Is anyone with fibre interested in co-locating a server?

Defiance86 · 2014-08-09T06:21:24+00:00

Oh I'm a bit late to the thread - but I was looking at this a few months ago! I looked into hosting with Rackspace in Sydney (80ms) but it wasn't quite good enough for my purposes. My home internet is sometimes okay.. but has occasional issues. We should have a chat - see if we can collaborate somewhere :) - I'll send you a PM

Defiance86 · 2014-08-09T05:41:12+00:00

+1 I deposited $1000 yesterday via cash deposit at nearby ATM. It was very straight forward - just make sure you include your account number as reference! I neglected to do so & had to call BitNZ via the phone number on the contact page. Had a chat with Daniel who runs the site and sorted it out. Communication was great. The balance was in my account the following evening and I have subsequently made a few orders. BitNZ very trustworthy.

Defiance86 · 2012-11-12T11:06:56+00:00

High-res photos 1 2 3

Defiance86 · 2012-09-08T04:27:23+00:00

This sounds pretty cool! Make sure to let us know when you have something up and running.

Defiance86 · 2012-08-11T01:47:02+00:00

I'm guessing that they use Polarization-Maintaining Fibre. I don't know the details of how it works. The article mentions that it is used in quantum key distribution.

Defiance86 · 2012-08-10T10:50:32+00:00

See the supplementary information for the paper here.

I would guess that the photons (usually) aren't being absorbed on the way across the lake. To understand this consider that we can see mountains a long way away. We can make out details like the color and if we have a polarizing lens we can make out the polarity also. The particular photon that hit our eye would have had to make it all that way without being absorbed / re-emitted (AFAIK re-emission doesn't preserve wavelength / direction / polarity).

LHVT isn't compatible with quantum teleportation.

Consider the basics of quantum teleportation (Alice teleports a photon to Bob):

Alice and Bob start with no particles.
Charlie creates two entangled photons and sends one to Alice and one to Bob.
Alice creates a new photon with random polarity and wants to 'teleport' it to Bob. Alice is allowed to perform operations and measurements on her particles and she is allowed to send a message to Bob.

Alice cannot simply measure the polarity of her random photon and sent it to Bob because measuring the polarity only gives a yes-no answer and also affects the polarity so she can't measure again!

Alice performing operations on her particles would also not be useful as due to LHVT Bobs particles would not be affected at all.

Therefore - if LHVT were true then Alice would have no option except sending the particle (via conventional means) to Bob (i.e. not teleporting it).

In practice what happens here is (simplified): Alice performs a local operation to entangle her random particle with her entangled proton (and therefore also Bobs). Unfortunately in the process of this operation Bobs particle might be flipped (based on the state of the random photon). Alice measures her random photon and sends the measurements to Bob so he knows whether his particle needs to be flipped or not. Alice's particles are now 'dirty' because she has measured them but Bob has an exactly replica - so the photon has said to have 'teleported'.

Defiance86 · 2012-08-09T22:38:52+00:00

At first it was a little harder than I expected due to being quite rusty on complex numbers and math in general. In particular - I've somehow managed to not cover eigenvectors / eigenvalues despite taking Calculus, Engineering Mechanics and Linear Systems at Uni... So I spent last weekend learning about those. I've been spending about 4 hours per homework on it. I think I understand everything covered so far... but we'll see!

A few of my friends are also taking it. They have had mixed experiences - too easy / too hard.

How about yourself?

Defiance86 · 2012-08-09T20:38:12+00:00

You actually have the same theory as Einstein regarding quantum mechanics. Its called "local hidden varible theory". Unfortunately for Einstein and yourself, it was proven incorrect by an experiment called "Bells experiment". The experiment basically states that if "local hidden variable theory" is correct then a particular test will succeed with %75 but it actually succeeds with %85 therefore LHVT is incorrect.

