our team with all of zero mentors helping us. Because of that, we got an award at the Awards Ceremony Friday night. No-one on our team really thought we were going to get an award, though, so they all stayed in the pit. Only three people on my team (Morgan, Forrest, and I) went to the ceremony.
So, we ended up getting the Rookie Inspiration Award, which was pretty cool. The three of us went down to claim the award and high-five the judges, and the three of us hugged before receiving the award.
Now, me being the nerd that I am, I got thinking about that today. For three people to hug each other exactly once, you need three hugs. We'll number our people 1, 2, and 3. You need a hug between 1 and 2, a hug between 1 and 3, and a hug between 2 and 3. Makes sense.
In fact, the formula for computing this ends up being 1+2+3+...+n, or (n2+n)/2, where n+1 is the number of people that want to hug.
So, because a single person generally can only hug one other person at the same time (meaning three people can't all hug each other at the exact same time for all intents and purposes concerned here), it takes three units of time, a unit of time being defined as the approximate time it takes two people to hug (which is obviously subjective and depends on how long they hug and other factors I'm not going to account for), for those three people to hug each other exactly once.
So, I started thinking to myself, let's say more people from our team had shown up at the ceremony. Let's say four people had shown up. In order for each of the four people to hug each of the other four people exactly once, 6 hugs need to take place: 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 2-3, 2-4, and 3-4. Since there are four people, only two hugs can take place over the course of a single unit of time. It would seem likely, then, that all 6 hugs could be completed in three units of time.
So then I thought about how those people would hug depend on where they're standing. Let's imagine them standing in an approximate square, like this (click on the image to view a larger version):
1, 2, 3, and 4 are our people. We have three time periods, each a unit of time long, that we're looking at here: A, B, and C. The dotted lines represent a hug that occurs during that time period. As indicated by the image, during time period A, 1 and 3 hug, and 2 and 4 hug. During time period B, 1 and 2 hug, and 3 and 4 hug. During time period C, 1 and 4 hug, and 2 and 3 hug.
There's just one problem: it's somewhat difficult for 1 and 4 to hug at the same time as 2 and 3 hug without having one of them walk around the other, since they would both be hugging through the center of the image (where the two C lines cross), which obviously wouldn't work. So this arrangement for completing all six hugs isn't going to work.
That seems to necessitate at least some sort of movement on the part of the people involved in order to complete all of the hugs within three units of time. For example, just before time period 3, 2 and 4 could switch places with each other, and then the C lines would parallel the existing B lines and there wouldn't be a conflict. But then the people involved have to remember which time period they're supposed to switch at and who's supposed to switch. What if there was a directed cycle graph involving some of the people that would cause all of the hugs to be carried out in three time periods if the people move one vertex down the directed cycle graph before every time period? That would seem to be simpler.
I set about finding such a directed cycle graph for the four person problem. In less than a minute I had found one that works. Not surprising, really, as there aren't many possible graphs when you only have four vertices.
So, the graph I found is this:
The dotted lines are the hugs that take place, and the arrows form the edges of the directed cycle graph. Three units of time need to elapse for each person to hug each other person, as established before. Between each time period, however, the people that are on the directed cycle graph (which is everyone except 4) move one edge down the graph. So 2 moves to where 3 is, 3 moves to where 1 is, and 1 moves to where 2 is.
So, as shown on the graph, 1 and 2 hug and 3 and 4 hug during the first time period.
Each person then moves down the graph by one position, so that the arrangement of people looks something like this:
Now 3 and 1 hug and 2 and 4 hug. This same process takes place once more, so now the arrangement of people looks like this:
Now 2 and 3 hug and 1 and 4 hug.
So, here's the list of all of the hugs that needed to have taken place in order for all of the people to have hugged each other exactly once:
Before we move on to the problem of six people, I'd like to point out an interesting fact: both the three-person puzzle and the four-person puzzle have the same minimum time period requirement (three) despite the fact that the three-person puzzle only involves three hugs whereas the four-person puzzle involves six hugs. As I'll show either later in this post or in a future post, this is not a coincidence; Every odd-numbered group requires exactly the same number of steps to hug as the next even-numbered group above it, and this stems from the fact that the directed cycle graphs for these end up being almost identical.
