Perhaps the best way to write a brain for winbolo is to use Ruby. Bolo brains must be written in C, but ruby interfaces with C very nicely.

<ul>
    <li><a href="http://www.teamspeak.org/">http://www.teamspeak.org/</a></li>
    <li><a href="http://www.ventrilo.com/index.php">http://www.ventrilo.com/index.php</a></li>
</ul>

<p>I&#8217;m back from my second time skiing. This time instead of just a quick few hours, I was skiing for three days. I improved my skills quite a bit, and almost broke my snowplow habits.</p>

<p><img src="http://www.braino.org/blog/images/16-1.jpg" height="210" width="340" alt="slopes" /></p>

<p>Weather.com has a handy <a href="http://www.weather.com/outlook/recreation/ski/weather/tenday/304001">Ski Comfort Index</a> that ranks the day&#8217;s weather on a scale of 0-10. The first day skiing it was a &#8220;1&#8221;. Skiing on ice through falling sleet did not bother me as much as I thought it would &#8211; it made me feel stupidly proud that I &#8220;could take it&#8221;.</p>

<p>The second day, it began to snow. You could get a quarter of an inch of snow covering your body just riding the chair lift to the top of the mountain.</p>

<p><img src="http://www.braino.org/blog/images/23.jpg" height="210" width="340" alt="night" /></p>

<p>After the day&#8217;s skiing was done, hanging out with friends for the evening was wonderful too. I usualy don&#8217;t get to socialize nearly as much as I would like to, so this was refreshing.</p>

I’ve picked up Rubik’s cubing as a relaxing way of killing time when waiting. I’ve also noticed people come up and talk to you when you are fiddling with a Rubik’s cube - it’s almost as good for starting conversations as bringing a dog.

The best method of solving the cube that I have found is explained by Lars Petrus.

I used rake today. It’s a good build system. I’ll be using it in the future. Oddly enough, the best documentation for using rake is this presentation on Building with Rake.

Watching this animation of the mars rover plan, it is astonishing that this much complexity could be successfully achieved. Every single step had to happen just right. One failure anywhere, and you have screwed up mission. I am really glad I don’t have to program at that level. Unit test’s rule. :P

<p><blockquote>Success, he argues, is the worst teacher of success.</blockquote></p>

<p>&#8220;What the heck?&#8221;, I thought, as I read this in a Fast Company <a href="http://pf.fastcompany.com/magazine/76/revolution.html">article on Clayton Christensen</a>. I stopped reading and went to bed wondering. The next morning I got up, and I had an email from a squad leader in a computer game, giving his tips for leading a successful squad, and asking for mine. I had led the most success squad in that particular game, and yet almost point for point, what we did was opposite of what he did.</p>

<p>It&#8217;s vital to be able to able to choose attributes to circumstances, and not just pick &#8220;positive&#8221; attributes. On of the most amazing feats the Lawrence of Arabia pulled off was his realization that attributes, strategies, and tactics that were positive for European armies were bad in his circumstances. Until today I never really, really, realized that most attributes are not positive, or negative &#8211; but are positive or negative according to the circumstances.  </p>

<p><blockquote>Good theory isn&#8217;t about copying attributes, says Christensen. That&#8217;s just strapping on feathers and hoping they&#8217;ll make you fly. It&#8217;s about discovering the &#8220;underlying causal mechanism behind the success&#8221; and identifying the circumstances in which a solution works and those in which it doesn&#8217;t. </blockquote></p>

<p>(Link via <a href="http://smartpei.typepad.com/robert_patersons_weblog/2004/01/book_reviews_48.html">Robert Paterson</a>)</p>

Downloading may be illegal. But 60 million people used Napster and only 50 million voted for Bush or Gore. We live in a democracy. If the people want to share files then the law should be changed to let them.

– Aaron Swartz

I’m not so fond of “democracies”. If 51% of the people in a land want to kill the other 49% it does not give them a right to kill. The majority is no more infallible than the pope.

The idea is, if you don’t like how the state is treating you, simply become part of another state

– T MacDonald

My idea of a great form of government.

I stumbled across Tofu, an app designed to improve readability of large chucks of text by breaking text into thin columns and scrolling horizontally. In practice Tofu works well for me - last night I read an entire full length book from Project Gutenburg.