Lots of people say that we count in base 10 because we have 10 fingers. To which, I ask, If we can count from 0 to 10, then why do we need two digits to write down the highest number we can have with fingers?

A much more natural base for counting on your fingers is base 6. Here’s what I want you to try. Your right hand will serve as the ones digit, and your left hand serves as the tens. Start counting.

One is easy. Raise your right index finger. Two, raise the next one. Similarly through five. At six, it becomes slightly trickier, because six is now ‘ten’. Your left index finger goes up, and your right hand closes. Now again, counting from 11 to 15 is very simple. To go to 20, close your right hand and raise another finger.

In this manner, you can count up to 55 – which would be 35 in base 10 terms, far more than the paltry 10 you claim your ten fingers are for counting! Switching bases back and forth is a bit tedious, I’ll agree, but once you get used to it, it’s far more useful than a simple 10 fingers.

The examples in the book are many and varied, and go from why most Canadian hockey league players are born in January to why most geniuses don’t actually get anywhere in life. It all comes down to one core argument, though: To be successful, be born in the right place, at the right time, to the right family, and then become obsessed with the right thing.

The statistics presented lead inexorably to the conclusion that it takes roughly 10,000 hours to become an expert in a field, and that to get this amount of experience at a young age, such as with Bill Gates, Oppenheimer, and several other individuals mentioned in the book, a person has to be brought up in a certain way, with enough resources to take advantage of that opportunity. Didn’t have the opportunity? Born to a poor family? Sucks to be you.

Looking at it from another perspective, you could take the view that the whole book is one giant apology from a genius for being smart, and that really feels like a slap in the face to someone like me, who centers a large part of their self-worth around being a geek. By golly, if just being smart isn’t good enough to make it, then what is?

In all of that uneasy, anti-intellectual sounding morass, though, there are two dimly shining lights in the text if you look hard enough. The first is that there’s a lot of squandered talent out there, and if we made some adjustments to our society and how we think about success, we could go from having a handful of Oppenheimers in a generation to having hundreds or even thousands.

The second is the idea that, so long as you have an iota of talent at something, it takes 10,000 hours of hard work to become an expert in a field. That’s it. The difference between world-class violinists and people who dabble in their spare time? 10,000 hours. As long as you put that much time into it, you can be an expert, regardless of your background or whatever. If you can forget the rest of the book about social background and ethnic influences, this is a pretty inspiring point. If you lived, ate, and breathed a topic, practicing for 16 hours a day, that means you could be an expert in something in just under two years.

On the other hand… this is also one of the points I take as rather contentious for one very simple reason: Tim Ferris.

Life Hackers

Tim Ferris is the author of ‘The Four-Hour Work Week’ and a reputed ‘life hacker’. He has a degree in neuroscience, is a world-class tango dancer, a national Chinese kickboxing champion, a best-selling author, and mastered the Japanese art of horseback archery, yabusame, in less than a single week. Not two years – five days.

As I underatand it, Tim draws on skills he’s learned from past experience, techniques he’s learned for body hacking, and a keen sense of observation to accomplish these feats. He relates drawing the arrows for reloading to scooping up a SCUBA respirator if you lose it, something he already has wel lingrained. He know that REM cycles ingrain short-term memory to long term, and that we have two per night, so waking up in the middle of the night for practice allows him to double his retention. And finally, he watches – really /watches/ – at what separates the experts from the amateurs. He breaks down their technique, and then just practices the key elements of the experts without going through the messy business of trial-and-error everyone else does.

Some people might say he’s faking it, or that he’s not a ‘real’ expert because he didn’t go up through the ranks like everyone else. But you can’t argue with results. In his final run, he performed flawlessly, riding at a full gallop with a Japanese longbow without holding onto the reins, and hit every single one the targets dead-on.

Has Tim Ferris spent 10,000 hours practicing the skills of a yabusame without realizing it? Or is he an expert at acquiring new skills? Or is the statistical fact that people who have mastered a skill spent 10,000 hours in practice the result of other social-biased, preconceived notions about learning?

What if we could all learn a new skill in a single week? And what if we could provide every student in the world with the same skills at learning, and the same opportunity to learn?

More here later.

Cheers,

tom

So, since I happen to have my own dedicated system I decided to give a try at running my own dedicated server instead. Since I couldn't locate one place that had all of this information, I decided to write up my own document to show you how to install and setup your very own Left 4 Dead Dedicated Server.

Setup

My server setup is pretty anemic at this time. However, this is all for testing at the moment until I get better hardware in place:

* 512 MB ram
* Dual P3 500 Mhz CPU's
* Lots of disk space for the game files

From what I see, I'd recommend a fast dual processor CPU with a minimum of 2GB memory to run the server. You can also run multiple instances of the server, so you can serve lots of groups all at once.

Installing Steam on Linux

The first thing you need to do to have a L4D Dedicated server is to download Steam for Linux. the installer is located over at http://storefront.steampowered.com/download/hldsupdatetool.bin. Use wget on the Linux system to download this file.

