The first is Peanut pushing on mummy’s cervix. Peanut is upside-down and cramped.

A little too anatomically correct in my opinion

The next is Peanut after coming out. See, there’s plenty of room.

Blue lines = free space (apparently)

Finally, Mil has a picture of herself holding Peanut. A promise of things to come, if you will.

Please come soon Peanut!

Isn’t she a brilliant artist?

A quick obligatory post using the new Wordpress iPhone app. Useful, and might mean more frequent personal posts. Missing Zemanta and the Flickr Photo Gallery plugin for quick links and Flickr integration. Can’t seem to easily link to those two useful tools for instance. I might use it to post about things in the “real world” as they happen.

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I’m writing this, my 100^th post, from my iPhone. It’s making me dizzy, as the screen jumps with every key press. I may not do this again till there is a native iphone app to do it with.

Congratulations to me anyway.

Image via Wikipedia

And as for Heath Ledger’s Joker, I present my Twitter comments from soon after seeing the film:

Seriously, he’s one scary mofo. I don’t want to be Batman anymore.

If you have a problem with this, it’s all in your mind.

Google released a small update yesterday that adds information about recent activity on your Gmail account to the bottom of the Gmail interface.

The new option in the Gmail interface

It also includes a link to further information, including details of IP addresses and methods that have recently been used to access your account. If anyone has accessed your mail in any way, it will be reported here.

Argh! What is that?!

I checked mine the minute it showed up in my inbox, and was shocked to see a bunch of IP addresses listed, when I hadn’t been anywhere near my computer in the last five hours.

In the screenshot, the blurred addresses marked with asterisks are my home computer’s IP address. But there are two addresses there that are listed as having accessed my account through IMAP and “Mobile” access.

I have to admit here that I freaked out for a second. I couldn’t think where or when anyone or anything could access my account. Two addresses - 67.228.171.34 and 67.228.162.43 had snuck into my account and peeked at my stuff!

Let me just say at this point that neither of the addresses I just listed are doing anything wrong. I freaked out for a second. I’m writing this post to help out anyone else who has unidentified addresses accessing their mail.

But lets not get carried away. Before I truly started freaking, I wracked my brains for any other computers I might have set up to access my account, or for any other service I could think that could be using my mail. At this point, nothing came to mind.

Working backwards from what information I had, I ran a “whois” on the addresses.

http://whois.domaintools.com/67.228.171.34

The address belongs to “SoftLayer Technologies Inc.”, and I have no idea who they are, but further down the page I get the last bit of information I need to unravel the “mystery”. Under the “Additional Information” section is this:

network:Organization;I:Xoopit.com 67.228.171.34

And I rememberⁱ I signed up for Xoopit, a service that searches my mail and finds all the photos and videos therein. Perfectly legitimate (I gave it my password), and totally not malicious. The other service turned out to be Zenbe.com, another free mail service (like Gmail) that has a few other nifty features. I tried it out a few months ago and forgot about it, but it happily kept fetching my mail from my main account all the while.

So, crisis averted. But the experience highlighted a couple of things for me.

1. Don’t be a douche and don’t freak out so easily
2. If you sign up for something that has potential privacy ramifications, write it down or keep a record somewhere so you know what services are accessing what.
3. When you have access to a tool like thisⁱⁱ - use it. It only takes a second, and it can be incredibly useful. It reminded me of two services I’d forgotten about, and in future, could save me from a real problem.

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I haven’t written for ages, because nothing has grabbed me enough to make me desperate to write. That was until tonight when I finished installing “Jungle Disk” on my Ubuntu laptop, and realized that I’d finally found a product that works exactly as promised, out-of-the-box on multiple platforms that provides a fantastic service.

A lot of potentially useful applications I’ve found in the last few years have promised a lot of amazing features, but have fallen short on cross-platform support. Backup apps, chat apps, music players - I’ve tried plenty of applications that work pretty well on one system but not on any other, or if they do, not as well as their original native systemⁱ. If the developers deign to produce cross platform products, they’re usually slathered with BETA labels for years, and are predominantly stuck on Windows and Mac.

