Coredump

No, it's not what you think . Directed by Spike Jonze ( Being John Malkovich , Adaptation ) and premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, I'm Here is a "robot love story celebrating a life enriched by creativity." The movie is set in contemporary L.A., where life moves at a seemingly regular pace with the exception of a certain amount of robot residents who live among the population. A male robot librarian lives a solitary and methodical life -- devoid of creativity, joy and passion -- until he meets an adventurous and free spirited female robot. /via Slashfilm

(It's time for another link dump , a hodgepodge of web goodness. Enjoy!) -- There is a theory -- a "unified" theory, in fact -- that the universe is connected by "wave tubes" . (Imagine traveling to other galaxies through wormholes ala- Star Gate .) But I digress. On a less grander scale, but still beautiful, here is the Milky Way, represented as a transit (tube) map . Credit: Samuel Arbesman -- Speaking of tubes (what a segue...), ever wondered how the Internet is made? Wonder no more. Here is an Instructables how-to about making a replica of "The Internet", as seen in the comedy hit, The IT Crowd . (Embedding is not allowed so here's a link to the clip of that episode .) Fun facts about the internet! The internet is surprisingly small! The internet is wireless! The internet is very light! (Of course the internet doesn't weigh anything!) The internet lives at the top of Big Ben! (Where it gets the best reception.) Before being borrowed,...

He was doing journalism in order to eat, which is a very good way of learning journalism. Probably the only real way, come to think of it. -- Terry Pratchett on Neil Gaiman, in Good Omens

If you have a few million dollars lying around, you might want to check out this auction . The University of Delaware is hosting an auction of Chrysler's automotive fabrication and assembly plant. Up for bidding, among other things, are CNC six-axis robotic arms . Whoa. Imagine how may power loaders and exoskeletons you could build from those. Enough to defend against Sentinels, hopefully. /via Boing Boing

(This blog has largely been content-free for a while now. Heh, sorry. To remedy the rut, I'm opting for a tried-and-tested strategy: posting random, unrelated links. Enjoy.) -- Everything must go! NASA puts out a garage sale that includes space suits, engines and -- get this -- space shuttles. Discounts are available (about 30%, according to a New York Times report ), but the buyer would have to pay for shipping. Assembly is required as well. Credit: toptechwriter on Flickr -- We all know that well-adjusted six-year-old kid with a pet tiger , Calvin, and his monster snowmen creations. Someone with an overly active imagination actually carved them ! Talk about life imitating art. Credit: justalby on Flickr -- I miss my K&R classic , " The C Programming Language ", which was a handy reference in college. (I think I have the second edition.) What if you rewrite Kernighan and Ritchie's opus in the style of H.P. Lovecraft? You get " C is for Cthulhu ", o...

I'm not sure this design would have made it to the RoboCup . Great idea, though. (The mouseover text reference, by the way, is a classic !)

(Another "piecemeal" post. Yes, I know: I should write more often.) I cycle through one-off passwords (of varying lengths). To generate these, I use the following shell script: #!/bin/bash usage() { echo "Usage: `basename $0` [length]" } [ $# -gt 1 ] && usage && exit 65 [ $# -eq 0 ] && len=8 || len=$1 strings /dev/urandom | grep -o '[[:alnum:]]' | head -n $len | tr -d '\n'; echo To use: $ ./genrand.sh 16 tFJNxyZk4EYaJiuz And, no, that's not my password. Or is it?

I want one !

Update : As Pádraig Brady , fslint maintainer, pointed out : fslint/findup *is* a shell script . My 500-GB Seagate FreeAgent Desktop is almost filled to the brim (there's * only * ~70GB free space left) so I need to find all duplicate files for clean-up. Fortunately, there are tools to do just this. I tried fslint , which is also available in the Fedora repository. I also found several nifty scripts on the web. I settled for a Perl script, found in PerlMonks , which I modified a bit (used digest() instead of hexdigest() , removed calculation of duplicate file size). #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use File::Find; use Digest::MD5; my %files; find(\&check_file, $ARGV[0] || "."); local $" = ", "; foreach my $size (sort {$b $a} keys %files) { next unless @{$files{$size}} > 1; my %md5; foreach my $file (@{$files{$size}}) { open(FILE, $file) or next; binmode(FILE); push @{$md5{Digest::MD5->new->addfile(*FILE)->di...

Okay, forget what I said about robots being beneficial to humankind. They're wicked — awesomely wicked, that is. Watch: Giant robots invade Montevideo (This is how robot/disaster movies should be made: no mushy dialogues, just pure unadulterated mayhem and destruction. Now, run!) Panic Atack! / Small Movie, Big Robots. (By FedeAlvarez) /via Make

Schneier has " Friday Squid Blogging ", so being original and imaginative, I'll take on Robot Sundays . (Besides, plenty other people do regular "niche" posts, and I thought, "Why not?") But why robots? Well, I've been fascinated by robots since I was young. (Who isn't?) My main motivation in becoming a computer engineer was to build robots. That, and my overwhelming nausea at the sight of blood droplets, which led me to quit my ambition of being a doctor. And despite naysayers' predictions that robots will rule the earth and crush humanity , I believe they are essential to our progress as a species. Of course, they must follow Asimov's three laws or we're doomed . At the SM Science Discovery Center. (My robotic obsession also stems from my frustration in control systems courses in college. I still wake up sweating after bad dreams of drowning in transforms and matrices. Damn you, Laplace !) Who knows, I might also use this ...