1337 tip: Alphabetize a String in Python with a One-liner

Let’s say you have a string of letters that needs to be alphabetized – a string of nucleotide bases, for example.

Original string: “TA”
New alphabetized string: “AT”

Code: newString = ‘’.join(sorted(myString))

Enjoy!

Z-Alarm 2 is Released

The original Z-Alarm was, admittedly, a little on the rough side. While it worked reliably and did its job, it looked ugly and gray like a misshapen piece of urban sculpture. Z-Alarm 2 aims to fix all that. In fact, it was designed around one goal: to fully emulate a traditional alarm clock.

As you can see, the GUI was completely rewritten. All user controls are grouped at the bottom of the screen. A custom LED-style fonts goes nicely with the idea of an old-fashioned alarm clock.

Most notably in this release is the expanded music support. As long as a DirectShow codec is installed for a particular audio format, Z-Alarm 2 can use it. For example, in the above screenshot, I’m playing an AAC/m4a file.

More information, instructions, technical details, and credits can be found in the readme. I’ll leave you to try it out for yourself:

http://www.box.net/shared/hpc7rjlz8q

A List of 900 Private Torrent Sites

900 Online Private Torrent Trackers: 2009 Edition | THE source for BitTorrent & P2P Tips, Tricks and Info. | FileShareFreak

For all you hardcore BitTorrent and file-sharing/P2P aficionados, you may find this quite exhaustive compilation of BT trackers from FileShareFreak quite interesting. If you have enough time to vet all of them, you really do have too much time on your hands.

A Car in the Sky

 Beat the traffic: take the flying car

This. is. awesome. The Terrafugia Transition is perhaps the world’s first viable flying car as it just completed its first road test…err, flying test. It seats two and is said to have a range of 4 hours at 180 km/h. Two caveats, though: it’s expensive, at $194,000, and requires a pilot’s license (for the flying feature, anyway). And for those of you who are bad drivers/pilots, there’s the option for a “full vehicle parachute”. Intense. It’s a car! It’s a plane! It’s…both!

Parallel parking done right

From our college friends at the University of Toledo comes a pretty awesome automated parallel parking device, created for a 2006 mechanical engineering project. Really, car manufacturers should integrate this as a standard, or at least an optional feature - just imagine the anger and frustration caused by trying to parallel-park in New York or something. This mechanical method is much easier, not to mention WAAAYY sexier.

Check out the build team's blog over at utppd.blogspot.com.

Spruce up your Gmail with the new Themes feature

Gmail is sporting a fun new feature - Themes. Logging into my account today, I was greeted by a small info banner at the top, inviting me with a link to the theme settings page:

Quite the selection, indeed! I was impressed by the wide range of new styles available. I highly recommend the retro, ultra-nerdy Terminal theme!

Phoenix 4.0 game for TI-82/83/84 calculators released

Phoenix 4.0 - ticalc.org


Good old Patrick D has released the latest update to his ever-popular calculator shoot-em-up game, Phoenix.
I can attest from my junior high and high school experience that this is a must-have game...blowing up
those little ships just never gets boring, especially when you teacher launches into an infinitely long lecture
on conic sections or something.

From the changelog:

In-game money display
Horizontal scrolling on 82/83/83+/84+
Updated in-game contact addresses

EA Releases C&C: Red Alert as Free Download

Command and Conquer fans, rejoice! As part of the pre-release hype for Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3.
EA is making the ORIGINAL Red Alert 1 available for free! I don't know about you, but I'm not going to miss
this chance to get 13 years worth of nostalgia (RA1 dates to 1995/1996).

Link to the official EA News page with download instructions:

COMMAND & CONQUER RED ALERT 3

Apparently there are Vista issues (such an old game, after all) but EA says that several fansites have workarounds.
I'm still rocking XP, though, so that won't be a problem. If you've been living under a rock and still have Windows 95/98/ME,
no problems for you.


If you'll excuse me, I've got to download those two Soviet/Allied ISO files now...