I will assume that we will be creating a /opt/steam directory for everything. If you don't have one, go ahead and make it now and download the hldsupdatetool.bin application to there.

Once downloaded, chmod +x the file to make it executable, and then run it. You will have to agree to the license. Once you agree, it will create a readme file as well as an executable named steam. We will be using that in the next step.

Running Steam in Linux

Now, the next step will be to create a new directory where all of our Left 4 Dead files to live in. Create a /opt/steam/l4d directory on your system and then run the following:

root@london:/opt/steam# ./steam
Checking bootstrapper version ...
Getting version 34 of Steam HLDS Update Tool
Downloading. . . . . . . . . . .
Steam Linux Client updated, please retry the command

Once the update is complete, we will be installing the L4D game by using the following command:

./steam -command update -game left4dead -dir /opt/steam/l4d
root@london:/opt/steam# ./steam -command update -game left4dead -dir /opt/steam/l4d
Checking bootstrapper version ...
Updating Installation
Checking/Installing 'Left 4 Dead binaries' version 6
Checking/Installing 'Left 4 Dead base' version 7
Checking/Installing 'left4dead linux dedicated server' version 3
...

It will take about 5-10 minutes (depending on a lot of variables here) for all the files to download and get installed into the /opt/steam/l4d/l4d directory. Once you get that installed, it's time for the next step, configuring it.

Configuring L4D Dedicated Server

there's a bunch of configuration files in the /opt/steam/l4d/l4d/left4dead/cfg directory, so I will give you highlights on how I configured my own server.

infected.cfg

Since I wanted just a pure co-op game without any users playing infected, I set this file like so:

director_no_human_zombies 1

singleplayer.cfg

Unsure if this means anything, but I ended up configuring the singleplayer.cfg to limit to 4 players (that's the 'maxplayers' bit).

wait
wait
exec infected_off.cfg
sv_lan 1
setmaster enable
maxplayers 4
progress_enable
num_ai_survivors 3
director_solo_mode 0
director_min_start_players 1

sv_pausable 0

twoplayers.cfg

Same here, but I configured the minimum number of starting players at 1 (that's the 'director_min_start_players' bit)

wait
wait
exec infected_off.cfg
sv_lan 1
setmaster enable
maxplayers 4
progress_enable
num_ai_survivors 2
director_solo_mode 0
director_min_start_players 1

sv_pausable 0

server.cfg

A lot of these items I got from here. You may check out the variables and tweak them to your liking.

hostname "*My server banner here*"
rcon_password "*I put in a server password here*"
sv_lan 0
mp_disable_autokick 1
sv_cheats 0
sv_clearhinthistory 0
sv_consistency 1
sv_pausable 0
sv_search_key ""

sv_allow_lobby_connect_only 0

Running From Command Line

Finally, after all the configuration has been completed, I run the following from the command line to kick off the server:

cd /opt/steam/l4d/l4d
./srcds_run -console -game left4dead -maxplayers 4 -autoupdate +map l4d_hospital01_apartment +ip *my server's public IP address* -port 27015 -nohltv +sv_lan 0

give it a few minutes to start up and keep an eye on the console for any error messages. Since this configuration worked “out of the box” for me, I'm unsure at what sort of errors that you might get. Use Google if you run across something.

Connecting to Your Dedicated Server

After start up is complete, bring up your Left 4 Dead client, open a console. Now, enter the following:

connect *your dedicated server IP address here*

Hit enter and you should connect to your new Linux Left 4 Dead Dedicated Server.

Other Links

Here's some other places you may be interested in checking out for information on running your own L4D server:

• Server Configs
• Server MOTD
• Another server setup page

I hope you enjoy and have a lot of fun with it. On Steam, my user name is idlethreat. Stop by and say hi sometime.

Cheers,

tom

While I had all the best intentions of posting more neat and interesting stuff (well, to me, that is), I managed to run smack into Left 4 Dead and things haven't been quite the same since.

Sure, I'm still the standard-issue Midwest programming geek, but I just happen to flinch a hell of a lot more in dark rooms.

If you guys haven't had an opportunity to try L4D out, I would highly recommend it. If you already happen to have it and are looking for someone to join you in the festivities, just hop over to my Steam page and contact me.

Finally, this reminds me that I have extra Steam copies of HL 2 and HL2, Episode One that I picked up whenever I got Orange Box.

If you would like a free legal copy of them for your very own, just log in (or create yourself a new account) and reply back with your Steam contact information.

Cheers,

tom

Have a great week, all. More code coming soon!

tom

• I want to see More of Sarah Palin
• Hoo, I'm Bored!

In my line of work I sometimes have to take immense blocks of data, distill them down to their essential components, and make decisions on their contents. I also enjoy visualizing information to make things easier to get an overview of their contents.

So, I grabbed a transcript of the Obama / McCain debate (since the VP debate was still going on) and do a little math on it. Here's my results.

Raw Data

the first thing I did was pull the full text of the debate from here. This became my raw information pool for the task at hand.

