Daenmark

« September 2004 | Main | November 2004 »

October 28, 2004

Pseudo-random enumeration

Daylight webpage on implementing Knuth's pseudo-random generators.

Posted by daen at 11:45 PM

Chemiïnformatics

Or cheminformatics. Or chemoïnformatics.

Whatever. Read about it here.

Dr Wendy Warr maintains a good list of chem{o|i}informatics-related conferences here.

Posted by daen at 11:00 PM

October 27, 2004

georgewbush.com blocks overseas viewers

Netcraft reports that the Bush campaign web site rejects non-US visitors.

What are they playing at? We US citizens abroad have already voted, thank you, so we're just waiting for the final Trump. Ever heard of proxies, Bush/Cheney people?

Also reported at boingboing.net and the BBC.

Posted by daen at 10:13 PM

October 21, 2004

Stephen Dewey's homepage

Stephen Dewey is a fellow student studying for the Open University's MSc in Science. He writes really quite excellent speculative fiction such as "Ten Hypothetical and Plausible Deaths in London" and "The Circus".

Posted by daen at 11:34 PM

FactCheck.org

FactCheck.org has a tagline of "holding politicians accountable".

Their mission statement is:

"We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

The Annenberg Political Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg in 1994 to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state, and federal levels.

The APPC accepts NO funding from business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals. It is funded primarily by an endowment from the Annenberg Foundation."

At the moment they are almost exclusively examining claims made by both Bush and Kerry camps in the runup to the election. This is a Good Thing and helps keep your feet firmly on the ground.

Posted by daen at 01:22 PM

October 19, 2004

Ad graveyard

Now, if you read my blog, you'll know it's high minded, not a little liberalistic and usually good clean fun. But this Aussie dog food advert is very, very funny. Sorry.

Posted by daen at 12:37 AM

Kill Bill ... starring Uma Tuxman?

Groan. Crossover culture. Love it or hate it, it brings a wry smile to the face sometimes whether you want it to or not.

Posted by daen at 12:27 AM

October 18, 2004

California Ballot Propositions - 2004 election

The Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley has written out a table of California Ballot Propositions for the 2004 election. The best part is the list of organizations and newspapers - from the Peace and Freedom Party to the Sierra Club. Never have I had to learn so much about a state's politics so fast ...

Posted by daen at 11:40 PM

October 07, 2004

Building OpenBabel under MinGW

1. gettimeofday()

This post on Building GNU Chess 5.07 on MinGW/gcc actually addresses a general problem with MinGW - it doesn't support the gettimeofday() call.

This fix from Anders Carlsson addresses that:

---- In common.h after #include <sys/time>, I added the following:


   /* These are winbase.h definitions, but to avoid including

      tons of Windows related stuff, it is reprinted here  */

   typedef struct _FILETIME {

        unsigned long dwLowDateTime;

        unsigned long dwHighDateTime;

   } FILETIME;

   void __stdcall GetSystemTimeAsFileTime(FILETIME*);

   

   void gettimeofday(struct timeval* p, void* tz /* IGNORED */);

---- and into main.c, I put the actual gettimeofday function:

   void gettimeofday(struct timeval* p, void* tz /* IGNORED */){

     union {

       long long ns100; /*time since 1 Jan 1601 in 100ns units */

       FILETIME ft;

     } _now;

     GetSystemTimeAsFileTime( &(_now.ft) );

     p->tv_usec=(long)((_now.ns100 / 10LL) % 1000000LL );

     p->tv_sec= (long)((_now.ns100-(116444736000000000LL))/10000000LL);

     return;

   }

----

Anders's original post was in the Redhat GDB mailing list.

2. rindex()

rindex() is unresolved ...

Danny Smith has this to say on the MinGW forum on SourceForge:

index, rindex are non-ANSI version of strchr. strrchr respectivley.
 msvcrt.dll exports only the ANSI names.  
   
 Change the references to the non-ANSI names to strchr and strrchr ... 

3. Still working on it ... currently having problems with resolving stdcall namemangled GetSystemTimeAsFileTime()

...

Posted by daen at 01:17 AM