Neil Gaiman points to AlexLit’s Recommender service. After rating my first few works, the thing was able to make reasonable guesses about the next author. Being contrary, I rated John Crowley first, then Neil second, and it already had a high rate of guesses.
7:15:56 PM  #  comment []

Vectorized Mersenne Twister

Earlier today, I was thinking to myself, I could teach myself the Altivec instruction set by attempting to optimize the Mersenne Twister pseudoRNG (with its reference implementation in C) with it. That would be a cool project. Then lazin—er, sanity—prevailed, and I used the Google search engine (lawyers, please note unlitigable language!) to find a little message thread on an Altivec forum, wherein one of the mailing list messages responded with an Altivec-optimized MT PRNG coded by Doug Clarke as “a good exercise to keep [his] mind going.” Yahumina? Whuzifula?

Do not worry, Darrin Cardini, I, too, feel like a deadbeat.

While I was searching for that, I came across this Wiki for Mac game developers. I did not realize that idevgames.com had a Wiki FAQ.
1:42:56 PM  #  comment []

Amidst the emergency patches I put into place to keep my weblog from total uselessness, I forgot to write about Mr. Rogers.

I too watched him in my otherwise misspent youth.

Several years ago, he received some sort of lifetime achievement award, or an appreciation of his work. He spoke about violence on television and how it affects children, how important it was to put decency back into television.* He was given a standing ovation by the actors, directors, producers, and media-types there. Did they listen to him? If one were to look at the current spate of reality television so-called, one would have to say no. But it was a beautiful speech, filled with the passion that fills people who know what power they have, understand the responsibility that power puts upon them, and want that responsibility to fulfilled in a meaningful way. He knew that television could change the world, and he was one of the primary forces for making a small corner of broadcast airwaves a force for bettering mankind.

Fred Rogers, you will be missed.

---

*Does anyone have a copy of the transcript? I’ve been looking for it ever since.
2:00:58 AM  #  comment []

By the by, Meera seems to have restarted her blog with a new look a couple of months ago, after a three-month or so hiatus. Yet another sign that I am very far behind on my blog-reading. Sorry all. Um, she enjoys Roger Zelazny and role-playing games. I believe she combines both passions using the Amber Diceless RPG. If any of that made sense or appeals to you, or you enjoy a slightly skewed look at things, go on and click the link. She just got a sword, too!
1:35:31 AM  #  comment []

Hm. Avid readers (hah!) may have noticed that a recent Radio Userland update knocked out the whole month of February, affecting all pages, around midweek. It seemed to have removed my item templates and reverted my home page template to its original state, knocking me off the GeoURL server.

I think I’ve fixed everything. I must learn to back up the template files.
1:06:29 AM  #  comment []