xyzzy
Xyzzy is a magic word from the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game.
Modern usage derives primarily from one of the earliest computer games, Colossal Cave Adventure, in which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures you find there. By typing “xyzzy” at the appropriate time, the player could move instantly between two otherwise distant points. Hundreds of later interactive fiction games contain responses to the command “xyzzy” as a tribute to Colossal Cave Adventure. More recent games have shown a trend of increasingly more elaborate and in-joke-like responses.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
From Dunning-Kruger effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average.
The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, both of Cornell University. Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (as Charles Darwin put it).
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Convert M4A into MP3 with GNU/Linux
I ripped some CDs with iTunes, but accidentally used their silly M4A format. Using the free FAAD program included in my debian install, I was able to use this Bash snippet to convert the files to mp3:
for i in *; do faad -o - "$i" | lame - "`basename "$i" .m4a`.mp3"; done
Be sure to include the double-quotes around the $i, otherwise filenames with spaces might cause errors.
Update: I figured out a way to add recursive multithreading support. Check it out!