gwillen

Fantastically awesome Flash game:

http://woodgears.ca/eyeball/

There's no trickery -- it's a series of tests of how well you can eyeball angles and distances. It runs you through the series three times, and your score is your average error measurement. The errors are in "units" otherwise unspecified, which I assume are calibrated for the difficult of the tasks.

My first score was 3.67; my second score was 1.87, which is enough to get me the #2 spot on the "last 500 games" top score list, and a spot near the bottom of the "last 10,000 games" list as well.

Suggestions for play: Rotate your head. Squint. Try closing each eye in turn.

Before trying to play for score, run through it once just to see the visualization it gives you of the correct answer for "Triangle center" -- it will give you a better intuition for what point the game is asking you for.

I seem to have a blister between two of my toes.

I wouldn't have thought that was possible...

Went to a Most Awesome New Years' party at Frances' place in San Diego. <3 the Mudd crowd. (Also pigsrcool who I think was the only non-Mudder there besides me. :-D)

The real purpose of this post, though: I know I don't have half the people from that party friended, and I bet they all have Livejournals. So those of you who do have me on your list, get those other folks to come comment here so I can friend them, but be lazy and not have to go search for them. ;-)

Any CMUers going to the MIT Mystery Hunt and wanting to reside in Buddha Lounge (or if you don't know what Buddha Lounge is), please reply here at once, mentioning whether or not you have already emailed the hunt housing alias with this information. I'm trying to help them work out whether they can fit us all. (Also mention whether you need housing before, after, or both. For the record at least a couple of us are staying with rlambert after instead.) If you have questions just post them, I can answer those. :-)

Hi Livejournal,

For those of you who don't already know, I will be in the Los Angeles area (Redondo Beach of course!) from Dec. 20 - Jan 2. (I'm going to arrive tonight around 9PM.) So let me know if you want to do anything while I'm out there! :-) I mostly don't even know who reading this is still around that area...

Hi everyone! I will be writing a puzzlehunt post shortly; but first I bring you another puzzle.

For reasons I will not go into here, rlambert currently has a laptop with many useful things missing from /lib; things like ld-linux.so. The laptop is still running; she has a browser and a terminal already open, and has sworn she won't close them. But very few things will run in the terminal, besides bash which is already open. (She also has pidgin open. If you give her advice directly, rather than by commenting on this post, please make sure you don't make anything worse.)

She has a complete copy of /lib residing elswhere.

The puzzle is: How can she restore /lib with only what she has available?

I've pointed out to her that there may be no solution that doesn't involve rebooting from removable media; but for the sake of exercise, try to find a solution she can do that doesn't require that. (She doesn't have another computer handy, and she doesn't have a CD drive; there may be solutions involving making a bootable USB drive using her own computer, and then booting from it, but unless you can prove without rebooting that her hardware can boot USB drives, that's a risky strategy.)

Feel free to make any reasonable assumptions (I'll let you know if they turn out to be wrong); or if you have her contact info, contact her and ask anything you need to know, and post it here in the comments. [But don't tell her to run any command that might make things worse!]

Go, lazywebs, go! ;-)

ETA: FYI to people reading this, we are helping her out in #cslounge. One correct solution to the puzzle (there may be others) was:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/backup-copy-of-lib /backup-copy-of-lib/ld-linux.so.2 command

To get something to run even in this fucked-up state.

Now we're trying to sort out the fact that she can't copy it back, due to the same reason she originally had a problem, which is that she's out of disk in /, combined with the fact that the copy of the files out of lib was done with cp -r, which caused all the symlinks to blow up into full-on files. (None of this is her fault; someone put her up to it. ;-)

[This announcement is mainly targeted at people in Pittsburgh, but you're welcome to fly out here for it... :-)]

This semester, KGB's puzzle hunt will be slightly different from what we've done in the past. We're calling it an Interactive Puzzle Event: Psych Night at the Geller Hotel! It will take place on November 1.

For more information, http://www.gellerhotel.com/event .

To register your team of four (or whoever you have), http://www.gellerhotel.com/register.html .

For questions, event@gellerhotel.com .


If you like the sound of our event, post about it on your LJ, so we can get more players! :-)

X-posted: gwillen, cmukgb

Hey guyz Freezepop on Friday at Mr. Smalls!

Apparently vehicles are required -- any drivers like Freezepop? :-)

By loading the image embedded in this post, you have contributed to poor Luis von Ahn getting yet another of his badly-secured web voting systems screwed with. Also my quest for world domination. ;-)

New Yorkers / Cory Doctorow fans: Who wants to attend this?

http://www.cbldf.org/pr/archives/000367.shtml

Thursday, August 21 at 7:30 PM, at the Helen Mills Theater (26th St). Cory Doctorow will be talking about his book Little Brother. Apparently DJ Spooky will also be there talking about whatever DJ Spooky talks about. I don't know who he is but he sounds cool. ;-)

I already have a ticket (costs a $20 donation to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.)