2.10.09

Northpaw, evil scheme mk.1

so i'm in my third academic year at University now, doing a Bsc Hons in Computing Science. understandably, it gets pretty hard - i'm chewing bitwise C operators right now, and to my shame i still don't exactly understand bitshifts - but it's awesome, in the same way that my work on the NBX Project is awesome.

that is, it's sort of above my capacity, which makes it fun along the lines of a dodgy rollercoaster: "Get off there! You might die!" "FUCK YEAH I KNOW!".

speaking of self-endangering behaviours, i should be getting my Northpaw kit sometime soon, and being the idiot that i am, i'm not content just to wear the sucker. i'm going to do my illevel-headed best to work on an implanted version.

some issues i can think of with this:
- power. it might need a gyro rather than a battery pack, or i could leave it transdermal.
- isolation. i need the buzzer electronics isolated, shock-speaking, from my Weak Against Shock flesh. you can do this with silicon, i'm just not sure where to get access to it.
- waterproofing. cause i like being able to take a shower (not that i wouldn't put up with sponge baths for a while if it meant more mods.)

my God, i really do have problems, don't i?

in other brainhacking news, i've lost track of how long i've been clean for (so more than two weeks, since my sense of time is absolute shite), but it looks like i was wrong about the extent of the dain bramage: slowly i've been getting my ability to detect temperature back. unfortunately, i live in fucking Scotland, and it turns out my room is really, really fucking cold. i had to pull Muad-Dib out of bed by his ankles this morning.

also i have a lot of Mana, since i won my textbook money for this year by writing essays for Epic Prize Money this year. that link takes you to the SugarCopter site at Kustom PCs, which ships from Scotland, so no need to import it from ThinkGeek anymore.

last, it looks like my revenge-driven ex has forgotten about his plans to Beat Lepht's Evil Schemes, which is good, because my evil schemes mostly involve buying candy with my government loans and pestering senior department staff with stupid questions.

peace, love and tramadol. -L


PS. ink win: the giant rook over my back and torso is now finished, and i have a H+ tattoo on my left shoulder above the other one, to boot. nerd win.

5 comments:

spoon said...

Speaking of bit shifting being hard to understand - I can't understand why Dan Bernstein's hashing algorithm works.

Can you grok it?

unsigned long
hash(unsigned char *str)
{
unsigned long hash = 5381;
int c;

while (c = *str++)
hash = ((hash << 5) + hash) + c;

return hash;
}

Maybe I need to walk through the algorithm some time with some paper + pen.

Seized from U of York

Lepht said...

not a goddamn clue. he lost me when he put that ++ operator in a Boolean condition. see me here scratchin' my little spiky head.

L

spoon said...

ASCII strings are terminated with the null character, which is the number 0. So *str++ is 0 when you reach the end of the string, which is false.

When I was wondering "why" it works, I was presuming that it did work well - now I understand how it compresses the strings, but also am critical of how well it actually performs.

Anonymous said...

i may be late with it, but easiest way to think of bit shifting is multiplying (if left shift) or dividing (if right shift) to the power of two. With said djb hash i'm trying and so far fail to find what is that magic 5381 number is. dug up even the Bernstein's site, but found nothing there. Looking in the wrong direction?

Lepht said...

yeah, i can do bitshifts if i actually draw the bits out and manually shift them up, but i have to have a terminal or a piece of paper in front of me. i guess i'm too dumb for this shit.

5381 is just a random hash, i thought... then again, generally the rule goes that if spoon understands it, we're not going to.

L

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[pls no ask about the vodka. debate is always welcome. remember, Tramadol fucks you up]