Inspired by [cached]a post on reddit, I decided to write this Python implementation of Conway's Game of Life. To spice things up, there's a twist: The outer border continues to randomly seed the field with new cells.
Additionally, newly deceased cells slowly fade back to black to make things more interesting to watch.
When I recently searched for a solution to host a large VM for a client to download, I remembered Amazon S3. Why deal with some shitty One-Click Hoster if I can just upload it to Amazon, pay a few cents and enjoy fullspeed and direct downloads?
The following night, I realized that I could just as well use this to host my website. Why waste a VPS on the task if the content hardly ever changed? Just generate the html files in advance and then use S3 to serve them. Obviously, I wasn't the first to come upon this idea …
I don't really like the direction of the "official" project, especially the part where they decided to use a central authortiy, so I started my own. This is a true distributed approach, for everything else we don't need to develop anything new.
The basic idea is that each and every node of the network caches all the domains we have. Before you cry foul, let's look at how much space this will really need.
Our DNS record has several parts:
Today, you don't even need to go to college to get access to all those fancy courses - thanks to MIT and Yale, you can now simply download and watch them at home:
If you are still in high school, or just want to know more about some subject, this is an ideal possibility to find out more - I listened to a bunch of lectures about Mathematics for my own paper.
Recently I discovered an interesting story on one of my favorite websites: [cached]Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
It contains just about every important idea mentioned in one of the posts in Less Wrong, while still being absorbing - maybe even more so than the original Harry Potter books.
Some years ago, I was fascinated by the inner workings of the games I played. I already had learned C++, so I set out to find out more about the libraries and techniques specific to graphics programming.
My journey began with [cached]NeHe, an excellent series of tutorials for OpenGL beginners. (The lessons are available in many languages, not just C++)
Next, I read up on engine design. Of course, ambitious as I was, I aimed for a fully scalable multi-threaded engine. Had I wanted to create an actual game, this would have led to endless frustration (as any game …