Next, I grouped all the text together as per speaker (there's three, all helpfully labeled).

The next step, I grepped the name of each speaker and placed that into an individual file. Since there's three (Lehrer, Obama, and Mccain), I ended up with three files to work with.

Readability

The first thing I ended up doing was dropping the files on my web server and sending the text to Juicy Studio's Readability Test, just for giggles to see how it would look to a machine.

Lehrer

Obama

McCain

The main bit to pay attention to is the “Gunning-Fog Index”. Here's what the fine folks over at Juicy say about it:

The result is your Gunning-Fog index, which is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content will be to your visitors. Results over seventeen are reported as seventeen, where seventeen is considered post-graduate level.

So, Overall it's a wash. Lehrer's scores are a bit lower than the rest since all he was around for was to ask questions and break them up whenever someone was on the ropes.

Word Clouds

I've always enjoyed word clouds and how they represent information. In short, word clouds take a volume of words and perform a frequency analysis on them. Once the analysis is completed, the words are ranked by the number of times they appear in the text.
The larger the word, the more times it appears in the target text and conversely, the smaller the word the less that appears in the target text.

Instead of writing my own parser, I run across Tagcrowd, who can parse raw text, URL, or even an uploaded file. This was extremely handy in parsing all of that text. The output was quite attractive as well.

For each of the candidates as well as the full text of the debate, I performed with these settings:

Word Cloud Results

• Lehrer
• Obama
• McCain
• Text from All, Aggregate

Conclusion

I'll hold off in giving political insight on the word clouds. Just check them out, and let your eyes hit all the key words you find interesting. You may come to conclusions of your own which are different than mine.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this bit. I'll probably start hunting down the Biden / Palin transcript and try the same bit on it as well, just to see if there's anything out of the ordinary with the baseline that I'm releasing today.

Now, if you want to try stuff on your own, here's download of the text that I was working with. Should help you out a bit in finding text online and working on that.

• Lehrer
• Obama
• McCain
• Text from All, Aggregate

Enjoy,

tom

Well, it's another July 4th in the states and I'll hunker down for a bit and watch the festivities from a safe distance. Going to a family fish fry this afternoon and will try my best to keep up with people who never use computers in their daily life.

Wish me luck.

I'm a Mac guy who, due to the nature of my work, has to spend a whole lot of time on Windows systems at work. Of all the Mac hotkeys that I miss terribly, + W (close window) is probably going to be at the top of my list. So, with a little hacking around last night I've successfully crafted up a hotkey (I use + W due to its location on the keyboard) which closes the foremost open window.

Window Closer

HotKey, #w, WindowCloser
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

WindowCloser:
WinGet, active_id, ID, A
WinClose ahk_id %active_id%

The only real caveat to it is that Windows task management sees open windows as instances of applications. Close a window and you (may) close the application altogether. The Mac sees all open windows as children of the application. Close all the open windows, and the application is still running (and still requires a + q to quit it). However, it pretty much works as advertised pretty much everywhere. I will warn you that applications like Firefox will just close altogether when this hotkey is used. So, keep using your + w in Windows to those those tabs individually.

And Others…

While working on that script, I managed to fire off a couple of more scripts that will make things handy for me that I thought I'd share. This one will open up a new Explorer window in whatever folder you wish it to (I defaulted to the C: drive, but that can be changed). This is another Mac hot key that I have always liked. This hotkey is kicked off by using the + n keys.

HotKey, #n, NewExplorerWindow
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

NewExplorerWindow:
Run C:

; This one will open up an explorer window on your personal desktop
;Run C:Documents and Settings%username%Desktop

And finally, this one creates a new email whenever you hit the + e keys. I send a whole bunch of emails off every day and know it will be terribly useful here in the very near future.

HotKey, #e, EmailMaker
return

; uncomment below to remove tray icon
; #NoTrayIcon

EmailMaker:
Run mailto:

How to Implement?

Grab and install a copy of AHK on your windows systems and either copy-paste in my examples that I have above into new .ahk files, or just [Download Here].

Once you have them on your system and unzipped, edit the files to your liking and run them as is. If you want them to be runnable executables (I.E. .exe files), right-click on them and select “compile script” from the list.

I just remembered only after writing this was the rather huge project that I once wrote up in AHK at work. This was a few years ago and I was working in the NOC at a web hosting company (that I'm still at, by the way). One issue we alway seemed to run into was running down websites on IIS servers so we could troubleshoot them.

I wrote an AHK script that would pull all the active sites from IIS and copy them over to a Linux server. the Linux box would parse the list (as a .CSV) and inject them into a MySQL database. I wrote a PHP front end to the entire mess and you could perform boolean searches on site names and which server they were parked at.

It was a hackish affair, abd prone to failure, but at the time there was nothing quite like it for a number of years until that functionality was added into our current ERP system. I think I still have the source code for Badger somewhere around here.

Would be interesting to see those scripts again.

Ok, well, enjoy these for now.

Cheers,

tom

Had a blast. More on this topic later.

tom