Matthew Skala's home page (RSS)Home page of Matthew Skala: computer scientist, mathematician, intellectual freedom activist, and general creative person.PDF Astrological Chart Service FAQ- June 29, 2008 Frequently Asked Questions for my PDF astrological chart service.http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/astrology/makechart-faq.php PDF Astrological Chart Service- June 29, 2008 This form generates nice-looking astrological charts in PDF format. It's mostly a demonstration of my horoscop and starfont astrological typesetting packages for LaTeX, but the hope is that the charts will also be useful for general purposes even for non-users of horoscop. They compare favorably to those generated by the other free online chart systems I'm aware of. This system does not provide any interpretation; for that you'll have to look elsewhere. See the FAQ for instructions, privacy..http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/astrology/makechart.php Unofficial University of Waterloo Thesis Template- June 25, 2008 Here's a template (ZIP format) created by stripping most of the content out of my PhD thesis source code to leave just the formatting. If you're using LaTeX to typeset a thesis for the University of Waterloo, especially in computer science, you might find this helpful. No warranties, but as far as I know it meets the current GSO formatting requirements. My thesis made with it passed their review on the first try. It's also supposed to look good, to the extent possible within the...http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/thesis-template.php Bill C-61 (Canadian DMCA) at first reading- June 25, 2008 No sooner did I go out of town than the Conservatives introduced Bill C-61, the long-awaited copyright legislation. It's pretty much as we feared: giving the US corporations everything they want with only a nod to the rights of Canadians. Now would be a good time to write some letters. Michael Geist has been covering it in some detail. I'm somewhat out of touch myself, but quickly getting back to speed. Below I'll summarize my clause-by-clause skimming of the Bill, and in future postings...http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/c61/first-reading.php Text-rewriting for adventure gaming- June 22, 2008 About 15 years ago I worked briefly on a multiplayer text adventure project. The idea I had in mind was that it would work with as close as possible to full English as the input and output language, and it would change the words to reflect multiple viewpoints. The world of computer gaming has changed a lot since that time and I'm not sure there'd still be interest in this kind of system, but on the other hand, it looks like I'm going to be working as a computational linguist in the next few...http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/mmorpg/text-rewriting.php That does it- June 22, 2008 Okay, I'm unsubscribing from Slashdot now.http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ephemera/no-more-slashdot.php Haunted!- June 21, 2008 I just got back from ACL'08, which was held in the Columbus, Ohio Hyatt Regency Hotel and the associated conference centre. (It's still ongoing - I left early because of my travelling companion's teaching commitments back in Waterloo.) It's a large facility, and hosts a lot of conferences at this time of year, so that at any given moment there are usually three or four going on. In particular, the start of ACL overlapped with the end of the Midwest Haunters Convention.http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ephemera/haunted.php Kulikuji Alpha: a lottery-style click exchange- June 7, 2008 This is a prototype click exchange system based on the ideas in my posting yesterday. Incoming clicks, after a small commission is taken out, get split in half. Half the clicks go to advertisers in proportion to how many clicks they brought in on the previous day. The other half all go to ONE lucky advertiser per day, and that advertiser is chosen at random with probability in proportion to how many clicks they brought in on the previous day. So on average you get out about as much as you...http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/kulikuji/index.php Risk-seeking advertising- June 7, 2008 While mentally drafting an email message to someone who'd written to me about my advertising efforts (and if that was you, sit tight - I do plan to reply eventually), I thought of something interesting. It's embedded in this statement, which is basically true: "I'd pay $100 for 10,000 clicks, but I'd only pay $0.50 for 100 clicks." That's a mouthful. It's a surprising statement with important causes and consequences both.http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/economics/risk-seeking.php Books I've written- June 6, 2008 Book-length works available onlinehttp://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/books/index.php |