Blackjack in Java - an AP Computer Science Project

Now, after the conclusion of my AP Computer Science A class/camp/summer program at Northwestern University's CTD, it's time to release the program my partner, Francis Chen, and I created as a final project - a simple text-based Blackjack game written in Java. Originally, we planned to go for a GUI version as well, but that turned out be a little complicated...

Blackjack v1.01 is licensed under the GPLv3. Features include:

• classic casino-style Blackjack play
• player chooses starting cash and bets
• hit, stand or double down
• dealer hits on soft 17 (Vegas-style)
• insurance for dealer's ace
• fully random card draws and deck shuffling
• standard 3:2 natural and 1:1 blackjack payouts
• source code included w/ comments

Screenshots:

The download package contains source code, a Windows EXE, and a cross-platform JAR (ideal for Mac and Linux users).

On Windows: Run the EXE. Duh.

On other platforms: open a command-line and type:
java -jar blackjack-bin.jar

DOWNLOAD NOW! (210KB)

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - Can it get any worse?

The Mummy franchise has reached its third installment, and for everyone's sake, it better be the last too. Let's make it nice and clear that this latest sequel is just plain terrible. We find our so-called heroes, the O'Connells, in China. The basic plot: they find the mummy of emperor Han; Han wakes up from his 2,000 year sleep and wreaks havoc; they manage to kill him; everyone lives happily ever after.

not nearly as good as the poster makes it out to be.

Since the events mainly take place in China, it would be appropriate to analyze and CRITIQUE the thematic elements. Firstly, the storyline is a blatant distortion of Chinese history. The "Dragon Emperor" is simply a ripoff of Qin Shi Huang, known as China's First Emperor. The presence of the Great Wall is greatly exaggerated; in the 20th century, there was very little of the Huang-era sections of the Great Wall still remaining. Needless to say, the so-called enemies buried under the wall serve only as a ridiculous action-fantasy element whose only legitimate purpose is to attract unknowing viewers. Clearly, Rob Cohen and his crew are interested only in action-rich, money-making plots, even if that calls for a complete sidestep of historical fact.

Also consider the film's glamorous portrayal of Shanghai in 1946. I appreciate your attempt to glorify Chinese life back then, but this depiction couldn't be farther from the truth. Firstly, WWII had just ended, and much of China was in the midst of a Communist-Nationalist power struggle. Nowhere to be found were foreigners and foreign businesses, such as the glitzy, neon-bling bar owned by Jonathan O'Connell. Honestly, dirt-lined streets and ramshackle slums would have been more telling of Shanghai back in the day. Obviously, some Western filmmakers don't know shit about life and culture in the East.

no neon signs here...

A major plot element is the "Eye of Shangri-La", which contains the water of immortality and is used to resurrect the Dragon Emperor. The Dragon Emperor (Jet Li) later uses it to point the way to Shangri-La, where he bathes in the water and supposedly becomes immortal. Shangri-La, though, exists only in fiction; the Eye in the movie looks nothing more than a cheap replica of a Fabergé egg. The whole thing seems to be nothing more than a stopgap solution to the plot gap created when the producers needed a way to resurrect the mummy. Again, there exists no historical basis.

looks awfully like a Fabergé egg...

Even worse are the three Yeti/abominable snowmen/whatever you want to call them. Mr. Cohen is really pulling our leg here. During the mountain battle scene these furry guys pop out of nowhere and save the day. Well, at least I can't complain about not being warned - the trailer prominently features these guys. But come ON - I'm not sure whether to be appalled or amazed that the filmmakers could stoop to such lows. When you need to use CGI'ed Yeti to get some action going, you must be really, REALLY desperate.

they must have been pretty high to even think of including Yeti...

Speaking of CGI, that in The Mummy 3 is just plain shoddy. The trailer provides some interesting eye candy, but the same cannot be said for the film. The Great Wall battle scene seems proportionally distorted; all we see is a bunch of dead guys crawling out of the dirt and fighting. And if you look closely, it is evident that all of the CGI soldiers are synchronized, doing the exact same motion at the exact same time. More evidence of this film's sloppiness...

