Day: September 24, 2007

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Have You Seen This Guy? He Might Have Taken Bill’s Laptop. [Updated]

Update: I posted the story on MetaFilter, and it has since shown up on Boing Boing. By the end of the day, this guy’s going to be the best-known computer thief in the nerdsphere.

Tris Hussey reports:

It seems that this gentleman stole a friend’s laptop…well then decided to take pictures of himself, but then uploaded them to the laptop owner’s Flickr account. With all the caveats about allegedly, and innocence preceding guilt, if you know this person, etc … please e-mail Bill MacEwan at info AT workspace DOT com.

Photo of alleged laptop thief, caption “I’M IN UR FLICKR ACCOUNT, INCRIMINATING MYSELF”
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

Richard writes:

Technically it wasn’t Bill’s laptop, but rather one of the iMacs at Workspace, a shared office space in Gastown, Vancouver. This particular iMac (the one used to post the photo) was setup at the coffee bar with Flickrbooth installed and Workspace’s account as the default account, so that anybody who came in for a coffee could, while waiting for their favourite caffeinated beverage, also take a photo of themselves. Whoever that is didn’t know to change the Flickr account or, more likely, not to click the upload button after having taken the photo.

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The Perfect Accessory for “Sorting Out Sorting”

In response to my post on the film Sorting Out Sorting, I’ve already received three email suggestions that someone hold a movie night for geeks where we watch the film and “smoke a bowl“, as the expression goes.

Should anyone decide to hold such a movie night, may I suggest this bong, made from the shell of a Nintendo 64 controller?

N64 controller being used as a bong
Random MySpace photo, found via Miss Fipi Lele.

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Sorting Out Sorting

Here’s a gem from over a quarter-century ago: Sorting Out Sorting (running time 31:15), a film produced by the University of Toronto that uses then-impressive graphics to visually explain sorting algorithms:

The film is divided into three sections, each devoted to a category of sorting algorithm. These sections are:

  1. Insertion sorts: Linear insertion, Binary insertion, Shellsort
  2. Exchange sorts: Bubble sort, Shaker sort, Quicksort
  3. Selection sorts: Straight selection, Tree selection, Heapsort

In case you’re not interested in sitting through 30-odd minutes of film and ice-cold ’70’s sci-fi synth music (which I found sort of mesmerizing), here’s the spoiler: Quicksort wins!*. I think this calls for a LOL-computer-scientist image of Quicksort’s creator, Tony Hoare:

C.A.R. Hoare: “I’M IN UR ARRAYS SORTING UR ELEMENTS”

Footnotes

* In most cases. If you want to sort data in an in-memory array or array-like structure that allows for constant speed random access, Quicksort is generally your best option, and it’s probably the algorithm used by your programming language’s built-in sort function.

Cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog.