Blog & White

Fire & Flight

© Amazon.fr

Long time ago, elves arrived on this planet in a shiny flying palace. Humans attacked them and forced them to flee at random. Few elves survived. Nowadays, a small group of elves lives in the forest, surviving despite the neighbouring human tribe who considers them as demons. When the humans burn the forest, the elves first flee to the caves of the trolls, who don't like them either and lead them to a wasteland with no possibility to come back. They cross the desert and finally meet another group of elves living in an oasis at the bottom of a mountain. Their ways are not the same as the forest elves, but they finally manage to integrate. Cutter, the chief of the forest elves falls in love with Leetah, a mountain elf girl. But Leetah doesn't want to “recognize” him, since she has been courted for a long time by Rayek. Rayek defies Cutter to a trial of strength, wisdom and courage. Cutter wins, Rayek leaves the village, and after some time Leetah finally recognizes Cutter as her soulmate.

Hidden Years

© Amazon.fr

Five independant stories, sometimes hard to follow because they refer to some past stories I haven't read.

Préparation

Même ingrédients et préparation que la glace au praliné, remplacer le pralin par de la chartreuse verte (j'ai utilise de la 1605) qu'on rajouter avant de passer à la sorbetière, selon goût (au pif 7 cL, je n'ai pas mesuré).

Commentaires

• La glace reste très molle à cause de la présence d'alcool qui abaisse son point de fusion.

Wikipedia

Anakin gets a padawan, Ahsoka, assigned to him by Yoda. With Obi-Wan, they have to go and retrieve Jabba the Hutt's son who has been abducted by an unknown party. An alliance with Jabba is of utmost importance, since he controls the routes in the Outer Rim, and therefore decides who will lead the war there. Anakin and Ahsoka lead a commando operation to retrieve the baby Hutt, while Count Dooku makes Jabba believe that the Jedis are the one who abducted his son. Anakin and Asoka manage to escape from the ancient monastery where the baby was held prisoner, while Obi-Wan fights Dooku's assassin who was supposed to retrieve the baby and return it to Jabba in order to prove they are on his side. Meanwhile, Padmé meets Jabba's uncle on Coruscant and discovers that he's an accomplice of Dooku, and had helped him kidnap the baby in exchange for the control of the Hutt clans. Ahsoka and Anakin finally manage to return the son to his father, and the treaty between the Republic and the Hutt is secured.

The mission: write a program that iterates over a list and asks the user, on every item, if he wants to change the current number, or quit (and keep the rest of the list unchanged).

Here's a possible python implementation.

def loop(data, index):
  return decide(index == len(data) - 1, 
                lambda: quit(data), 
                lambda: run(data, index+1)
               )
 
def decide(condition, iftrue, iffalse):
  return (iffalse, iftrue)[condition]()
 
def choose(selector, choices, default):
  return choices.get(selector, default)()
 
def change(data, index, new_value):
  data[index] = new_value
  return loop(data, index)
 
def run(data, index):
  print data[index]," Change? [n/q/]",
  reply = raw_input()
  return choose(reply.lower(),
                { 
                  "n": lambda: loop(data, index),
                  "q": lambda: quit(data)
                },
                lambda: decide(reply.isdigit(),
                               lambda: change(data, index, int(reply)),
                               lambda: run(data, index)
                              )
               )
 
def quit(data):
  return data
 
data = range(10)
print run(data, 0)

Smells like bitter cocoa, tastes very sweet, roasted and something spicy. Made of barley malt.

BrewDog Ltd., Fraserburgh, Scotland. 8.0% alcohol

Very bitter, and not very interesting. Contains malted barley.

BrewDog Ltd., Fraserburgh, Scotland. 6.1% alcohol

Pour la Saint Patrick, la Chartreuse (verte, évidemment) c'est plus adapté que la Guinness, non ? Donc, en attendant de me lancer dans la glace à la Chartreuse, un petit verre de Chartreuse.

Yesterday late evening I went to the kitchen, switched the light on and… nothing, except a slight buzzing from the switch. I ran to the fuse board and removed a couple of unlabeled fuses (until I found the one for the kitchen, which bore a label). Of course, the fridge is on the same circuit as the light, so I had to pull it out of its corner to grab its power cord, and connect it to one of the sockets in the kitchen (which are on a grounded circuit).

