GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

So, to make a tie-in to game shows on this blog, I thought I'd write a quick blurb about what my profile picture is.  (Just in case my picture ever changes, the picture I'm referring to can be seen here at  http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/atkins-diet-and-who-wants-to-be-a-millionaire/ )   No, that's not me -- I'm not a lady, I sport a manly beard, I was never on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? , and I'm not that big.  (Yes, people have asked me these questions. :-P)  However, it's just a humorous picture from a relatively recent game show (recent, at least compared to the 1/20/1961 episode of You're In the Picture I had intended to write about tonight, but I felt like these people did a far better job!). The hapless contestant is being asked a question about the Atkins diet, popular back in the early-mid 2000s.  Having probably ignored all advice about dieting, she proceeded to use the 50/50 lifeline in order to take away two of th...

With jQuery, it becomes possible for people to make much simpler and more intuitive user interactions with controls on the Web.  I'm sure many people have had the problem where they want to select, say, half of the checkboxes on a page, or maybe all the ones within just a particular value or range.  It's time-consuming and error-prone to click them all, and the "Select All" button just won't buy much time savings. Thus far, I haven't really seen a good implementation that solves this problem, so I rolled my own.  Please use it in your own designs!  This is something that needs to be shared freely for the good of humanity. :-P  You can do this completely in JavaScript with dynamically-generated checkboxes or even ones you have pre-existing.  Here goes: <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> v...

Just to clarify: it won't work now without significant attention from the right people. Bitcoin would stand to benefit from some type of options or futures market, as these instruments help people mitigate their risk in other assets when used properly (yes, I'm looking at you, Dick Fuld ).  Currently the only way you can protect yourself from losses in BTC is to sell at the right time, and everyone knows timing any market is very hard to do.  (Well, not so hard---just sell next time someone hacks the system, as it starts falling, then buy again in about 24 hours.  It's tricky to actually pull off, though, when currently one exchange handles most of the transactions and basically falls apart during high volume.) Apparently, due to the denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox, the most popular Bitcoin exchange, within the past few weeks, folks have been looking to create an open-source trading platform that will allow anyone to make their own BTC exchange with all the be...

The first project I'd like to share is DecorreLab , a script I wrote back in college as a project for a couple of my classes, particularly 3D Sound and Spatial Audio.  While there are apparently some VST plugins that do decorrelation, I'll provide my source so you can run with it and improve it if you wish.  Plus, you'll know exactly what algorithm I use. ;) What's SuperCollider? It's an IDE and language (heavily based on Smalltalk) for carrying out real-time audio synthesis and effects processing.  It works best on Mac OSX, and has built-in filters, sequencers, frequency generators, impulse generators, noise gates, and all sorts of goodies to let you do pretty much anything you can imagine with computer sound.  You might be thinking that a purely object-oriented language such as Smalltalk would incur substantial performance penalties (i.e. how the heck is it doing real-time audio synthesis without choking all the time?), but surprisingly, it's not easy t...