Now, on to the six-person version of the puzzle. We'll assume the people are standing in a circle. The vertices representing the people therefore form a hexagon. After a few minutes of trial and error, I found a graph that works for our hexagonal group of people:
As per the formula given above, 15 hugs are necessary in order for all six people to hug exactly once. Since we have six people, three hugs can take place concurrently, so we need a total of 5 units of time to complete all of the hugs. Each of those will obviously have a different arrangement people. Here are the five time periods for the directed cycle graph given above:
Cool, huh.
So I made the mistake of trying to explain this whole puzzle to my mom. It took me quite a bit to explain it to her so that she could understand, and the only comment I could get out of her after that was that I should get some people together and actually try it and then post a video of it on the blog post. If you can't already tell, my mom is quite mathematically disinclined.
Anyway, that's it for tonight. I will, however, mention that graphs for odd numbers look quite a bit different than graphs for even numbers. I'm working on some such graphs in my notebook; I'll post a followup entry with them in a few days.
This is our first year competing as a team. Most teams have adult mentors that help them out; we managed to get 25 members for our team with all of zero mentors helping us. Because of that, we got an award at the Awards Ceremony Friday night. No-one on our team really thought we were going to get an award, though, so they all stayed in the pit. Only three people on my team (Morgan, Forrest, and I) went to the ceremony.
So, we ended up getting the Rookie Inspiration Award, which was pretty cool. The three of us went down to claim the award and high-five the judges, and the three of us hugged before receiving the award.
Now, me being the nerd that I am, I got thinking about that today. For three people to hug each other exactly once, you need three hugs. We'll number our people 1, 2, and 3. You need a hug between 1 and 2, a hug between 1 and 3, and a hug between 2 and 3. Makes sense.
In fact, the formula for computing this ends up being 1+2+3+...+n, or (n2+n)/2, where n+1 is the number of people that want to hug.
So, because a single person generally can only hug one other person at the same time (meaning three people can't all hug each other at the exact same time for all intents and purposes concerned here), it takes three units of time, a unit of time being defined as the approximate time it takes two people to hug (which is obviously subjective and depends on how long they hug and other factors I'm not going to account for), for those three people to hug each other exactly once.
So, I started thinking to myself, let's say more people from our team had shown up at the ceremony. Let's say four people had shown up. In order for each of the four people to hug each of the other four people exactly once, 6 hugs need to take place: 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 2-3, 2-4, and 3-4. Since there are four people, only two hugs can take place over the course of a single unit of time. It would seem likely, then, that all 6 hugs could be completed in three units of time.
So then I thought about how those people would hug depend on where they're standing. Let's imagine them standing in an approximate square, like this (click on the image to view a larger version):
1, 2, 3, and 4 are our people. We have three time periods, each a unit of time long, that we're looking at here: A, B, and C. The dotted lines represent a hug that occurs during that time period. As indicated by the image, during time period A, 1 and 3 hug, and 2 and 4 hug. During time period B, 1 and 2 hug, and 3 and 4 hug. During time period C, 1 and 4 hug, and 2 and 3 hug.
There's just one problem: it's somewhat difficult for 1 and 4 to hug at the same time as 2 and 3 hug without having one of them walk around the other, since they would both be hugging through the center of the image (where the two C lines cross), which obviously wouldn't work. So this arrangement for completing all six hugs isn't going to work.
That seems to necessitate at least some sort of movement on the part of the people involved in order to complete all of the hugs within three units of time. For example, just before time period 3, 2 and 4 could switch places with each other, and then the C lines would parallel the existing B lines and there wouldn't be a conflict. But then the people involved have to remember which time period they're supposed to switch at and who's supposed to switch. What if there was a directed cycle graph involving some of the people that would cause all of the hugs to be carried out in three time periods if the people move one vertex down the directed cycle graph before every time period? That would seem to be simpler.
