tasuki’s blog

I used to use tasuki@volny.cz, then got tasuki@seznam.cz for registering to suspicious places that could send me spam, and two years ago or so I switched to vit.brunner@gmail.com. I still forwarded the two previous emails there, as sometimes someone sent me something there, but lately I found out that I am more or less only forwarding spam.

Now I recieved about one spam every hour (yeah, I know, it’s still not that bad), so I decided it was the right time to cancel the redirects, so, the old adresses don’t work anymore, use the new one.

There’s no point to this post, just an announcement or something like that.

Do you know sed? It is a program that transforms text (I’ve used it to transfer sgf to my povray format), however, some people thought it’d be funny to make games in sed…

They made classic pong game and sokoban (the old game where you are a man that has to move boxes through a maze). Well, I think they are completely crazy (both the games and their creators), but I really like the idea of (ab)using sed in this way.

Sorry for a geekish post. (but I really do find this interesting )

This blog finally got hit by spammers. I recieve about 1 comment spam an hour, which is rather tough. Some get filtered automatically and I have to remove some of them by hand. Here I have to say big thanks to wordpress – editing/removing comments is very easy and the interface is great (it also allows bulk deleting spam).

There are several possible solutions – first (and very obvious one) is me just removing all the spam comments by hand (or training a filter, which will not be very useful probably, as the comments vary a lot). Then there is an option in wordpress – comment author must have previously approved comment (well, I have to check this too, but the other comments will wait in the queue and will do no harm to the reader; otoh new authors will have to wait for their comments to appear, which is a bit of a nuisance).

As a last note, I really don’t know what the fuckers want to accomplish – my blog doesn’t have any big traffic and there is nofollow on the comment links, so they are mostly useless. But the comment spamming is probably highly automated so I expect I’ll never get rid of them (and probably I can expect only higher and higher volume). And I am getting about 50 email spams daily too, luckily gmail’s spam filter totally rocks (I used to check spam folder as it is not 100% accurate but I don’t check it much anymore).

I’ve been living in this room since I was 4 years old or so (I had been in living parents’ room before I think).

To the north there is my sister’s room, to the east there is the living room, and garden is south. There is terrace above my room, and bathroom and corridor below. But what is in the west direction?

Just as I sit here, I have no idea what exactly there is. Well, there is neighbours’ house, and I think they have a living room there, but I’m not sure. The wall is probably quite thick as I never heard any sounds from there, not even music or so.

And why am I writing about it? I find it rather creepy that I have no idea what is there, just one or two meters far. Do you know all the direct surroundings of the place you live in?

Poker is a bad game because when someone bets more money than you have you have to fold.

I really have no idea where this originated, but it is for sure utter nonsense. Just think about it, if it was so, person with most money would bet everything everytime and always win.

When a player runs out of chips during the course of a hand, he doesn’t have to fold. Instead the player is said to be all-in. When you are all-in, you call all your chips and the pot is divided into the main pot and side pot. All subsequent chips are added to the side pot. At the showdown if the all-in player does not have a winning hand, both the side pot and the main pot go to the winning hand, as usual. At the showdown if the all-in player has a winning hand, the main pot goes to the all-in player, and the side pot goes to the next best hand. When several players go all-in, multiple side pots are created. The pots are divided according to hand and order in which the players went all-in. If a player not all-in at the showdown has the winning hand he wins all side pots and the main pot. If an all in player has the strongest hand he wins the pot or pots that were collected until he went all-in. Any all-in player with a winning hand can only win the pot or pots they are involved in.

It’s simple and fair.

It hurts.

Because we thought that the limit was 12GB for a week when in fact it is 12GB a month, well, we exceeded the bandtwidth and our connection got highly limited. Now I will have to survive with 30 times slower connection than the one I am used to (downloading 1mb in 3 seconds is kinda neat, downloading 30kB in 3 seconds sucks big time).

Ten days like this… I wonder whether I will survive or just die from lack of connectivity, which became more important than eating, drinking or sleeping for me.

I’ve read somewhere that average blog lasts slightly less than three months. Now I can see why.

I’ve had the blog for about three and a half month, so I am already above average, but lately I simply do not have enough energy to write posts. It’s not that there is nothing to write about, there are plenty of things I’d like to write about, but somehow it is too much work and I am very lazy.

So, don’t expect the blog to come to the end now, but maybe I will slow down a bit…

There are many various types of betting, most of them have one thing in common – you bet a rather small amount of money and there is a very small chance that you will win a lot of money. Why are there no lottery tickets for $1 where you would have 50% chance for winning $1.90? Or 80% chance for winning $1.10? I guess people just wouldn’t buy them. But why do people buy tickets for $1 where they have 1 in a million chance for winning $100 000? I can not think of any other reason than that they are stupid.

Comparison:
Insurance – you pay just little money and if something highly unprobable happens you can get a lot of money
Lottery – you pay just little money and if something highly unprobable happens you can get a lot of money
Roulette – you choose how much you want to risk, but you will lose on average 1/37 of what you bet
Poker – depends mainly on your knowledge of statistics and psychology compared to your opponents’, you choose how much you want to risk
Betting with friends – has the best positive expectation if you have the right friends and know how to do it, reminds me of a former classmate who lost every single bet he has made (he thought he’d write a 500 page book, run faster than marathon winners, and so on…)
Post edit: Stowawaying is another type – you have a very high percentage to win a very small amount and a very small percentage to lose quite a huge amount.
As a side note, I face the same problem over and over when writing to the blog – I have a lot of very good ideas (at least I think so), but I am too lazy to put them in proper order (I just write what I think of, the order is more or less random) and generally play with it a bit, I just write it all down and publish it. Otoh this has the advantage that it forces you to find out the connections yourself, so maybe that would be a good excuse for my laziness.

A lot of people have LCD displays (the flat ones, as opposed to CRT monitors). The “problem” with LCD is that each pixel (the little dot that can display any colour) is physically fixed in one position. So using LCD with different resolution than the one it was built for is a very bad idea. But still, some people do it. They apparently don’t mind that all the image is blurred as the poor LCD tries to display something that should be just between its fixed built pixels.

What surprises me even more is how some people clearly do not get it. I tell them, I even change the resolution for them to see how much better it is, but next time I come it is back to before. I got told various reasons for this – the image is too sharp (huh?!?), the fonts are too small (what about using bigger ones?), the application elements are too small (you have to put up with this, but it will actually save you space on the display for more important things).

I will not give up my fight against using LCD with wrong resolution, but I strongly consider carying a gun with me as it seems the only possible way to explain this to some people.

Aerosmith: Dream on

Every time that I look in the mirror,
All these lines on my face getting clearer.
The past is gone,
It went by like dusk to dawn.
Isn’t that the way?
Everybody’s got their dues in life to pay.

I know nobody knows,
Where it comes and where it goes.
I know it’s everybody’s sin,
You got to lose to know how to win.

Half my life’s in books’ written pages,
Live and learn from fools and from sages.
You know it’s true,
All the things come back to you.

Sing with me, sing for the years,
Sing for the laughter and sing for the tears.
Sing with me, if it’s just for today,
Maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away.

A very good song, I can play it over and over and never get bored. The lyrics is also enlightening, sometimes you can learn more from fools than from sages and you definitely got to lose to know how to win, which applies not only to go or other games, but to life in general.

Dream on, dream on, dream until your dream comes true…