After that, I removed the cover, I took a look at the inside of the swith. It was full of cooked ants… We've been having ants in the kitchen (they came with the house, they visit us at the end of the winter, and should leave when the weather is warmer outside), but I never expects the buggers to walk into the electric switch. Damn stupid animals (which they are, of course, taken individually). So I vacuum-cleaned the switch, then used canned air to spray the last pieces of ant out. But the switch was still not conducting electricity.

The problem was that cooked ants don't conduct electricity very well (I measured about 60 Ω through the switch) and the switch was still buzzing. After a bit of thinking and scratching the contacts with a flat screwdriver (too big for the job), I thought of using a piece of sandpaper, stick it between the contacts, close the switch, and pull. After a couple of times, the switch was better than new (with a resistance of under an Ohm).

Lights are working fine now. But why does this always happen at night, when you have to work with a flashlight in your mouth?

© kraat.tistory.com

Senator Palpatine has been abducted by the separationists, and the Jedi Council has sent Obi-Wan and Anakin to retrieve him from General Grievous' flagship. During the operation, Palpatine convices Anakin to kill Count Dooku, the leader of the separationists. Grievous escapes. Back on Coruscant, Padmé tells Anakin she's pregnant. Anakin has promonitiry nightmares about Padmé dying in childbirth and is worried about how to prevent it. Meanwhile, the Jedi Council suspects Palpatine of being corrupt and orders Anakin to spy on him, while Palpatine asks Anakin to become his representative in the Council. The Jedi masters agree to let Anakin sit with them, but deny him the title of Master Jedi. Palpatine tempts Anakin to the Dark Side by telling him of a possibility to prevent death, and drives him to grow distrustful of the Jedi Council. Anakin reports Palpatine to be a Sith Lord, but Palpatine manages to kill the Jedis who came to arrest him. Anakin finally submits to the dark side and become Darth Sidious' apprentice, Darth Vader. Sidious then executes his plan to simultaneously exterminate all the Jedis fighting along the clones on various planets and gains even more power by turning the Republic into the firts Galactic Empire. Only Obi-Wan and Yoda survive. Anakin is sent to kill the leaders of the various federations that compose the separationists. He fights there Obi-Wan, who leaves him for dead. But Sidious recovers his body and reconstruct him with mechanical protheses. Padmé gives birth to twins, Luke and Leia, and dies of despair because of Anakin's treason. Luke is sent to Tatooine to the Lars, and Leia is adopted by Senator Organa of Alderaan.

“a fresh-citrus, hoppy aroma and a dry, bitter finish. Brewed using organically grown Pale Ale malts and organically farmed English hops”

Orangey taste, very bitter (and quite an unpleasant bitterness). Contains wheat and barley malt.

Bath Ales, Warmley, South Gloucestershire, England. 5.0% alcohol.

Smells like a lager, tastes like a lager. Contains malted barley, maize and rice.

Cobra Beer Ltd., London, England. 5% alcohol.

Smells like some kind of vegetable or herb. Quite sweet and “vegetably”. Contains barley malt and coriander.

Traquair House, Innerleithen, Peebleshire, Scotland. 8% alcohol.

Interesting article about how personal profiles on different systems can be linked together by datamining:

“If your username isn't your real name, your Last.fm account may seem to be anonymous, but the facts it contains probably tell the world who you are.”

“even a small amount of information about other pseudonyms you've friended on Last.fm has a high probability of allowing a data miner to match you based on the friendship graphs from other sites”

“There are only 7 billion people on the planet, and only about a billion on the Internet. Every fact about a person (are they male or female? Where they live? Do they listen to Brian Eno?) slices that number down by a significant fraction. If you have enough facts about a person, (33 bits of independent facts, it turns out, because log₂ 7,000,000,000 = 32.7) you can determine who they are.”

Quite sweet and dark, not bitter, smells like honey and flowers. Good, but yet another dark ale.

St. Peter's Brewery, Bungay, Suffolk, England. 6.5% alcohol.

“marmalade and fruitiness… blend of Northdown, Target, Challenger and Goldings hops”

Smells of red fruits, sweet. Very good. Contains malted barley.

Fuller, Smith & Turner, London, England. 5.9% alcohol.