Today I discovered a product that breaks this mold - Jungle Disk. I am just so chuffed with it I cannot believe it. Jungle Disk is a backup solution that uses Amazon’s S3 service to provide cheap backup and storage on the web. For about 10 cents per gigabyte, Jungle Disk stores your files securely and easily and lets you access them from anywhere you have an internet connection.

Let me help you understand why this is so revolutionary by taking you through how I’ve set up the four computers I have access to in my day.

At work I have a windows machine that accesses the internet through a proxy. I set up the Jungle Disk software and created an Amazon S3 account and in minutes was creating a backup of my important files. Additionally, the software created a separate drive (X:) that I can just drop files on like any other Windows disk.

When I got home, I installed the software on my Mac (an old Panther mini - no hardware/software pretension here). Just like on my Windows box I had a backup schedule set up, and a network drive accessible from the Finder in around 2 minutes.

Finally, I opened my Ubuntu laptopⁱⁱ. Following the simple instructions, I had a similar set-up up and running and a disk mounted on my desktop that connects to my central disk.

Putting a file in the disk on my Laptop makes it accessible instantly at work and from my Mac. Need to take a file home from work? Drop it on my X drive, and I’ve got it waiting for me when I arrive home. It’s brilliant.

What makes it all the more amazing is that on every system it just works. This one thing puts it leaps and bounds beyond the competition in my mind. I tried Mozy - it was buggy beta software that only worked on Windows and Macs. The Jungle Disk engineers have my respect for making software that works on multiple systems while maintaining a few neat platform specific touches - each version has been programmed with the important system and user folders appropriate for that platform.

The second most amazing thing about Jungle Disk is that it relies on Amazon - one of the biggest internet companies on the web today - for storage. Not only does this mean security and reliabilityⁱⁱⁱ, but fantastic storage prices to boot. Where other companies will charge set fees for more storage than you need, Amazon’s S3 ony charges for what you use. And the prices are low. I’ve backup up about 1.8 gig so far, and my current monthly cost is sitting at about 26 cents. By the time all my data is backed up, I expect my monthly fee to be about 3 bucks per month. That is pocket change. Why didn’t I do this sooner?

And speaking of pocket change: the Jungle disk software - the amazing Jungle Disk software I mentioned? A one time fee of $20 for every version ever made ever in perpetuity. Some of the best software I’ve seen for a one-time fee of 20 bucks - priceless. I really can’t imagine how it could get better.

No wait - I do. As well as my three completely differently configured machines, I also set the software up on Mil’s mac laptop. I set it to backup and nothing else, and set it to backup in a completely separate container. All her files will be securely backed up alongside mine, and never the twain shall meet - all using a single account, so I don’t need to pay for anything but the extra data she’ll back-up. Seriously - what could make this better?

How about $1 extra per month for web access? Yep, that’d do it.

I thought I’d jot down how I answered the questions - not my particular answers - as they will be different for other people, but the methods for answering the questions which are the same for each of the four question types.

Please note that I cannot finish the treasure hunt. I got stuck at question four. I wrote up how I did questions one to three before I’d done four and it just seemed like a waste not to post them.

Question 1

Question 1: Robot A robot is located at the top-left corner of a X × Y grid (marked ‘Start’ in the diagram below).

The robot can only move either down or right at any point in time. The robot is trying to reach the bottom-right corner of the grid (marked ‘Finish’ in the diagram below).

Note: The grid below is 7×3, and is used to illustrate the problem. It is not drawn to scale.

*Image not to scale.

How many possible unique paths are there?
(Note: Answer must be an exact, decimal representation of the number.)

I used to have a book of puzzles and math problems that had a section about just this type of number problem. Unfortunately I could never make sense of it - it used factorials and a fancy equation that told us the answer, but the author never explained how he got the numbers that he plugged into the equation. Fortunately I have Google. With a bit of research I found out from Dr. Math that the formula is:

              n!
C(n,r) = -------------
           r!*(n-r)!

where n is the total number of moves along one path it would take, and r is the number of moves along either axis (accross or down in this example).

