Tech Head

How to play 10 GMs in chess simultaneously
SBP Editor
Friday, June 19, 2009

Here's a simple technique that guarantees at least a 5 point score (out of 10 possible) playing against 10 Grandmasters simultaneously in chess, should you ever strangely be given this opportunity!

Assuming you are black in 5 games and white in the other 5, simply pair up your opponents mentally, and then act as the conduit for their moves against each other.  In other words, take one of the games where you're white, and another where you're black, then play all of white's moves against the black player, and play all of black's moves against the white player.

Ruby each_char in String Class Broken
SBP Editor
Thursday, January 1, 2009
A quick tech tip... Ruby's String.each_char() method doesn't work in 1.8 because of Unicoding issues (Ruby isn't very Unicode-savvy yet).

But for those of us who ever might need to iterate over a String in an app that doesn't use or need Unicode, it's surprisingly hard to find a simple workaround to this stupid little problem!

Here's an easy workaround:

mystring = 'hello'
mystring.each_byte {|b|
c = b.chr
}
### variable c now contains the character
### you'd expect from each_char() if it worked
MASCII: Musical ascii
SBP Editor
Thursday, December 18, 2008

[UPDATE: This post is outdated. The complete mascii specification can now be found at mascii.org and a free implementation of it open to the public can be found at composersnotebook.com]

I'm very excited about an ASCII-based musical language I've invented called mascii, which stands for musical ascii. I'd love to see this adopted as I think it's way better than anything else I've seen out there.

BACKGROUND

Perl, Python, Ruby
SBP Editor
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
If you're considering picking up a scripting language for admin tasks or for general programming, your main choices are Perl, Python, and Ruby. Here's my breakdown on each:

Perl
Which Musical Instrument Is Right For Me
SBP Editor
Friday, May 16, 2008
There's a basic trade-off to consider when choosing a musical instrument to learn.

It's this: either you get great control over each individual note, or you trade in some of that control for the ability to play multiple notes at once (called polyphony). There are pros and cons to each.
Open Source Shiva
SBP Editor
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Most comparisons of open source versus proprietary software I've seen focus on the creative side, which model can attract better programmers to create better software. Open source people say the whole world is your talent pool, with thousands of eyes scrutinizing every line of code, while proprietary advocates counter that without a strong driving unifying force the code falls into disarray, and besides, how motivated or good are programmers who work for free? And on and on...
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