“Empty Walls” by Serj Tankian

Beautifully crafted music video.

Richard Stallman Comes to Stanford

Richard Stallman at Stanford University

A few weeks ago, I had the amazing opportunity to meet Richard Stallman — founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, and developer of the amazingly popular GNU Emacs, GNU compiler (gcc), and GNU debugger (gdb).

RMS, as he likes to be called, is a living legend in the computing field. He’s widely considered to be the father of the free software movement. There is no question that the free software philosophy has brought enormous amounts of good to the world. I firmly believe this. I think most programmers and computer scientists would agree, too.

GNU/Linux render farm at Dreamworks

Free software is everywhere today. The popular operating system GNU/Linux (which Stallman wrote large parts of) powers so much of our computing today, nearly everyone has used it, whether they’ve heard of it or not.

The majority of servers on the Internet are powered by Apache and GNU/Linux, major parts of the Internet and most networks in large corporations are powered by GNU/Linux, and even 95% of the desktops and servers at major Hollywood movie studios like Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Sony run GNU/Linux.

Many people are confused about what the phrase “free software” means. Before I continue, let’s be clear about the definition of free software. Read the rest of this entry »

Phosphenes and Psychedelic Patterns

An artist's depiction of a phosphene

When I was a young child, I used to love to close my eyes and rub them because it made a bunch of cool patterns appear. It turns out, the patterns of light you see when you rub your closed eyes hard are called phosphenes. Cool!

From Wikipedia:

The most common phosphenes are pressure phosphenes, caused by rubbing the closed eyes. They have been known since antiquity, and described by the Greeks. The pressure mechanically stimulates the cells of the retina. Experiences include a darkening of the visual field that moves against the rubbing, a diffused colored patch that also moves against the rubbing, a scintillating and ever-changing and deforming light grid with occasional dark spots (like a crumpling fly-spotted flyscreen), and a sparse field of intense blue points of light. Pressure phosphenes can persist briefly after the rubbing stops and the eyes are opened, allowing the phosphenes to be seen on the visual scene.

Blasted Cursory

What does this phrase mean? I’m doing The Game at Stanford and this phrase is puzzling me…

Also, there were no hits on Google for the search “blasted cursory” so this is my attempt to mislead the others playing The Game. If you’re reading this — I hope you were misled!

Quoted

… “Diversity is really important,” Stanford University Association for Computing Machinery Student Chapter Chair Feross Aboukhadijeh said. “If you’re starting a startup, you don’t want to hire people that are just like yourself because then you don’t get a variety of ideas.” …

– From The Oracle – Gender enrollment gap in science classes persists

From now on everyone has to call me “Stanford University Association for Computing Machinery Student Chapter Chair Feross Aboukhadijeh” if you want to get my attention. Anything less than my full title and I won’t reply to you.

But seriously… what a ridiculously long way to introduce me…