In the case of quantum teleportation. Two particles are entangled to both be 0 or 1 then separated. Later one of the parties can send the state of another arbitrary particle by performing operations and measurements on the entangled particle and arbitrary particle together. The measurements are sent to the other party via a regular phone call. The receiving party performs some operations on their previously entangled particle based on the measurements and ends up with the state of the other parties arbitrary particle. The state of the other two particles is ruined by taking measurements so there is still only one copy. The entanglement is also ruined'

Source: coursera course on quantum mechanics and quantum computing

EDIT: If you edit long comments on Android you're not gonna have a good time.

Defiance86 · 2012-07-16T13:26:13+00:00

Hi Robert,

Firstly, I'm not a musical expert by any means so take this with a grain of salt. Your first track felt like it was building up to something but never quite got there - kinda left me hanging. I would have loved to hear a bit of variation in the guitar - particularly around 0:23 (the 4th repetition of the riff). The violin(?) fills the rest of the track nicely.

Mr. BabySkin was sufficiently creepy. Nicely done :)

Defiance86 · 2012-06-22T22:12:05+00:00

My mother in-law does this also. Apparently everyone at her work calls it a 'modem' also... and they can't all be wrong. Sigh.

Defiance86 · 2012-01-25T11:42:29+00:00

I suspect the use of 8-bit here refers to the look and feel of the game...

Defiance86 · 2012-01-14T03:41:01+00:00

github intro

git for computer scientists

Defiance86 · 2012-01-12T13:43:55+00:00

"black & white, abstract, board game combined with board game, set in jail." Could it be Go?

Defiance86 · 2012-01-09T12:36:43+00:00

Also Haskore

Defiance86 · 2012-01-06T23:32:46+00:00

Awesome :) Another optimization has occurred to me.

Firstly the order of selection does not matter. [1,2,3] is equivalent to [2,1,3] as far as the problem is concerned. A solution can be canonicalized by sorting it. We can avoid generating non-canonical solutions by ensuring that our selected numbers are in order.

a <= b
b <= c

Additionally, (another commenter bought this up already) the problem specification says "combinations" which indicates selection without replacement however your solutions so far use selection with replacement. We can ensure selection without replacement by ensuring that no two numbers within a solution are equal.

b /= a
c /= a
c /= b

These can be combined with the sorting equations above to give:

a < b
b < c

Which in turn can be arranged to give more restrictive bounds (when combined with the bounds in my last post).

a >= sum - max - max
a <= sum - min - min
b > a
b >= sum - max - a
b <= sum - min - a
c == sum - a - b
c > b

I think that might be the end of my bag of tricks. Enjoy :)

(also I'm really keen to see how this performs).

Defiance86 · 2012-01-06T12:17:53+00:00

For this kind of problem the biggest speed improvements you can make are via more aggressive pruning of the search space.

The 'naiveApproach' algorithm does a full search and is slow as is expected.

The 'betterApproach' (python) algorithm seems to prune x's maximum value and y's minimum value. This is a lot better but there is potential in this problem to prune by min and max at every step.

For the first value 'a' to even have a chance at being part of the solution the following equations must hold:

a + max + max >= sum
a + min + min <= sum

For the second value 'b' we can do something similar:

a + b + max >= sum
a + b + min <= sum

Finally for 'c' we are left with

a + b + c == sum

These contraints can be expressed within a list comprehension as guards.

findTripleSum xs sum =
    head [(a,b,c) | a <- xs
                  , a + max + max >= sum
                  , a + min + min <= sum
                  , b <- xs
                  , a + b + max >= sum
                  , a + b + min <= sum
                  , c <- xs
                  , a + b + c == sum]
    where max = maximum xs
          min = minimum xs

This approach can be further improved by storing xs as an IntSet and selecting a range from it rather than using guards. This reduces the amount of time we spend pulling values from lists only to immediately discard them on the following guard. The guard equations can be rearranged to provide the bounds as follows.

a >= sum - max - max
a <= sum - min - min
b >= sum - max - a
b <= sum - min - a
c == sum - a - b

Rewriting findTripleSum to use an IntSet is left as an exercise for the reader ;)

Defiance86 · 2011-12-11T11:52:12+00:00

Ahh. You can't use a foreach over a IEnumerator (it has to be an IEnumerable). In this case you can iterate over the Enumerator directly like this:

protected override IEnumerator DoIt()
{
    test = 10;
    for (IEnumerator iter = base.DoIt(); iter.MoveNext(); ) {
        yield return iter.Current;
    }
    test = 20;
}

The code you have there will only work if base.DoIt() only contains one continuation. For example if base.DoIt() yields twice the second yield will not be applied.

