A riddle

Two astronauts are standing on a spinning space station shaped like a disk. They are the same radial distance away from the disk's center, and standing opposite to each other across from the center (e.g., if you draw a line connecting the two astronauts, the line crosses the disk's center.) One astronaut wants to toss a wrench to the other. Among the infinitude of trajectories which will accomplish this goal, characterize one of the trajectories without writing a single equation.

My answer:

??l??o?s dn ?i ??id o? ?uol? ?q lli? ?n?uo??s? ????o ??? pu? '??u?????? ?o ????? u?is????? ? ui uoi???s ???ds ??? o? ??i??l?? ???ds ui ?u?? lli? ??u??? ??? ??uil????? ?p???l? ??,no? ???? ??i?ol?? l?i?u??u?? ??? ?o ???? o? l?nb? ??i?ol?? ? ?? 'uoi???o? ?o ???u?? s,uoi???s ??? ?o?? ??u??sip ?no? o? l?nb? snip?? ? ??i? ?l??i? ??? o? l?i?u??u?? uoi????ip p???uidsi?u? ??? ui ??u??? ??? ?o???

The Script

//Prep the bread
footlong Italian Herbs & Cheese
Cold cut trio
Pepperjack
Toasted

//Veggies
Olives
Lettuce
Pickles
Green Pepper
Onion

//Additional toppings
Black Pepper
Spicy brown mustard

//Meal
44 oz - 5% lemonade, 95% Diet Coke
Nacho Cheese Doritos

// Variations
* Occasionally, switch to regular mustard, and add jalapeno.
* Occasionally, add light mayo.

GNU Screen for X

If you don't know what GNU "screen" is, use this as a primer. The most interesting bit is that it allows you to disconnect from a server, and have all of your programs continue to run until you return.

Except that it only works for terminal environments.

Something similar for graphical environments would be VNC; With most VNC servers, if you disconnect from the server, your programs continue to run even while you're not connected. Actually, servers that don't do this are the exception, rather than the rule.

There are two problems with the VNC protocol that make it not ideal, though. The first is that you have a severe trade-off between image quality and latency over low-bandwidth networks. The second is that applications served up over VNC integrate terribly with the host desktop session. VNC servers these days handle clipboard transfer well enough, but you can forget drag-and-drop or resizing your window.

The UNIX world has had this partially solved for so many years, it's ridiculous. Enter, the X Window System. On most systems, it's only used to display the output of programs running on the local computer on your local monitor. But it also allows you run Firefox on computer A and allow the Firefox window to show up on computer B, with no visible indication to the user of computer B that his program isn't running locally. If you've used Parallels or VMWare Fusion to display Windows programs on a Mac screen, you understand how valuable such a relatively seamless integration is. And the X Window System has supported this since the 1980s. That's at least twenty years, now.

What's missing is the ability to combine the remote desktop integration capabilities of X with the headless nature of GNU Screen and the detachable session nature of GNU Screen and VNC. I'll leave the question of why this is valuable as an exercise to the reader. Should be pretty easy to figure out.

(And despite the fact that they bill themselves that way, ratpoison isn't what I'm looking for. They're missing the detachable session side of things, because they're just a window manager, and not a stub/proxy X server.)

Politics and Me

Today's Dilbert is hilarious...

Chillin' with friends and family at telnet://bbs.grnet.com

4:30AM Saturday. We're working on the same project we've been working on for three weeks nonstop. Now playing: Insomnia by Faithless.

I've got a great title for a critique on the typical grading scale: "A is for Average"

*Sigh* It was bound to happen eventually. I now have very specific disagreements about how code gets formatted...

Hear about the guy who made transplant eye fluid? Put a bucket on top of a door. Now divorced. Wife didn't appreciate the humour.

"Hopefully the comments in the file will jog your memory." "Hopefully my memory doesn't go DING-DING-DING-DING-TILT!!!"

// Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do or throw an exception.

I ♥ Visual Studio's caller graph.

I want to try writing an inherently-thread-safe red-black tree.

Reddit thread Bash users will love: http://ping.fm/jBi8R

So I broke my work keyboard. Enter key gave out. Pulled out a spare, and noticed the surfaces felt different. I'd warn my old one smooth.

Wondering if I can set up an XMPP server for Rosetta Code, where auth is based on MW db, and there are conference rooms for every MW cat.

One of the worst things that could happen to me is if they made puns a capitol offense. It'd be a deaf sentence, for sure.

http://ping.fm/gdpDz

Oi. I broke 40 hours for the week ten minutes ago.

Hey! I resemble that remark! http://bash.org/?3469

Would everyone please email ukagentdept05 (at) gmail.com and tell them not to try to scam me with fake lottery responses? kthxbai

Need something to write about for the paper? How about the online comments to the last article you wrote: http://bit.ly/h8Zb

#DRM will screw you over. Don't assume businesses to be benevolent: http://bit.ly/wLCTP http://bit.ly/pYA19 http://bit.ly/QDZpo

I've been awake for ten hours, and just realized I haven't eaten yet. Got a ton of cleaning done, though...

So you can refresh a black inkjet cartridge by shaking it, similar to toner? Who'da thunk it?

Who says bards in 3.5e suck? Tonight, I got a 33 on my perform check at a religious ceremony that deities were keeping an eye on.

I just found my old printout of this from 2001: http://ping.fm/x7Gyx

It's not July 4th, but expect some fireworks: http://➞.ws/镺