Comments for Stochastic Geometry

Comment on Why seeding is important for random functions… by Nicolas

Nicolas — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:16:04 +0000

My board looks exactly like the one on your screenshot.

Using Debian squeeze, 64-bit; Flash 10.0 r32, I don’t know if it’s 32-bit or 64-bit; happens in both Iceweasel (rebranded Firefox) and Konqueror.

Comment on Joel Spolsky, Snake-Oil Salesman by Mark Dennehy

Mark Dennehy — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:07:17 +0000

That isn’t giving it away for free Bryan. It’s just not getting money up front. Like I said above:

Yes, I know it appears that he’s offering it “for free” but appearances are deceptive. Every software company who deals with colleges like this will push their products not merely for free, but with extra donations tagged on. They don’t do it because they’re being altruistic. In fact it’s become a major problem in universities because with funding getting tighter, the pressure to make an economically based decision instead of a teaching based one is enormous. The reason they do this is that it’s a long-term marketing ploy, as explained above. Joel’s just doing it on the cheap. And it’s done in every discipline – Intel funds a clean room here and takes the top two students every year. The top two students here are more often than not actual bona-fide geniuses whose net worth to Intel will far outstrip the cost of the donation Intel made. If the deal can be struck constructively, it can be beneficial, but that’s a rare occurance – and Joel’s idea of a donation just plain isn’t beneficial to anyone but Joel. It is snake oil salesmanship. Heck, it’s not even good snake oil salesmanship at that.

Comment on Joel Spolsky, Snake-Oil Salesman by Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:22:01 +0000

Well, except that he *is* giving it away for free. I’ve been using FogBugz hosted for free for over a year now. That doesn’t mean I’m drinking the Joel Kool-Aid. It just means yes, he actually is giving the software away to certain groups of people, students doing capstone projects included.

Comment on Joel Spolsky, Snake-Oil Salesman by zero-blog » The Fallacy of Industrial Expectation

zero-blog » The Fallacy of Industrial Expectation — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:57:39 +0000

[...] an arbitrary tool or language that the industry is consistant in its opinion. I read this really great response to his article that echos many of my complaints about this [...]

Comment on Joel Spolsky, Snake-Oil Salesman by Mark Dennehy

Mark Dennehy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:42:44 +0000

Bryan, as everyone’s said before, it is a sales pitch. Joel’s not giving his stuff away for free here, he’s looking for product placement for free in a market most companies are paying a lot of money to get into. Altruistic, he’s not!

Comment on Why seeding is important for random functions… by Jen

Jen — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:07:41 +0000

Just to chime in; I was still running the older 10.0.22 version of the 64-bit flash alpha release, and still started experiencing the “same board” problem at around the same date Mark’s post mentioned, so it doesn’t have to do with any recent updates to the flash platform at least…

So, nothing on my end changed at all [no OS updates, no ff updates, no flash updates] when the game started to show me the same board.

Comment on Why seeding is important for random functions… by Jen

Jen — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:58:02 +0000

I recently updated flash [the 64 bit alpha] from 10.0.22 to 10.0.32.18 on Debian lenny Linux 64bit with firefox 3.5, but alas, I still get the exact same board you posted above, every time.

I figured it must have had to do with me being on ilnux [also the reason the bejeweled folk haven't answered my problem report, I assumed], but my old 32-bit ubuntu hardy laptop generated new boards just fine.

Thanks for this post, Mark! It was more information than I had hoped to find out there! :]

Comment on Joel Spolsky, Snake-Oil Salesman by Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:01:30 +0000

Mark, he isn’t *selling* his wares in that article. He’s offering to give them away for free.

From the article:

“FogBugz would work great for tracking this: if you’re doing a capstone project and need access to FogBugz, please let us know and we’ll be happy to set you up for free. We can also set you up with beta access to kiln, our hosted version of Mercurial, which includes a code review feature.”

Comment on Maximum Password Length in Coova-Chilli by Mark Dennehy

Mark Dennehy — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:31:46 +0000

Unfortunately you have to fix both the cgi script and the chillispot server John. There were errors on both sides with encoding/decoding the password when it exceeded 16 characters. I’ve been working with coova, but I’m not as au fait with it as I am with chillispot. Still, chillispot’s a dead project with no development work on it since ‘07, so moving over might well be a positive thing to do.

Comment on Maximum Password Length in Coova-Chilli by John S

John S — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:57:20 +0000

Thanks for posting your trials and tribulations. I am trying to get around the 16 character limit as well, but I am hoping that I don’t have to install the full blown coova-chili install.
Right now I am using dd-wrt v24.sp2 to redirect clients to hotspotlogin.cgi which is located on a separate radius server. I tried replacing my hotspotlogin.cgi script with the latest version of hotspotlogin.cgi (1.14 build 240) which contains your fix, but passwords are still trimmed to 16 characters. Am I missing the point? Do I really need to fix the version of chillispot running on dd-wrt AND the hotspotlogin.cgi?

Since I doubt my ability to rebuild and install chillispot from source in the DD-wrt environment, would you recommend installing coovachilli on my radius server and running everything from there?

Thanks again for sharing with the rest of us! BTW, the gif at the top is pretty funny.

John