The grid size I was given was 66 × 46. Starting in the first square, the robot can move either down or right - and will therefore take 65 moves right and 45 moves down to get to the star-square, regardless of what order he takes them in. That’s a total of 110 moves (down or right), and I can plug those numbers into the formula to get:

               110!
C(110,65) = -------------
            65!*(110-65)!

The problem is, most calculators can’t handle those numbers. The ! is called the factorial, and means take the number preceding it and multiply it by one less than the number, then multiply that by one less than that number and so on - in this example, 110! = 110 × 109 × 108 × 107 … etc. This can generate very large numbers very quickly. Asking the Google calculator what the answer is gave me a very large number indeed, and did what most calculators do with these sorts of numbers and freaked out, giving me this answer:

110 ! / 65 !* 45 ! = 1.60981337 × 10³¹ Google’s unhelpful answer

What I needed was a whole number - a large whole number to put in the answer box. So I went looking for an online calculator that can handle large numbers. I found one built using Javascript, and one that runs in a Java applet. I found the javascript calculator more intuitive and easy to use, but the final step of dividing one huge number by another kept timing out on me, so I switched to the Java one. I used a lot of copy pasting to keep the numbers clear in my head - pasting them into a text document and switching between the two calculators to check and recheck my answer. Eventually, I had a number to paste into the answer box that matched what Google almost told me earlier:

110 ! / 65 ! × 45 ! = 16098133690909086126971454271170

I submitted it and a few minutes later, was told I was correct. A week later I tried question 2.

Question 2

Question 2: Zip Here is a random zip archive for you to download:
GoogleTreasureHunt08_longstringofrandomnumbers.zip

Unzip the archive, then process the resulting files to obtain a numeric result. You’ll be taking the sum of lines from files matching a certain description, and multiplying those sums together to obtain a final result. Note that files have many different extensions, like ‘.pdf’ and ‘.js’, but all are plain text files containing a small number of lines of text.

Sum of line X for all files with path or name containing 999 and ending in .abc
Sum of line Y for all files with path or name containing 000 and ending in .xyz
Hint: If the requested line does not exist, do not increment the sum.

Multiply all the above sums together and enter the product below.
(Note: Answer must be an exact, decimal representation of the number.)

Where the bold numbers/letters above change randomly from question to question.

I downloaded the zip file provided and extracted it (with paths) to my hard drive. I initially tried to find a way to automatically find the files specified using Windows command line tools, but they are very limited (or I just don’t know where to look). What I was looking for was any file with a ‘.xml’ extension that resided in any folder (even in subfolders) with ‘zzz’ in the name, or that had the filename ‘zzz.xml’. Same again for any file with a ‘.pdf’ extension that had ‘EFG’ in the path. then I had to extract the numbers on the fourth line of all the files I found. Fortunately I have access to unix tools - Cygwin for Windows at work, and linux and mac machines at home. With a bit of “research“, and the unix ‘man’ pages, I strung together a command that would print me a list of numbers.

find . -path *zzz**xml -print0 | xargs -0 -I xxx sed -ne '4{p;q}' xxx

The command works this way:

• find is the command to look through a file list.
• I started in the directory I had extracted the files to, which is why I used . as the search path.
• Then the ‘-path’ switch finds any path that matches the regular expression following it. The expression I used was *abc**xyz, where abc is the path code we were supposed to find and xyz is the extension.
• -print0 just outputs the files it finds.
• The files then get piped |
• into the xargs command, which is used to run the sed command on each file in turn.
• The sed command is then given:
  • the -n switch to make sure sed doesn’t edit the file.
  • -e to run the sub-script 4{p;q}, where 4 is the line number to extract, p prints the contents on the line, and q tells the sub-script to quit there, rather than keep going unnecessarily. I’m not sure the -e switch is necessary, but I kept it in from the helpful fellow who suggested it on a forum discussion from 2004 that I can’t find again.
  • xxx to say “use the file you found in the xargs part of the command.

  I’m not sure that my analysis of the sed command is accurate. Please correct me if I’m missing something.