And what's up with the shape-shifting Emperor? Like, where the HELL did the ability to magically turn into a dragon and bat planes out of the sky come from? Hey, I knew he was supposed to be immortal - but this whole morphing thing is really pushing the limits of disbelief.

The plot of Mummy 3 is simply too shallow and straightforward. Protagonists find mummy, mummy awakens and wreaks havoc, fight mummy, mummy dies, everyone lives happily ever after. It is such a mundane and predictable sequence. There is no sense of emotion, no connection to the viewers - simply a cut-and-dry, hollow action movie.

The movie's lackluster quality is evident especially to anyone who understands Chinese. As a movie that takes place in China, it is inevitable that there is Chinese spoken in Mummy 3. With the exception of the actual Chinese/Asian actors in the film, all the others (I'm thinking of you, Alex O'Connell/Luke Ford!) The Western actors' Chinese accents are very noticeable, chipping away further at what little dignity the movie still has.

Rating: ★

Mummy 3 on Rotten Tomatoes
Mummy 3 on IMDB

In short, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is relegated to only a lowly, excessively cheesy action flick. Watch it if you like that; otherwise, it's something to be passed, especially if you're big on plot (there is none.) I think it's time to wrap up this dead franchise...

Weekly Travels: A Taste of Chicago

Over the past week my friends and I have worked hard and played hard. Here is a lineup of our activities so far:

On Friday, we took the Metra downtown and walked to Pizza Uno for dinner. The Chicago deep-dish they have there is superb, but so is Giordano's, and I still can't decide which is superior. Curfew was at 11:15 pm, though, and we were kinda rushed (the fact that we got out of lab at 7:00 didn't help). We waited for the train for 20 minutes, and whether due to chance or a misreading of the schedule, it still didn't come. It was now 10:50 pm, and we had to move to our last resort: a taxi. Where are those things when you need them? We waited another five minutes before a taxi van showed up. We told the Turkish taxi dude to go fast and that we had to be back by 11:10 at the latest. At times we were going 70 in a 45 mph zone. Thanks to this guy's awesome driving we made it back actually 3 minutes before, at 11:12. That was one of the best stunts we ever pulled - hopefully it will be unnecessary to repeat that.

The next day we went downtown again, this time to see (and taste?) the Taste of Chicago. It's actually still going on till July 6. Basically, it's a highly overpriced food festival with some of the most murderous crowds ever. Admission itself is free, but to eat the food or ride the rides ya gotta buy tickets (12 for $8). To put this in perspective, consider the fact that ONE slice of pizza is 7 or 8 tickets, a barbecue sandwich up to 10, and the Ferris Wheel 6. If you are a gluttonous eater, too bad for you, cuz you'll be forking over a lot of money. Oh, and don't forget the enormous number of people - it is literally packed, and a lot of times you can't even move. They really need to implement some form of crowd control.

The 4th of July means fireworks. Actually, though, Chicago's fireworks are on the 3rd, and my roommate's dad offered to take us all out to the festivities at Millennium Park. After a quick drive down to the Metra station, we hopped on and got off at Van Buren Street. The place was crawling with cops - near the subway station, their was a crapload of cop cars, cop SUVs, and unmarked police vehicles. Downtown, there were at least two cops on every street corner. After stops at Chipotle and Jamba Juice, we headed for Millennium Park. Getting there  meant (at least, according to my roommate's dad) a little shortcut through the Taste of Chicago grounds. Unfortunately, our plans were ruined by the crowds there, which were even worse this time around. By the time we escaped, it was already too late and we had to go back for curfew. But, at the very least, we had enough crowds for a lifetime.

Stay tuned for more adventures!

English Video Project - Supreme Court and Gratz v. Bollinger

My group's video for the English class project is now up on YouTube...check it out! Inspired by The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin.

Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos | Wired Science from Wired.com

Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos | Wired Science from Wired.com

Some really cool chemistry (and one bio) videos...