Digital Wanderer

We live as long as we fly

First Off, Bicycles

 2007-05-13

This will probably be of little interest to most, but first I'll write about wandering around Riga. Arrived at 9 o'clock.  Bought a map to see where the bike shops were, having dropped their addresses into my Sony Reader beforehand. The map was barely needed, because I somehow naturally gravitated toward the part of Riga I know best, meaning down Brivibas street towards the Teika neighborhood. As a result, I hit 7 shops and made it  almost all the way to my old dorm.

The shops mainly sell Merida. I don't know why that is. The Trek store (aka www.veloserviss.lv) on Brivibas was a pleasant surprise -
right there at the entrance stands a bike like this, totally rideable.

A sepia image of an antique penny-farthing bicycle with a huge front wheel and a tiny rear wheel, standing on a grated surface against a background of old buildings.
Penny-farthing , aka ordinary bicycle

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Sony Reader

 2007-05-11

Well then, a Sony Reader has arrived, just like a birthday present. What can I say.
It really is so thin and small! The screen seems a little small, but we’ll know for sure later. The screen looks great, though it’s a bit grayish. The branded light that I bought in addition to the Reader is weak. It’s not bright enough for me—which is quite understandable after the floodlights known as “Samsung monitors.”
Pages turn almost as quickly as in a paper book—so what are people complaining about? I’ll share my actual impressions later.
Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday. Those who haven’t gotten around to it yet: don’t bother, I already know you wish me happiness and good health, so there’s no point wearing out your keyboard.

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p2p computing for games

 2007-05-08

A fun idea came to me yesterday, and it's easy to formulate. Right now there are projects where people provide their computers for calculations. You install a client program, it runs all the time and, analyzing the sent data, it does something. Something useful, like searching for a cancer cure, or of little use, like searching for aliens. You could also do some genome decoding, this will bring closer the coveted era of universal genetic modification. All these projects are partially based on server technology, rather than p2p, because the server distributes and collects the tasks. But why not make a strictly p2p project, where participants in a grid provide services to each other, not by sharing Britney Spears porn, but by providing CPU time for other people's tasks?
The easiest way is to apply this idea to CPU-intensive games like chess (I don't know, truth be told, how easy they are to parallelize). I mean, people won't be playing all that much, there will be enough CPU time for everyone if the client program is on all the time, and there are many participants in the grid.

The sad part: of course, all this has already been invented before me. Here, for example.

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Master’s Thesis

 2007-05-06

Here are the diagrams I drew yesterday for my master’s thesis. The gist, for enthusiasts: the game calculates physics discretely, and object trajectories depend on the discretization step, as shown in the image. To avoid randomness in the trajectories, this step must be fixed.
Two diagrams illustrate the interaction dynamics between a large (V0) and a small (V1) red circle. The upper diagram shows the path of V0, the velocity vector V1, and the parameter L1; in the lower diagram, V1 also has an additional velocity vector V2 at an angle, while the parameter is labeled L2.

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Hmm

 2007-05-05