Divine Lunacy

My spelling in these posts is normally far from perfect. ( and this is no exception. ) there are wordpress plugins to do spellchecking, but most of them require pspell to run. This server doesn’t have pspell :’(. Well, just installing a plugin is no fun anyway. I decided to see if I could create my own spellcheck algorithm, which is no easy task. The algorithm picks the correct word, most of the time, but it can take up to 30 seconds to give suggestions for some words. ( due to the large volume of words it has to check against. ). I have been able to speed it up considerably just by making the code more stream line. I have come up with several ways to limit the number of items pulled from the database, but none of them has done quite enough. If I ever want this to work, I fear I’ll have to research spellcheck algorithms :’(… The current algorithm I am using gives x points for each matching property of a word. The words with the highest number of points are therefore the most likely canditates. searching for “taht” takes <2 seconds and returns only one result, the correct one. Searching for defenestrare returns several results, but the correct word, defenestrate is the best match. Same goes for fenestrate. By using a checksum test, the alogithm is able to account for typos ( i.e. Hitting r instead of t because they are right next to each other. ) Well, have to be going to school right now… I’ll keep me posted if I make any more progress with this.

Several weeks ago, I really really wanted access to my Linux partitions from windows. ( god knows what got into me… ). Well, I installed some extfs drivers… As if windows wasn’t already unstable enough… Explorer.exe couldn’t stay alive for more than a few minutes. Some of my files wouldn’t even ‘load’. I haven’t tried reading the linux partitions since then, and I haven’t uninstalled the drivers. Well, today, I decided to run a full virus scan, meaning all of the drives. I had obviously forgotten that my linux partitions were mounted to drives: x:, y:, z:.. After 15 minutes of scanning windows partition, the sky suddenly fell on my head. I felt like an iguana stuck in quicksand. No matter how hard I tried to stop the scan, my efforts just made me sink further into the murky instability of windows. I was drowning, when suddenly a box popped up asking me to install Flash Player. I cliked no. It came back. I clicked no. It came back . I clicked no. it came back. I clicked yes and it said “press yes to restart your computer.” I clicked no. It yelled at me. I clicked no. It yelled at me. I cliked no. Dave instant messaged me. Aim crashed. I clicked no. I clicked shutdown and then windows media player Said “Shutting down may stop the music. Are you sure you want to do this?”. I thought to myself “Yes, off to the wonderful world of linux with me.” And so, here I am back in Linux. The point of the story is: I hate windows and it hates me back.

I finally kind of finished the starbucks stylesheet for this. FFX users can view it by clicking the button at the bottom of the window or by: view>Page Style>Starbucks. Anyone who isn’t using Firefox should be.

Explorer.exe has encountered errors and has to quit.

I spent all of yesterday working on the PUD page. Well, at least I want me to think that is what I was doing the whole day. There were, of course, distractions inbetween short periods of work. I managed to get very far in wordpressizing it. The contacts page and the news page now run on wordpress 1.5. Sadly, I think I might need to actually make some alterations to suit wordpress to this task. ( sad because I don’t want to go through the trouble. ) My work on the page is currently at: http://mario/~mario/pud

I finally updated this blog to wordpress 1.5—sexy

I went out to eat at chilli’s last night. Yay. It was good.

I went o’er yonder to greenville today! I stopped at RadioShack to buy the Normally Open magnetic Reed switch that they didn’t have and a battery. I also went to home depot and replenished my duct tape supply ( thank god ). I bought indoor/outdoor transparent again, but this time, I got 50% mas!!! ( 30 yds instead of 20 ).

An excerpt from my /etc/hosts file:
127.0.0.1      mario localhost
heeheee.

Alas, vacation week… So wonderful, yet so depressing. No math homework. Long hours wasted—staring blankly at a computer screen hoping to god someone worth talking to will come online. The occasional trip to the mall, of course coupled with long hours waiting for your brother to try on pants. No english class, yet countless hours spent doing english work. Is it just me, or do teachers not understand vacation? They all have to give tests right before vacation, that way, they have all vacation to correct them. They seem to think vacation is just a long night, during which there will be plenty of time to do the collosal amounts of homework they plan to dump on you. Isn’t vacation great?

Today began having breakfast at The Inn at the Falls, with TSA We then proceeded to school, ran over the plans for the next few weeks, which include the senior ball, ( march 11^th ), completion of the PUD Video and website, a school beautification project and a welcome to Burrillville sign ( for route 102 ). We were able to knock off most of the video today. All the filming is done, complete with Alex Chuman’s infectively installed energy conservation kit blooper. All that remains is the editing, which won’t take long. As for the website, we can finish that off in an hour or two.

Pastor Darin approached me on sunday with gospel of more tasks to fill my seemingly limitless time. He talked to me about a computer which was donated to the church. I am to look it over and explore the possiblity of upgrades. As he was talking to me, he seemed to infer that he wants to run it as a webserver. The computer, which seems to have spent most of its life in a smoking household, was tinted yellow and missing several screws which I soooo generously replaced. I was also ‘contracted’ to make a blog/website deal.

Hmm… I did something this weekend. Something that didn’t involve sitting on my ass all weekend ( as does a normal weekend… ). I went camping, at Yawgoog Scout Reservation, over in Rockville. The main part of the campout was the Bottle Rocket making, but the card games and angry mobs were also quite fun. Everyone, aside from me, made fancy looking bottle Rockets, whereas, I stuck with the simple 3 fin, nose cone with parachute under it Design. ( on a two liter coke bottle ). Each rocket flew 4 times. The winning rocket would be the one with the greatest hang time. My scores were: 5 secods, 4, 3, 9. 9 seconds was the top score, leaving my competition at least 4 seconds behind. On my last run, the rocket went highest, the nose cone stayed on for the whole flight, and the parachute deployed prompty. That night, some other troop was playing a game in the field in front of our cabin. I decided we would welcome them by being an angry mob and running through the field ( no torches or pitchforks, but I had a broom ). We were warmly recieved with such greetings as “who are the faggets running through our game?” The team at the far end of the field thought we were part of their game and treated us as such ( I think my brother was taken prisoner.. hehe ). Throughout the night, we continued to walk up and down the road bordering the field. Each time, the other troop thought were were part of the game. Eventually, some little kid told us to go back to our camp. Ironically, our cabin was closer to the field than theirs… It was good… ( though it may not sound it… )

I last posted foreverago. This infrequent posting doesn’t pay off. Me:posting::me homework. I procrasitnate at posting to a journal, that is just pathetic. I am pathetic. If My memory serves me correctly… Ok, it doesn’t. I’ll have to cut out some days in this post.

Last weekend, I worked at that klondike derby thing… enough about that… more about soap operas… no, don’t like them either. I like pi. Pi is good. Apparently, some 8^th grader knows more digits of pi than me… that is just not right!!!! I have to go memorize more ( currently at 69 ) as soon as I finish this post. This post had no point…