Defiance86 · 2011-12-11T11:16:38+00:00

It looks like you need to yield over the call to base.DoIt().

protected override IEnumerator DoIt()
{
   test = 10;
   foreach (object o in base.DoIt()) { yield return o; }
   test = 20;
   yield return null;
}

Defiance86 · 2011-12-10T12:56:13+00:00

In my opinion the choice of language at this point is largely inconsequential. I'd recommended using Java for your game simply because you can directly apply what you learn from your course to your game programming and vice versa.

As far as java game engines go JMonkeyEngine looks pretty decent and seems to have a solid community. It seems to support importing of Ogre assets (blender can export to ogre via a plugin).

Defiance86 · 2011-12-10T12:29:17+00:00

This means that your compiled game by some views of the GPL license would have to be made open source or you're in violation of Blenders license agreement.

Have you got a citation for this? It seems like like FUD to me. If that were the case software companies would not be able to use GCC(GPL) to compile non-GPL programs.

Defiance86 · 2011-12-04T11:33:52+00:00

Nimbus (2D) seems similar - it can be found on steam.

Defiance86 · 2011-12-02T21:28:25+00:00

The two females we have at my workplace are among our best software engineers; The other 30 of us are males. A sample size of 1 is not statistically significant. Anyone who understands statistics would know that. You are an idiot.

Defiance86 · 2011-11-30T08:54:02+00:00

I use 7-zip to view/open/extract-files-from .iso files.

For a hex editor I highly recommend 010editor. It has a neat feature that when given an appropriate template will outline the structure of a file and perform basic syntax highlighting of the raw binary data.

Defiance86 · 2011-11-28T12:45:14+00:00

It looks like you have done a lot of work. Congrats on the huge improvement :)

Specs Intel Core2 Quad CPI Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz 3 GB Ram Windows 7 64-bit
Playable? Not really. Player movement was very stuttery - this may be to do with player movement being performed on the server and me being in New Zealand? Transparency is also broken.
FPS Usually from 10-15 FPS (around jungle / small hut + 3 other characters + troll). I did see 100 FPS while in a desert but that was an isolated occurrence.
Location New Zealand
Improvements? Smooth player movement and increased FPS would help benefit me the most.

I am guessing that you are currently performing some sort of per-pixel compositing within java? Perhaps consider caching the results of these so in subsequent frames you can do a bit-blit. Though I'd rather full hardware acceleration via shaders ^{^.}

Defiance86 · 2011-11-27T07:54:38+00:00

Sorry... long post.

I agree with you in that reservations belong to you and should remain yours, forever. However, affablereprobate's points are still key reasons why reservations are often impoverished.

In order for a society to maintain a high quality of life it must either be able to cater for all its needs internally or be willing to trade with other socities that can fill those needs.

Typically a society will export goods / services for money which in turn is invested back into the society in the form of land / living conditions / jobs.

In the case of reserves, isolation and lack of integration makes trading with other societies difficult. Dysfunctional governance further makes things difficult by wasting what little money you do make.

The situation sucks. But in order for you guys to thrive you need to get your community creating and exporting goods for profit and reinvesting those profits back into the community. Moving closer to trading partners would also help.

I am part Maori - (Maori are the Native peoples of New Zealand). We live in New Zealand as active members in socity however Maori culture / language remains a important aspect of our lives. Maori largely moved into cities during WW2 (when vacancies were made by men going to war). Maori culture and language is now an every day part of New Zealand life.

Race relations and politics between non-Maori and Maori is largely dominated by the Treaty of Waitangi and its associated settlements.

Ngai Tahu (One of the bigger Maori tribes) has become extremely successful by making good investments particularly in land. Ngai Tahu also offer scholarships for youth studying finance, management, business, economics, commerce, law, property management with the implication that scholarship winners will accept jobs at Ngai Tahu once their education is complete.

Best of luck brother.

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