I finally finished nethack. It was somewhat anti-climactic really. But oh well. I had an excellent chaotic wizard going. Being able to cast polymorph is so good that it feels wrong. Anytime I saw a scroll, tool, wand, or spellbook of any kind, I’d polymorph it once or twice to try and get a scroll of genocide, a magic marker, wand of death, or a spellbook of finger of death or something really good. I had never finished the game before, so I just wanted to make sure I could do it, but I had something like AC -23, 4 amulets of life saving, 323 hit points, +7 Grayswandir, +4 Magicbane, reflection. I could cast polymorph, identify, magic mapping, finger of death. I had a wand of wishing with 1 charge left that could still be recharged. And I had genocided all the annoying creatures. Really that’s all you need. I was much more prepared for the Elemental Planes this time, and I breezed through them quickly. Total time to play was probably between 25-30 hours. This wizard I played was much more combat oriented than the last one. One of the problems with my last game was that carrying the amulet drains a lot of extra spellcasting energy, so it makes being a pure casting wizard very difficult. I opted for gauntlets of power because I found a pair early, and that meant I was good in combat because of the extra strength.

In other thanksgiving news. Tracy’s family was in town for the holidays. As usual, she cooked up a great meal. The usual sorts of things turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin and apple pie. Her parents drove 12 hours from Phoenix for a 2 day stay, which seems like a lot to me, but they are retired, so it doesn’t bother them too much I imagine. And Michigan won their final football game against Ohio State to take the Big-10 conference championships. This means a likely Rose Bowl appearance.

I had my best game of Nethack ever. It’s funny that even though I have played hundreds of hours, I’ve never ascended. I died on the last level possible, which was pretty depressing, but I had been running forever and I knew I was in trouble. I had what I thought was an uber wizard. 300 hit points, over 400 energy, and a great complement of items. Among the things I had, almost every spellbook imaginable, silver and gray dragon scale mail, 3 amulets of life saving, boots of speed, helm of brilliance, Magicbane, Fire Brand.

I made a bunch of mistakes. My biggest problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how difficult the Elemental Planes were. I should’ve read up on the spoilers about what to bring and how to be ready for it. Among the things I should’ve done, gotten rid of my spellbooks earlier, not carried so much stuff, loaded up on teleportation wands, done some more genociding.

Everyone has a guilty pleasure or two. One of mine is reading the Best of Craigs List. It has posts that are unbelievably funny.

Also I recently read Moneyball and it was pretty interesting. It has several themes. First, it’s a true story about a man who had an incredible talent for baseball, but never became the great player he was supposed to be because his mental toughness wasn’t there. It’s a story of how he turned into an excellent scout for talent because he took an entirely unconventional approach to managing a baseball team. It makes you wonder about baseball statistics and how baseball teams are managed.

Speaking of sports management. My fantasy football team is doing pretty well. I’m in 2nd place in my 8 person league with a 7-3 record. It’s somewhat ironic because my scores are not that high. In total scoring I’m in 5th place, but everyone seems to have a bad week against me.

I started playing a bit of Nethack again. It’s a great game, but of course it’s old and it has a clunky interface. But it’s still a game that I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing and never finished. I’m just not patient and careful enough to be a really good player.

So today I went to a town hall meeting given by Anna Eshoo my local congresswoman. It was mildly interesting, nothing very revealing, but she seemed nice, personable and approachable. She stuck to the party line on most issues, and showed she was committed to her principles on her most prominent issues, health care and consumer protections.

Here are some interesting notes I took on the meeting.

The most interesting thing that Anna said today was that Democrats are getting completely shut out of Congressional Conference Committees. It used to be even when Republicans held majorities in the House or Senate the Democrats would at least be invited to debate issues. The Democrats would frequently lose when the votes came up, but at least there was a reasonable debate going on. Now, the Democrats are not even invited to debate and she said that it’s a severe abuse of power. That is troublesome from a political point of view.

