Chaos Server

I ended the work day and stepped out of the office to find that my wife had taken all our movies and CDs out of the cabinets. "Hey, could you figure out if there is anything in here worth keeping, and we'll just donate the rest." My childhood movie collection: "Secret of Nimh," "Flight of Dragons," "Dark Crystal." All on VHS. My highschool music collection: "The Murmurs," "Peter Murphy," "They Might Be Giants." All on CD. The thing is - we don't have a VCR in the house. We don't even have a CD player in the house.  All I could say is, "I need a moment." I got emotional. My rational and emotional sides needed to have a conversation. Because in reality I know that I am never going to watch those VHS tapes or listen to those CDs again. The movies? The songs? Sure - I'll definitely watch those movies on Netflix and listen to those songs on Spotify, but I will never use those physical copies of i...

My new iPhone 6s+ didn’t show up today. I ordered at it 3:17am EST on pre-order day with the expectation it would show up on day one, but I got a notification from AT&T saying it would be late. Sad, right? There’s no people visiting my town or anything. I was excited that I did get a ship notification this morning with the FedEx delivery day for Monday. So, a little late, but not much - I think I’ll manage. Nothing like the Apple Watch fiasco where I had to wait an entire month! Anyways, before I go the earlier ship notificatio, I was feeling bummed about having to wait a few weeks to get my phone and so to tide myself over I did some shopping therapy an order myself a couple of Mounties so I could side-mount my devices on my computer. This is pretty awesome, right? Running Duet on my iPad to give me an external display, and then running Reeder in full screen mode - AWESOME! When I take the train to the office this week I am going to be able to mount my enormous iPhone on the ...

Fellow nerds, I thought we had this figured out - stop getting angry at the ad-blockers. It’s a cycle. In the early 2000s we all learned to hate popups, side-pops, and the dreaded popunder (I’m looking at you X10 camera). So we started installing blockers all over the place and then the browser makers added in popup blockers, we all backed down and stopped installing the agressive 3rd party blockers. TiVo came out in the early 2000s and we freaked out that it was the end of television. Only, it wasn’t. Sure, we skip most commercials, but we watch some, and now we have embedded advertising where the CIA uses Skype to plan operations in Homeland and Netflix and the like. Everybody is getting paid. In 2015 the mobile phone is becoming the dominant web browsing platform and it’s a decade slower than the desktops - so when you’re serving us ads designed for a desktop, we freak out, and get extremely excited about blocking the insanity threatening mutually assured destruction. You know what ...

Youth is wasted on the young, and free time is wasted on people without children. - John Siracusa When Mrs.Chaos was pregnant with the first kid my friends jokingly said, "prepare to give up all your hobbies for the next 3-5 years." I laughed along knowing there would still be time in life to play and work on things. That's what naptime and after bedtime is for, right? I fell into the pre-parents trap by grossly misunderstanding how I would want to use time. Writing apps? Learning Swift? Yeah, I haven't done that. Playing all the great games that have been coming out? Yeah, I haven't done that. WWDC, PAX, etc? Yeah, I haven't done that. I *DO* think that I estimated the required time commitment roughly right in my brain, what I didn't think about was the optional time commitment. If I asked for an hour every couple of nights or on the weekend to do my own thing, I'm sure that Mrs.Chaos would be happy to oblige, but the thing is... given an hour of fre...

It's been two years since I upgraded my phone and that means my two year contract expired and I get to upgrade. I have to say this has been one of the more complicated pricing decisions I’ve had in a very long time. I know everyone hates their phone company (just like they hate their internet provider and cable provider), but I’ve been happy with AT&T over the years. I got my very first phone on AT&T Wireless, which became Cingular, which became AT&T, and it’s been fine. I was a day #1 buyer of the first iPhone and have been carrying along my unlimited data plan the whole time. Still, AT&T has been trying to get me off the unlimited data plan. I ran ALL the numbers basically the only way to keep the Unlimited data plan at the same 2-year ownership cost as AT&T Next or the Apple Replacement program, I had to sign another two year contract. I think eventually I’ll probably get off the unlimited data, but I like to keep it as long as I can. These were my rough calc...

Mrs.Chaos asked me, “I need some help. I have five tables, each with six people. I’m going to have three rounds of games where I want everyone to rotate tables and meet as many unique people as possible.” It’s straight out of my college Putnam prep class. The thing about problem solving in preparation for the Putnam exam is that while every problem could be proveable solved using mathematics, most problems could ALSO be solved using some sort of brute force algorithm I could write a program for. I was also always confident I could write the program to brute force it, but not always confident I could figure out the mathematics to solve. So when Mrs.Chaos asked me that question I thought to myself, “I might be able to solve this problem using combinatorics or linear algebra, but I *KNOW* I can write a program that will solve this program." I cranked on it for an hour, and wrote a great a basic genetic algorithm to solve it. I say, basic, because it randomly generates solutions and ...