Spaz.ca

Lately, I’m becoming obessesed with the whole small-footprint idea. I want to go live in the mountains, in a earthship home built from recycled tires and pop-cans, generating electricity from wind, water, bio, and solar sources. And I want to have a fat sattelite internet connection, so I can just work from this remote location. And I want a lollipop too.

I added a few minor updates to my site today. I updated the Mandelbrot Set Applet, and I posted the source code to my 8-queens puzzle applet, since I keep getting requests for it.

Next on my list to to add the BioGraphy applet that has said coming soon for the last 4 years…, and to release my java graphing library. If I wasn’t so lazy it would have been done years ago.

What is with the internet? Its greatest strength seems to be the wonderous ability to deliver an endless supply of jerks and morons direct to you. These parasitic people are the ones that truly gain from the internet. Those that provide content, and put energy into producing something on the internet invariably are connected to these countless jerks and morons — as their puppy chow.

I have written a lot of web content over the years. I have released lots of free programs, and published serveral papers, all of which are available online. And here is the rub. After going through all the work — hard work — of producing these free and valuable items for public consumption, it only leads to the expectation by the masses that you will and *must* do everything for them.

I get countless e-mails now, because of these products I’ve given to the world. The majority are inane questions and demands for new features or source code to various programs. These two types of demands drive me up the wall. There are the ones like “Hi Aaron, Can you tell me how to program a good poker program?” Um, sure buddy. Go to University for six years, and learn to become a really good programmer and do a thesis on Artificial Intelligence, and then read all the literature on AI and poker, and also learn to play poker well yourself. Christ, what am I supposed to say? Don’t get me started on their spelling and grammar.

There are also the brilliant ones like “Hi. How do you compute pot-odds in poker?”. Okay buddy. WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME SUCH A BASIC QUESTION!? If you spent 30 seconds on google, or in a library you could answer it yourself. It’s infinitely better than wasting my time. Really, you are wasting your time because I’m not going to reply. See this? It’s me deleting your email.

Then there are the really brash folk that get mad if I ignore their inane questions. HOW DARE I not help them. After all I OWE them an answer. I OWE them a new feature in my free program, I OWE them the source code to all my software, and I OWE them my first born child, and so on. WRONG. Get this through your heads retards. I owe you nothing. Send me some cash or some beer and then I’ll think about it.

The worst part is that 5% of these emails are well written, kind, and intelligent. I can’t just ignore them all. And the line between ignorable, and answerable is hard to find. I don’t mind answering intelligent, kind questions because really, I don’t mind helping people. That is why I give away free things afterall.

Ignoring the dumb requests seems to be far better than answering them. In the past, when I answered these people, like the leechy parasite leg-humpers they are, it just generates more questions. If you ignore them, they don’t know WHY. They might forget they asked, they might think I’m dead or in a coma. Maybe the email never got through. But once I answer, they know I’m alive, and like a wood louse, they bury their heads in and attempt to feast on the goo inside until they are so engorged with blood they pop. Okay, the last part was kind of wishful thinking.

More delightful poker news to report. First, our group’s latest paper won the distinguished paper award for the IJCAI conference. And a new book about Las Vegas and Poker came out recently called Positively Fifth Street which is a journalist’s story about entering the world series of poker and making it all the way to the final table. He has a bout 3 or 4 pages in it that discusses our research group and has a few quotes from Darse. All in all, a pretty cool week for the poker group. I’ve been coding a new pre-flop system for our new top-secret heads-up bot, which has been keeping me quite busy. Let me just say it: There are not many days left in the world where humans are the best limit heads-up poker players [insert evil, maniacal laughter here].

Hmmm. So it is spring (well, last week I was wearing a t-shirt and sunglasses. Today it is snowing yet again). And with spring comes the itch to hike. To backpack. To hump a survival kit over mountains for a hundred kilometers or more. To spend a week in the bush, living off of the love-handles I grew during the winter. To make matters worse, eco-challenge is on this week, and I just want to get out there and get blisters even more. Bring it on.

This weekend was a POKER weekend. First, saturday morning I joined friends at the Bacarrat Casino for a small 36 player Hold’em tournament. The first hour is limit, with tiny $5 rebuys, and unless you get lucky, you typically go through a few of these. This builds the prize pool — the bad players will rebuy 10 times, whereas the better players won’t usually need to rebuy more than a couple of times, if any. I had a total of 3, and busted pretty quickly when we hit no-limit in the second hour. I flopped a pair of aces, and went all in against the chip leader, who called me and then got runner-runner clubs to bust me. Oh well. Then Myke (who didn’t fare much better) and I went to the Palace Casino at the mall and joined a 3-6 hold’em game. Duane showed up later as well so it was nice to have two friends at the table to chat with. I started out with a really dry run of cards and slowly pissed half of my stack away. Then I had two fortunate things happen. I started to get decent cards, and after having spent two hours folding, I had a pretty good bead on most of the players at the table. I knew who to bluff at and who to call down. If you’re a pro-poker player reading this, try not to laugh 🙂 I know — these are basic things. But I’m still learning the feel for the game, and it felt good to be on top of things. Myke, unfortunately got horrible second-best hands all night and fared poorly. He definately had the skillz to take down the grubby troglodytes at our table, but the card gods strongly feel that only one of us can ever win at the same table. Last time we played together, it was the exact opposite. I finished the 4 hour stretch and cashed out with a cool $183 profit. That’s over seven big-bets per hour. Not too shabby.

Today, I dived back into poki’s source code. Poki is almost entirely written in java. There is one small but crucial component of poki that is written in highly optimized C code — the hand comparitor. Poki needs to do tens of thousands of hand comparisions in order to decide on an action. And poki needs to make its decisions within one or two seconds. Nothing can come close to touching the speed of the GNU hand evaluation library which has been tuned over many years to exploit everything possible. Our native java evaluator is orders of magnitude slower than the GNU C code. Thus there is a very ugly JNI interface to the GNU C library in order to get maximum performance out of poki. Today I finally dived back into that ugly mess and did something I should have done years ago. I made it faster by moving some of the enumeration code (tight loops that call the hand comparitor thousands of times) directly into the C code. Poki is feeling much peppier today, and that makes me happy.

Wow, Bush is a retard. Has he ever stopped to think that maybe this kind of unwarranted agression is exactly why there are terrorists willing to lose their lives in order to kill Americans? The USA has attacked far more countries than Iraq ever has, and furthermore, has anyone else noticed that the US has the market cornered when it comes to possessing weapons of mass destruction? As Bill Mahr said, “How bad do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein?” I read this quote on Michael Moore’s Page. He also has a great rant and activist advice. System of a Down has a great video documenting the Feb 15th Peace Protests, for their song Boom!.

So yah, I haven’t posted anything in a few days. The short answer for the absence: Civilization-III. Uhg. My coworkers and I are battling in a heated civ-by-e-mail game that will last until the heat-death of the universe. Of course, I need to ‘research’ strategies by playing single player games against the computer. Eleven hours of frantic clicking later I’m the germans, and only a few points behind the only two other surviving civilizations, the grumpy russians, and the arrogant americans. I hit the 2050-AD time limit about five turns away from achieving the space victory. How depressing.

In other news, I’m excited that apple finally released Java 1.4.1 for MacOS X. Now they are finally “caught up” to the latest version, and hopefully the lag time will be reduced for future versions.

Checking google, I am the #1 “Aaron Davidson” in the world. But I am nowhere near the top Aaron. Spaz.ca was ranked 19th today for spaz. Obviously that I am not #1 for all of them signifies something deeply wrong with google’s algorithms. Hopefully time will show google the error of its ways.