I set about finding such a directed cycle graph for the four person problem. In less than a minute I had found one that works. Not surprising, really, as there aren't many possible graphs when you only have four vertices.
So, the graph I found is this:
The dotted lines are the hugs that take place, and the arrows form the edges of the directed cycle graph. Three units of time need to elapse for each person to hug each other person, as established before. Between each time period, however, the people that are on the directed cycle graph (which is everyone except 4) move one edge down the graph. So 2 moves to where 3 is, 3 moves to where 1 is, and 1 moves to where 2 is.
So, as shown on the graph, 1 and 2 hug and 3 and 4 hug during the first time period.
Each person then moves down the graph by one position, so that the arrangement of people looks something like this:
Now 3 and 1 hug and 2 and 4 hug. This same process takes place once more, so now the arrangement of people looks like this:
Now 2 and 3 hug and 1 and 4 hug.
So, here's the list of all of the hugs that needed to have taken place in order for all of the people to have hugged each other exactly once:
- 1 and 2 (took place in time period 1)
- 1 and 3 (took place in time period 2)
- 1 and 4 (took place in time period 3)
- 2 and 3 (took place in time period 3)
- 2 and 4 (took place in time period 2)
- 3 and 4 (took place in time period 1)
Before we move on to the problem of six people, I'd like to point out an interesting fact: both the three-person puzzle and the four-person puzzle have the same minimum time period requirement (three) despite the fact that the three-person puzzle only involves three hugs whereas the four-person puzzle involves six hugs. As I'll show either later in this post or in a future post, this is not a coincidence; Every odd-numbered group requires exactly the same number of steps to hug as the next even-numbered group above it, and this stems from the fact that the directed cycle graphs for these end up being almost identical.
Now, on to the six-person version of the puzzle. We'll assume the people are standing in a circle. The vertices representing the people therefore form a hexagon. After a few minutes of trial and error, I found a graph that works for our hexagonal group of people:
As per the formula given above, 15 hugs are necessary in order for all six people to hug exactly once. Since we have six people, three hugs can take place concurrently, so we need a total of 5 units of time to complete all of the hugs. Each of those will obviously have a different arrangement people. Here are the five time periods for the directed cycle graph given above:
Cool, huh.
So I made the mistake of trying to explain this whole puzzle to my mom. It took me quite a bit to explain it to her so that she could understand, and the only comment I could get out of her after that was that I should get some people together and actually try it and then post a video of it on the blog post. If you can't already tell, my mom is quite mathematically disinclined.
Anyway, that's it for tonight. I will, however, mention that graphs for odd numbers look quite a bit different than graphs for even numbers. I'm working on some such graphs in my notebook; I'll post a followup entry with them in a few days.
2010-02-27
JZBot now supports Facebook!
I finally got Facebook support for JZBot/Marlen working!!! If you have a facebook account, add Marlen as a friend and start chatting. Marlen's Facebook profile is here.
2010-02-17
JZBot now supports XMPP/GMail
As usual with my posts, this is probably 2 weeks late, but JZBot now supports XMPP (and therefore GMail Chat)!!! Add multimarlen@opengroove.org as a contact and send "hi" in a chat message to him, or "lart Alex". multimarlen will automatically let you chat with him when he's online.
2010-02-08
Gummy Heart
While browsing ThinkGeek for other random valentines stuff (see my last blog post), I came across another of their new products, a gummy heart. And by "heart", I mean it looks like a real human heart, not like a stereotypical valentine's heart. Sheer awesomeness, except for the one fact that it's caffeinated (I hope I'm not the only one out there that gets major headaches from caffeine).
But yeah, that's my only real gripe against ThinkGeek, is that almost all of their foodstuff is caffeinated to the point that it would be more against the Word of Wisdom than coffee would. I hope they start to sell uncaffeinated versions of some of their products, although knowing ThinkGeek, they won't anytime soon.
But yeah, that's my only real gripe against ThinkGeek, is that almost all of their foodstuff is caffeinated to the point that it would be more against the Word of Wisdom than coffee would. I hope they start to sell uncaffeinated versions of some of their products, although knowing ThinkGeek, they won't anytime soon.
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