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I’ve been meaning to finish my new updating system before posting, but looks like that’s going to be at least a week or two off while I clear my plate off with other things.

I got the latest issue of Res last week, and while there weren’t any new spectacular music videos (one of the results of going to the monthly Res screenings), there was an amazing trailer for an amazing looking documentary, BattleGround: Dispatches From the End of Empire.

While a medium-sized trailer is available on their site and on archive.org, I decided to rip a high-quality XviD AVI [53.1MiB]. I’ve been showing it to everyone at work, it’s that good.

From the forums, it was shot in three weeks, on a DVX100 (although it looked like there was a secondary camera as well) by two people. The footage is amazing and the editing is really great. I hope this gets picked up. (it’s been submitted to Toronto, Venice Biennale, and Telluride) It would be a shame if it weren’t and I’d love to see it playing on the big screen.

I started a Suggestions list for OSCON yesterday on the wiki. I think there are definitely some good suggestions being put on.

Currently in Portland for OSCON

• Grumpy Gamer – I saw this in my referer logs the other day. Very cool, Ron Gilbert (yeah, that one) has a blog.
• Comparison of Drupal Access Control Modules
• Mozilla Developer Day 2004 – Friday, August 6, at Google’s Campus. Looks like fun
• A Compact Guide to Lex & Yacc

• CRM114 TUNE results – Mathieu De Zutter has already setup almost exactly what I want to do w/ my spam training

It’s a good idea not to run kill -9 -1 as root.

• Weblog Snapshots – paranoid fish whips up a pyobjc/webkit script to generate snapshots of entire weblogs. Source forthcoming. Cool!
• Re:Why not a PDA? – interesting, Duke provides campus-wide CVS and (apparently flaky) AFS w/ Mac and Windows clients.
• Autoversioning, Subversion and WebDAV – the holy grail w/ Apache2 and SubVersion. See also: OSCON 2003 Subversion WebDAV [PDF], Appendix C. WebDAV and Autoversioning
• DForge – version of GForge w/ Wiki, Subversion, WebDAV support
• A Foot of Mac – photomatt breaks down, joins the club. I think it was just last year he was talking about being one of the last non-swicthers…
• R-Name – in the tradition of other great Japanese GUI front-ends, a free OS X batch-file-renaming utility
• Canon XL2 and Panasonic AG-DVX100 Comparison – the new Canon XL2 looks awesome. Interchangable use of EOS lenses, true 24P and 16:9. Although this description of its image quality is disheartening. See also Anyone with some 8bit DSP insights?. We’ll have to see when the XL2 comes out I suppose… (the cinematography forums look like a good place to hang out if you’re doing the video thing)

Noise Ninja 2.0 has a Mac OS X version. That’s great. Ironically, one of the things I still do primarily on my PC is my image handling and cataloguing, primarily because of tools like Noise Ninja, Neat Image, Qimage being PC only. And for cataloguing/browsing, ACDSee just beats the pants off of anything on the Mac.

• Assemble Me – cool blog on information design and visualization

I spent a couple hours today working out Google Labs Problem #3 (skip the bottom if you want to solve it for yourself). I don’t need a job or anything, but it caught my interest. Sadly, I’m left with a feeling that there should be a much better way to do it if I were smarter, but hey, I kicked that snack machine’s ass. That’s the important thing.

Yes, this was incredibly nerdy. Yes, I should be doing other things with my time. And no, I haven’t eaten yet today.

[update] I got this response back:

Dear Problem Solver,

Thanks for taking the time to play with our little brain-teaser and for
sending us your solution. While you won’t find a confirmation of the
answer in this email, we did want to let you know that your message was
received and that we’ll be taking a look at it. If you submitted a resume,
we’ll be spending some time with that as well. If it seems like there
might be a fit with a position we have open, we’ll contact you within the
next few days.

And as for the answer to the puzzle, we’ll post the ads and the solution
on our site within a couple of months, after those who are a little slower
than you have had a chance to work on it a bit longer. Thanks again for
your interest in Google.

The Google Labs Engineering Team

Which puts me in a bit of an ethical dilemma, right? Do I take this link down so the less scrupulous won’t cheat their way to an (admittedly mediocre) solution? Of course, if they do find this, it’ll be pretty much by using Google to search for it (ahh, delicious irony).

See also: Fog Creek Software: Mysterious billboard, Google is behind mystery geek trap

• Algorithm::FastPermute – like Algorithm::Permute, works only on entire list. I just hard-coded my own fixed-depth iterative permutation loops in PHP
• perlfaq4: How do I permute N elements of a list? – this would probably work, didn’t bother
• Hacking The Math: Permutation Generation – like the Perl libraries, does permutations of entire sets, not subsets
• Permutation Generation Methods – reading that would both go over my head and put me to sleep, I’m sure