Macrotritopus larva, thanks to Pharyngula's Friday cephalopod; original image from Cephalopods: A World Guide, by Mark Norman. Captioned by myself.

(If you're not aware of this little Internet meme, you might want to try a cheezburger?)

I am now the proud owner of the number 255. All your base-16 0xFF are belong to me!

Google Maps recently added a feature where you can click and drag on a route to add a waypoint. This is a nice feature because it lets you find an alternative path if the path Google suggests is bad, or if you'd like to travel through a certain place on a road trip.

I used this feature tonight to come up with a route that takes you through all 48 of the contiguous U.S. states. My initial route was about 9,300 miles long, but after substantial tweaking, I got the distance down to just 7,469 miles. I think my current path is pretty good -- can you find one that's shorter? (The computer scientists in the crowd will recognize this as a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem.)

(Click the image for a zoomed version that you can play with.)

Humans solve about 60 million CAPTCHAs a day. A new project called reCAPTCHA aims to put this human computing power to good use: digitizing books. Especially cool is the reCAPTCHA Mailhide service. Type your email into a textbox and it generates HTML code that uses the reCAPTCHA servers to protect your email address. The end result looks like this:
mcmi...@cs.cmu.edu

I've been working on converting an ancient laptop ("vivi", a 166 MHz Pentium) into a digital picture frame. I got the hardware working to my satisfaction a couple weeks ago, so now it's time to work on the software. There are a lot of slideshow programs out there, but I couldn't find any that would allow:

• 1) the ability to display full-screen photos from my Flickr account.
• 2) the ability to be remotely controlled from another machine in our home network.

So I wrote my own slideshow program, using Pygame for graphics and Twisted for networking. Along the way, I picked up a neat design pattern. By using Python's function decorators, my Photo objects can load their metadata (description, tags, URLs) on-demand without much additional code.

I just got poetry spam. Not Markov poetry; not random snippets from out-of-print books; actual poetry that specifically promotes their products. Here it is:

Gorgeous presents You may find,
Make this clear to your mind
Morning, noon or even night
Here's the link that you want
Rolex, Cartie and much more
Hurry up, this is YOUR store!

Rhyming "night" with "want" is dubious, but 2 out of 3 couplets isn't bad. Anyone game for trying to write a spam sonnet? :)

(Link removed for obvious reasons.)

Generators are a powerful feature of the Python programming language. In a nutshell, generators let you write a function that behaves like an iterator. The standard approach to programming robot behaviors is based on state machines. However, robotics code is full of special cases, so a complex behavior will typically end up with a lot of bookkeeping cruft. Generators let us simplify the bookkeeping and express the desired behavior in a straightforward manner.

(Idea originally due to Jim Bruce.)

Movie industry
Claims copyright infringement
For publishing this:

13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640

This number can be used to watch HD-DVD movies on the Linux operating system. The movie industry is trying to claim that publishing the above number is a violation of the DMCA. Since when are numbers subject to DMCA protection?

Need to embed fonts,
but finding it difficult?
Maybe this will help.

Ph.D. comic:
It's about Kristen and me,
But I'm not "William".