Camwyn@LiveJournal did a fairly good job of summarizing some very dense text.

AINULINDALE:

…

ILUVATAR: LA LA!

AINUR: LA LA!

MELKOR: This sucks. BUM BUM BA DUM!

AINUR: Um. . . la?

ILUVATAR: Ahem. LA!

MELKOR: Boop bop-a-doo-bop!

ILUVATAR: LA, dammit.

MELKOR: Bwam bardle ningle boom.

AINUR: . . .

ILUVATAR: Right, you’re out of the band.

Create a text file in Windows Explorer called “gf99999a.txt”.

Then create one called “gf100000.txt”

Then sort by name.

What is wrong with this picture? :-)

Update: Nothing. See the comments on this post of Raymond Chen’s.

Each of my daughters has been invited to a birthday party this weekend. I had read in the past that it took an absurdly low number of people to give better-than-even odds of sharing a birthday, but I had forgotten the number. FoxPro to the rescue!

lnProb = 1

lnCount = 1

DO WHILE lnProb > .50

	lnProb = lnProb * (365-lnCount + 1) / 365

	lnCount = lnCount + 1

ENDDO

? “Probability of ” + TRANSFORM(lnCount) + ” people sharing a birthday: ”

?? 1 - lnProb

With two people, the odds are 364/365 that they don’t share a birthday. With three people, rather than 363/365 that they don’t share, it’s actually (364/365)*(363/365). This number shrinks faster than you’d think: run the algorithm above in your favorite language to find the answer.

Update: fixed the backwards probability in the above code. Thanks, Ted!

I’ll switch back from Atom to RSS.

Besides, Atom doesn’t seem to embed the hyperlinks in the descriptions.

What format will this be generated in?

I just had it pointed out to me that I was generating RSS 1.0, which isn’t exactly the best format to use. I think I can switch to Atom: I just wanted to do one last post in this format in case something weird happens. :-)

Late last year, 1&1 decided to break into the consumer market by giving away free web hosting for three years. I took advantage of this to give my daughters’ preschool its own domain — NorthshoreCoOp.org.

The content there was copied off the existing site, but I cleaned up the HTML a great deal. I’m also going to try to update the pictures: while I like that Ael was prominently featured in many of them, they were taken at her 3rd birthday celebration (note the crown she wears throughout).

Let’s see how well my Googlejuice works for getting this site listed there. :-)

Lynn Flewelling’s first book, Luck in the Shadows, is now out in audiobook format.

Note the relative pricing of MP3 CDs and regular CDs — I know which one I’m ordering. :-)

Lynn Flewelling’s first book, Luck in the Shadows, is now out in audiobook format.

Note the relative pricing of MP3 CDs and regular CDs — I know which one I’m ordering. :-)

Scott Water points to a neat little app called Fiddler. I certainly could have used it last time I was trying to figure out how to talk to a Web Service that didn’t quite want to speak my language…