Cool programs

Here are some cool programs everyone reading this blog should try out:

Aptana Studio

Best free program to write sites with html, css, php, ruby on rails and even iphone applications

Webots

Best robot simulator. The full program costs around $3000 but there is a free version for the Rat’s life robot programming contest

Robotc

This is the best way to program a lego NXT robot. This is unmodified c with a straight forward interface to inputs and outputs. This is the only program that’s not free (1 month trial) and it’s only $30

Dev C++

The best free all platform program to write c and c++ code

Autostitch

Best (free program) for making panoramic pictures from a group of pictures

Go see the movie Sicko

This is another controversial movie by Michael Moore. Here is the movie’s wikipedia entry. Out of all of his previous documentaries I found this one the least impartial since when he goes to visit an “average” french family he goes to visit a secretary and an engineer. Otherwise the documentary is really good.  

John Conway in Youtube

Here’s a documentary segment with John Conway talking about The Game of Life:

This segment is from a documentary called: What we still don’t know.

The whole episode where the John Conway segment came from is in google video.

I also found an excellent Make magazine video about a kit that allows you to make a Game of Life board with LEDs and a PIC controller. You can also buy more of them and join them:

Halo 3 ending

I just finished the last level of Halo 3 and I wasn’t disapointed. I know it’s more than a month after the release but I had a thing to do called “midterms”. It was the best ending ever. It’s like the ending in Halo 1 but better. It was really well done.

For people that don’t play Halo or want to see the last level and the ending again, here’s a good quality video of it on youtube:

Virgil Griffith

What do the WikiScanner tool, the website Romanpoet.org (that I wrote about in this post) and Chris Adami have in common? Virgil Griffith! The is suposedly the best known hacker in the US. He wrote WikiScanner, his online name is romanpoet (hence the website name) and he is now at caltech working with Chris Adami, the author of the avida software. It’s weird how these three things I’ve been following are connected.   

Here is his website:

http://virgil.gr/

And here is a “Colbert report” about him:

 

Difference b/n SciFi and Fantasy

I always hear people interchanging the terms and confusing them so here’s a definition of each: a scifi story happens in the future and it’s remotely possible and fantasy is a thing happening in the past or in a “parallel” time and it didn’t or will not happen. But there’s an issue there: if in the fantasy story they mention a time in the past it’s 100% fantasy but if they don’t mention the date it might be some time in the future. So in theory scifi and fantasy are the same if the date is not mentioned in the story. Since we constantly have more and more control of nature; what’s going to stop some people in the future from making dragons and castles and stuff like that? Or maybe more likely they can just have some kind of huge computer like in The Matrix where they can live in The Lord of the Rings world for example. Here or course I’m assuming that if you can’t distinguish it from reality then it’s also a reality (physics-wise). All fantasy stories told today could be used. But who wants to do that? Who wants to settle with dragons and medieval buildings when they are going to have technology “Indistinguishable from Magic” as Robert Forward’s book is titled? Oh wait … those 8 million War of Warcraft users … So yeah: all fantasy is science fiction.

Having fun with Halo 3

It turns out you can record pictures or video of anything you do in Halo 3. To do it you need an xbox live account and you need to sign up in bungie.net

Here is me (the guy in red) killing someone with a rocket and 2 guys and me shooting rockets at each other at the same time:

Here is my friend Mark and I playing baseball, Halo style, in Forge (Halo 3’s new game mode):

Strike 1

Comming, the hit, going, gone!

Jim Carrey talking about physics

From Late night with Connan O’brien