Optimized Sort

I want a highly optimized "sort" command for files of fixed-length records to be compared with memcmp. I can usually massage my data into such a format in linear time, so any speedup of the constant factor of the O(n log n) sort would be great. Regular Unix sort is too fancy (detecting line endings, locale-specific alphabetization), and I suspect it has significant performance loss. This optimized sort program not the easiest program in the world to write because I'm particularly interested in external sort (it does not all fit into memory), so we need to take into account things like various cache sizes and main memory, what to do if there is more than one hard drive available (and how much space is available on each), how many channels to merge (if the algorithm to be used is mergesort) at once, and how to use multiple processors.

And compression, e.g., LZO LZOP, to conserve external disk space. Sorted records should compress well.

Lattice graphs enumeration

2x3 lattice: 1 + 2*17*239 = 3^3*7*43 = 8127 (out of 2^13 = 8192) unique modulo translation

3x3 lattice: 268419137 out of 2^28 (5 hrs computation)

includes the empty graph

Corpora

Shakespeare's total word count is about 800,000 words. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series comprises roughly 1,000,000 words. With these training examples, could more Shakespeare or Potter be electronically synthesized?

vmware player installer evil

As I watch the task manager network traffic ("Wireless Network Connection") as the VMWare player installer runs, it's pretty clear that the installer is sending some information onto the network, i.e., it is probably calling home. This is evil.

Blitz Chess Film Idea

Take some famous chess game and have two actors play it out as if it were a blitz chess game with pieces flying around as fast as hands can move them. For maximum irony, choose a postal chess game. Overlay it with audio of a very-rapid-talking colorful play-by-play commentator.

Playing on a board is cool (definitely choose a chess set that the pieces make a sharp tap when placed on the board, or add such a sound effect in post). It might also be interesting if the game is acted out with real people dressed up as chess pieces sprinting around the chess field.

Another idea, mentioned previously, is to use Yoko Ono's all-white chess set to reenact a game, or actually play one for real, with the players both clad in white. I think the board should be all white as well (with lines separating the squares, like shogi) and not a checkerboard.

Slashdot | True Random Number Generator Goes Online

Slashdot | True Random Number Generator Goes Online

Not a good idea, because the client (person downloading) has no easy way of knowing the numbers are random. A better idea would be to post lots of hexadecimal digits of an irrational numbers like pi. Such numbers ought to be random so long as you are not doing something involving the digits of pi. However, given the existence of the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe digit extraction algorithm, I'm not sure just how "random" the hexadecimal digits of pi are anymore. Are their any other good (highly subjective) irrational numbers?

Thumbnail changes

This is a firefox bug. Why does the small scaled thumbnail down below change (the pixels dance) on mouse down of the main image?

See thumbnail

Unsolved Pencil and Paper problem

Orchard-Planting Problem -- from Wolfram MathWorld

How many rows of 3 can you create with 13 points? 22, 23, or 24?

Touchfree faucet

Design an intuitive touch-less hot and cold water faucet that the amount of flow of both hot and cold may be controlled independently, like a regular faucet.

CTF Go

Modify the game of go 囲碁 to be Capture The Flag.

Cell phones and pagers

Why do pagers have an order-of-magnitude greater battery life than cell phones?

When a phone runs low on power, or at user request, it could switch to "pager" mode and still remain useful for a long while.

Given the popularity of text messaging, two-way papers ought to be more popular.

Widescreen

The largest image in fullscreen firefox is 1272x752.

Google Calcaulator "Factor"

Google Calculator should implement "factor". And they have a huge server farm power it.

Crystalline Entity

Ken's blog: Brownian Motion Point growth snowflake fractal

Building this fractal cell-by-cell in 3D on an tetrahedral-octahedral honeycomb, one can virtually generate the "Crystalline Entity" from Star Trek. I'd like to see some ray-traced (with refraction) animation with the Earth as a backdrop.