It’s a relatively simple command, but it produces a list of every 4th line in every file that matches the criteria.

There’s probably a unix-hackery way to then get the sum of those numbers, but I just copied and pasted them into an Excel spreadsheet and used the =SUM(A1:A10) to add them all up. Then repeated the process with the next set of criteria and multiplied the two number I got at the end to give me the answer. I did it a second time to produce another answer in a faster time, and waited for Question 3.

Question 3

Question 3: Network Below is a diagram of a computer network. The nodes are hosts on the network, and the lines between them are links. A packet is sent out from host X with a destination of 111.222.333.444. Which nodes does the packet pass through on its way to the destination? (include start and final node in your answer)

And here’s an image of the second question I attempted (click to zoom):

After freaking out a little at how complex it looks I started brushing up on my routing table knowledge. It quickly dawned on me however this puzzle is nothing like a real-world networking problem, and is entirely about logic and following a path.

Again, there’s probably a unix-y way of doing this, maybe a perl script or something that could look through this grid of numbers and trace a path around the diagram. I chose to do it the easy hard my way.

What I’m doing is following the logic of the routing table. At each node you can get only one step closer to the node you want, and each node has instructions for where to send the information next. In this example if I start at the top in row 1 (for node A) I would read this as:

• if I want to get to 203.21.93.108, then go to 203.21.93.108;
• if I want to go to 48.251.60.80 go to 100.5.76.120;
• if I want 8.32.24.0/24 go to 161.212.157.20;
• and if I want to go anywhere else, go to 17.29.203.130.

Of course, you don’t start at node A, you start where you need to start - in my case node G. I write “G” in the answer box and start.

Finding the starting point: G (in this example), I looked across the columns until I found reference to the end point I was trying to reach: 203.21.93.108. On the table, the second routing table entry in row ‘G’ has “203.21.93.108 => 8.32.24.60″. This means that for the information to get from G to 203.21.93.108, it must first go through the node with the IP address of “8.32.24.60″.

“8.32.24.60″ is node “F”, so I write down F in the answer box and keep going.

Node F directs me to “234.129.94.133″ which is node “I”, and so on I go. It’s like a numerical choose your own adventure. Without the choice. Or the fun. On occasion, there are nodes that look like the next logical step would be to finish the puzzle, because it is right next to the finishing node, but if the rules don’t tell you to finish, you have to keep going.

Following this to completion gives a string of letters like this: GFIHDCLONAM corresponding to the path taken through the nodes. This gets me through this round and on to question 4.

Question 4

Question 4: Primes
Find the smallest number that can be expressed as
the sum of A consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of B consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of C consecutive prime numbers,
the sum of D consecutive prime numbers,
and is itself a prime number.

For example, 41 is the smallest prime number that can be expressed as
the sum of 3 consecutive primes (11 + 13 + 17 = 41) and
the sum of 6 consecutive primes (2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 = 41).

Where A, B, C, and D are uniquely generated for each question.

Question four is here to separate the boys from the men. Unfortunately in terms of maths and programming/scripting - my voice hasn’t dropped. I cannot continue giving any help, and I’ve had to bow out of the hunt. I know I could do the question with the help of the internet, but frankly - I was only doing it to feel smart…

Anyway - if you’d like a solution to the fourth question you can get it here: Solving Google Treasure Hunt Puzzle 4: Prime Numbers. His solution is particularly good - in that he uses a lot of command line nous to get the job done. A few commenters say they’ve used python/perl/java programs to do it all from scratch, but I love that he uses a bit of unix giggery-pokery to get a useful file that he then just extracts the answers from. He also hasn’t tried the first three questions yet - so I’m not linking to someone who’s gonna show me up with their first three answers!

Have fun.

photo credit: Journal Girl Kira

Sorry ’bout the title. It’s Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia Awareness Day again. I haven’t done anything this year to raise awareness, except I’ve tried to sum up Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia in 140 characters on Twitter.

Natalie left a comment on my post from two years ago, and told me about the videos she’s been making on Youtube. I particularly thought this one appropriate:

P.S. Also - Happy Birthday mum.