When asked about the problem of illegal immigration, she said she supported strengthened border enforcement. I’m not sure where exactly I stand on this issue, but it’s really a multi-tiered problem. The incentive to work in America is far too strong for immigrants to avoid smuggling themselves in. One solution is to a make it tougher to get it, another solution is to reduce the incentive to work in America. Americans have to accept that cheap agriculture and immigrant labor are almost inseparable. If we want to protect our jobs, there has to be an associated cost with doing so. We have to punish companies that hire illegal immigrants, and we have to accept that prices will be higher for doing so. I personally belive that punishing companies for using immigrants is more effective, but that’s harder to stomach politically. It’s also too easy for the whole issue to engender racism, which makes it touchier.

When asked about why gas prices in California were so high(roughly $.20/gal more than other states someone said), Eshoo pointed to a lack of competition in the gas market. I’m not sure where this comes from, and I tend to doubt it, I have no idea what would make the state so unfriendly to gas competition.

There were a lot of questions about medicare and fiscal policy. On Medicare, she was hopeful about upcoming reforms giving universal prescription drug coverage. I think this is one issue that’s again extremely difficult to solve. Maybe pharmaceuticals need to be regulated, maybe even taken from the private sector and bought out by the government. Something so dramatic will never happen, but something has to be done. Pharamceuticals have fought long and hard against any sort of price containment, but its time they looked at the huge profits and did something for the public. Eshoo was not all that enthused about allowing importation of prescription drugs from Canada, citing the impossibility of FDA regulation and enforcement when liability falls on non-US companies.

It used to be that the Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility and open markets. And when I look at the issue of prescription drug coverage, it’s hard to tell if this is an issue where Republicans are sticking to their principles of open markets, or they are actually caving to the special interests. I think this might be one of the reasons why the public perceives Republicans as too cozy with special interests. Taking money from special interests makes everyone think that they are just accepting money from their friends in big business. It’s possible that they want a small government that doesn’t pay for services to the public, but you can’t tell.

Also Eshoo cited the chipping away of the Clean Air Act as her most worrisome environmental issue. I have to strongly agree here. Not everyone agrees on the value of saving the whales or some other favorite mammal, but if you take away the Clean Air Act it’s a serious public health problem. She saw the new EPA administrator as another typical Bush appointee, a pro business person who won’t really be an advocate for the environment. That is quite a depressing way to describe the new head of the EPA.

So I have been thinking a lot about distributed computing lately. And it seems there are two divergent paths in the next wave of computing.

One is that you’ll have a large number of specialized devices which will be wirelessly connected and working together to give you all the services that you need. Consumer electronics makers love this. And of course any application where portability or compact size is important will have these features.

The other path is to bring together several general purpose computers and ties them together to add extra processing power this is the grid computing. The Intels and the IBM’s love this idea.

Obviously we’ll have some of both, but I’ve been thinking a bit more about the grid computing idea lately. In an ideal world, we’ll be able to just plug in more processing power whenever we need it. In an ideal world, I’d be able to just plug in a new machine at home and automatically it would configure itself to be part of my local network, then all the services I need would be rebalanced so that the new machine could take on a share of the load. So I thought about what tools could be used to tie together. There’s a project called

Condor which has some neat distributed computing features. And of course the DIBS project I was mentioning earlier. There’s also a project for Postgres replication

If you put those together, you’ve got several critical services distributed already. The problem is that most services can’t be replicated easily, anything that takes I/O is bound to have some need to stay on a single machine. I’ll think about this some more.

I was told about the following programming challenge..

John and Mary each have between 1 and 50 coins. Those coins can be any combination of the penny, nickel, dime, quarer, and half dollar denominations. John owes Mary some debt “d”. Given the list of coins that John has, the list of coins that Mary has, and the debt, return the fewest number of coins that can be transferred in order to exactly pay off the debt. Return -1 if the debt cannot be paid with these coins. For example, if John has [1, 1, 1, 1, 10, 10, 50] and Mary has [1, 1, 1, 25], and d = 23, John could give Mary 5 coins (1, 1, 1, 10, 10)

The program must run in under 8 seconds and should be written in Java, C or C#.

Google had a programming contest and this was the final test. Apparently the winners could do this in 1/2 hr. Needless to say, I didn’t come anywhere close to that and I wrote it in perl. My solution is kind of ugly too, not the cleanest I’ve ever seen, but that isn’t a huge problem I guess.

I also was doing some of the GRE computer science practice exam for fun. I was doing OK, but I would’ve done better with practice.