For an upcoming meeting I bought 20 pairs of red-cyan 3D glasses from Deal Extreme (these ones here).  I figured since 3D is the big thing in the theatres it should be in our sprint reviews too.

There is an excellent free application called Anaglyph Maker that can combine two images into a single red-cyan 3D anaglyph.  Hand holding the camera and moving it over about 4” between shots ended up with a surprisingly descent 3D image.

We’re working on redesigning our licensing code and part of that involved generating a unique installation ID for each installation of our software.  The goal is for this identifier to be absolutely unique for each client while still being small enough that it would be feasible for them to read it over the phone to us. 

The identifier is generated from hashing together a lot of system data and converting that into a N digit code, where N is large enough to be unique but small enough not to be cumbersome.

That got us thinking…

For various identifier lengths, how many identifiers could we generate before we had, say, a 1% chance of a collision?

This is an implementation of the birthday paradox (ie. what are the chances two students in a class of 30 share the same birthday). 

It turns out that the math to solve this problem produces some absolutely ginormous numbers.  Excel gave up rather quickly as did Python’s built-in numeric types but fortunately the add-on mpmath library can handle such ridiculous numbers with ease.

A lunch hour of poking at it yielded the following chart.

From this you can see that with a key size of only 10 digits and only a few thousand identifiers you are risking a collision while for  a 12 digit key one can safely handle 100,000 + identifiers.  Moving to 15 or 20 digit identifiers makes the chance of collision insignificant unless we are dealing with enormous numbers of identifiers (which we are not).

I’ve created an online calculator for the birthday paradox here.

from mpmath import *
def collisionProbability(nKeys, nEntities):
    t1 = mpf(1)
    for i in range(nKeys-nEntities+1, nKeys+1):
        t1 *= i
    return 1 - t1 * power(mpf(1)/nKeys,nEntities)

I tried to read more about a Boot CD tool that cracks WEP passwords and was denied with “Hacking/Computer Crime not allowed”.

How lame.

I logged in to do a build of one of our older utilities…  It’s been a while apparently…  IE5?!

I think I might have downloaded too much in the last few days. Shaw is going to be thrilled…

They have to win for one of the best April err.. tools.. pranks ever.  Mostly because I think they actually fabricated this stuff!

Go to their search page and search for “AFD”.

The Pouchless Tool Belt is supplied with six belt pucks (additional pucks available separately). Each puck is 2-3/8" in diameter, and is precisely turned from 3/8" thick Japanese white sword-steel. Corinthian leather belt loops are a generous 1-1/2" wide, and are made from sustainably harvested and certified BSE-free sources. Loops are securely bolted to the pucks and reinforced with a 1-1/4" diameter backing plate.

In the past six months we’ve had:

• A schwack of assaults
• A vehicle theft
• 2 commercial break-ins
• A bunch of vandalism
• 2 residential break-ins
• A generic theft (I assume lawn gnomes)

How exciting!  You can find out about your neighbourhood on the Calgary Police Crime Map.

For comparison here is Forrest Lawn:

This has got to be one of the coolest things ever.  The website yourfonts.com has a free service for creating your own font.

1. Download and print their form
2. Fill in your own letters
3. Scan the form
4. Send it to them
5. Download your font 40 seconds later!

Oh.  And it’s all free!

Here is a sample of the form I filled out:

And here is the sneak-peak font sample they generated for me:

And here is my test document in MS Word:

Apparently all those little ticks in the side of the boxes are to help you get your letter height correct.  My font is pretty horrendous looking with each letter at a different height.

It’s the honey crueller / double chocolate donut burger.

Inspired by the fine folks at Bacon Today I made bacon brownies for the office today.  So far people are actually trying them but I’m disappointed.  They really aren’t quite as tasty as they sound.