Archive for March, 2010

Status.net – The future (hopefully) of microblogging!

Published on March 17, 2010 in Personal and linux. 0 Comments

First, if you think Twitter / Google Buzz / Petstatus.com are silly and just fads, you can go ahead and navigate away from this page.

For those of you who believe that “microblogging” is a new form of communication between people, then listen up. If you have an account on twitter, why do I have to have an account on twitter as well to subscribe to your updates? What about facebook?

If you have a hotmail email account, I don’t have to have hotmail to email you, why should it be the same with microblogging?

What we need is a common protocol, so people on different networks can follow and join the conversation! What we need is a protocol… what we need is…

Yes, Status.net! Status.net is an application that allows you to microblog, and converse with people even if they are different networks. That’s right! Now you can follow your favorite pets on Petstatus.com even though you are on Identi.ca. People on Swisen.com can subscribe to people on WowTweet.net. Amazing!

And guess what, you can actually MOVE and DELETE your status updates. Yes you actually own them. You can move them to another server if you want. Does twitter allow that? Didn’t think so.

If you are using Dreamhost to host a website, installing Status.net is super easy! They have one-click install for status.net. If you have trouble working with their installer, I have some notes that might help.

So when you are ready you can follow me! http://xkyle.com/status/

XKCD’s Collatz Conjecture

Published on March 4, 2010 in Personal and linux. 3 Comments

In the XKCD comic dated 3/4/2010, the Collatz Conjecture presents the following scenario:

Well I don’t know if your friends will stop calling your or not, but I was curious about what the graph would actually look like. The graph in the comic looks like it was created with Graphviz, one of my favorite programs!

So I wrote a quick bash script to generate the approrpiate links for graphviz to interpret:

#!/bin/bash
echo "digraph \"xkcd\" {"
for NUMBER in `seq 1 100`
do
 if [ $[$NUMBER % 2] -eq 0 ]; then #We are even
 let OUTPUT=$NUMBER/2
 else  #Odd
 let OUTPUT=$NUMBER*3+1
 fi
 echo "$NUMBER -> $OUTPUT"
done
echo "}"

So what does it really look like? Here:

There are lots of straggling links. This is of course only because I went to 100. Why not 1000? It is a little big… click Here.

Turns out with even more numbers we end up with even more isolated links, no big super chain.

If you would like to run this code for yourself, first make sure you have the graphviz package installed in your linux system. Then copy that code above into a script, say called xkcd.sh. Then run like so:

./xkcd.sh | neato -Tpng | display

Adjust as necessary.