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Archive for March, 2007
Watch this and tell me you didn’t laugh. If you didn’t then you clearly have to no sense of humor. Unlike me. I have a sense of humor and recognized this as funny. YEAH!
Enigma 1435 - A good sign
Like many people I read the New Scientist on a weekly basis. One of the things that annoys me is the weekly (usually) maths based puzzle Enigma.
This week’s puzzle is thus:
The distance between any pair of the villages Aville, Bestown, Chipping and Dreem is a whole number of miles. A signpost in each village gives the distances to the other villages, but each sign has a different number of correct distances. The signs are as follows:
From Aville
- Bestown 7
- Chipping 9
- Dreem 9
From Bestown
- Aville 8
- Chipping 7
- Dreem 9
From Chipping
- Aville 8
- Bestown 9
- Dreem 7
From Dreem
- Aville 7
- Bestown 8
- Chipping 9
I recently did a round walk, of less than 30 miles, visiting each village and ending back where I started.
List (in the order AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD) the distances between the villages.
This appears to be a straight forward Traveling Sales Person problem, where the person walking around travels along a simple Hamiltonian cycle. (There are a number of assumptions about the problem here - the wording of “I did a round walk,…, visiting each village..” is quite ambiguous, so a number of assumptions are necessary)
Starting with the 6 bidirectional pairs (ie. A>B == B>A), we can see that when written out no two values from the sign posts are the same. From the question we can deduce that while its impossible for both to be correct, both CAN be incorrect.
From the fact that the 4 signs can have 0,1,2, or 3 errors we can see that there are a total of 6 errors across the signs. 6 of the 12 distances are incorrect.
As the hamiltonian cycle must be LESS THAN (not less than or equal to) the only two ways to do this with the possible values from the 6 remaining values are with either a cycle of 7, 7, 7, 7, or 7, 7, 7, 8. Any more and the total becomes 30.
By elimination, we get the following values:
- A-B = 8
- B-C = 7
- C-D = 7
- D-A = 7
Once we’ve got these values all we need to do is figure out the remaining diagonal values that will satisfy the 0,1,2,3 errors condition. After testing we get the values of A-C=8 and B-D=9 that work with all the conditions.
From this, we have Aville with 3 errors, Bestown 0 errors, Chipping 1 error and Dreem 2 errors.
To get the final requested solution in the order AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD, we get the end solution -
8, 8, 7, 7, 9, 7
Or if you wish, here’s a diagramatic layout of the towns.
Oh what fun. Will this become a regular feature? Who knows? Not me. All depends if I can do next weeks really. Until then.
while working feverishly today I stubled across these gems on youtube. Its a lovely little promo video made by Microsoft for Windows 95. You can watch them here, here, here and here. You know its bad when they have a character called “joystick johnny” playing pinball to show off their OS. Underwhelms me in much the same way as the Vista promos.
(On a side note - Ive got my asides working -yeah - perfect for these kind of posts that don’t really warrant a full post)
would you employ these geeks
To prove that jay’s constant intake of cigarettes and alcohol don’t affect his running ability we had a little race at work.
Final Results -
Ok - yes Jay won. But he cheated. His legs are like three times longer than anyone elses, and Al will argue that his shoe came off, but we all know that he just threw it off his foot so he wouldn’t have to face that he’d come last.
(Great camera work by Paul)
Fruit Flinging
You may of seen the original Sony Bravia advert where they hurled thousands of balls down a steep street in San Francisco. Initially a lot of people thought it was cgi, but it turns out they really did do it.
For those that havn’t seen it, you can watch the advert here.
The advert was hugely successful and spawned a slew of imitators. One of these was one relativly short lived take off by Tango (Clear).
Now, its more likely you havn’t seen this advert. Same music, same concept though replacing the hilly streets of San Francisco for a street in Swansea.
Also, the balls are now fruit. You can watch this one here.
But thats not the interesting part. The interesting part is this website:
Swansea North Residents Association
Examining the site you can find various interviews about how terrible the advert was - how it ruined their lovely street, even how Aled Edward’s was late to work that evening because he had to wash the pulpy mess off his car. You just can’t make this stuff up.
My personal favourite is the video interviews with the shocked and angered residents. With this quote from this woman, being my favorite.:
Eileen survived both wars with the utmost composure, but couldn’t contain her anger when her home was bombarded by kiwis and citrus fruit.
I think I may just sign the petition, I mean, its their street today, what about tommorrow? These terrible TV types, will be flinging fruit down everybody’s streets. Oh No!
I guess its one way to get kids to eat fruit.
(I’ve got a slightly nasty feeling this may be part of a failed viral campain - I mean it just seems too lame to make up doesn’t it?)
strange flvplayer problems
Playing around with flv player yesterday I came across an odd problem.
Using flvplayer to play a flv file on my machine worked fine. As soon as I uploaded it to a server (infact in this case it was my localhost - but same thing really) it no longer played.
After all sorts of searches for phrases like “FLVPlayer not streaming video”, “flv not streaming online”, “problems streaming flv video”, “im bored and slightly hungry”, “why isn’t this working”, “what is the answer mr google? tell me!”, “flv player flv video streaming problems” and so on, I came across an odd thing. This is a well known problem .
Under IIS 6.0, microsoft changed the way they handle flv files. Heres the article by adobe on how to fix the problem with iis. The way to fix is to add the .flv extension as a MIME type on iis.
The way I found to do this best (as it was on my local server) was to go to IIS and then the Default Web Site, right click on properties, then go to the HTTPHeaders tab. On the bottom click on File Types and in there add the following:
Associated Extension: flv
Content Type (MIME): flv-application/oclet-stream
For all intents and purposes, this should of fixed the problem.
But it didn’t.
Here’s the markup I’m using for embeding:
<object data=”mcpassets/flvplayer/flvplayer.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” height=”600″ width=”600″>
<paramvalue=”file=assets/video/pete.flv&image=assets/video/pete_thumb.jpg” name=”flashvars” />
<param name=”movie”value=”mcpassets/flvplayer/flvplayer.swf?file=assets/video/pete.flv&image=assets/video/pete_thumb.jpg” />
<object>
Now while this showed the thumbnail, the movie itself never played. After much searching and some going TOTALLY CRAZY, I discovered the root of the problem.
While the path of the thumbnail is relative to the page, the path of the flv, oddly, isn’t. Instead, the path of the flv is relative to the location of the flvplayer.swf.
Does this make sense? NO. But after some quick code changes, and changing the params to this:
paramvalue=”file=../../assets/video/pete.flv&image=assets/video/pete_thumb.jpg”
TADA! It now works. Isn’t that lovely. I’m sure there will be problems in the future, but for now, I’m happy.
crazy sheep
Reasons I don’t own a swing set:
- I have no where to put one
- I’m meant to be a grown up
- I don’t know where to buy them
- The constant fear of a terrorist attack by rampaging, genetically enhanced sheep clones
Maybe number 4 is just me, but this demonstrates EXACTLY what I’m afraid of.
See? No, I bet you’re afraid of terrorist sheep. They’ll attack you in your sleep. Your precious precious sleep. Little terrorist sheep.
