pagoda

fears

poil (a yarn or thread made from silk, used for ribbon, velvet, and as the core of gold, silver and tinsel yarn)

pall Yup - no argument there... I'll take that hit and eat it since it is much deserved. Patrick

1365m - No, no skill here, just an idiot with too much time to spare... Most of my other scores were 0's - that's more indicative of any "skill". Pagoda

wail More correctly, I should have said that I have some of the answers, but not all... Those I do have are shown below. #1) What does the distribution of letters in the Unabridged Dictionary look like? The Letter a Appears 184697 Times The Letter b Appears 36966 Times The Letter c Appears 96102 Times The Letter d Appears 63378 Times The Letter e Appears 217977 Times The Letter f Appears 21933 Times The Letter g Appears 43713 Times The Letter h Appears 59952 Times The Letter i Appears 188408 Times The Letter j Appears 2717 Times The Letter k Appears 14630 Times The Letter l Appears 121765 Times The Letter m Appears 65693 Times The Letter n Appears 148412 Times The Letter o Appears 159708 Times The Letter p Appears 73194 Times The Letter q Appears 3394 Times The Letter r Appears 149137 Times The Letter s Appears 130612 Times The Letter t Appears 141357 Times The Letter u Appears 81553 Times The Letter v Appears 18515 Times The Letter w Appears 12406 Times The Letter x Appears 6385 Times The Letter y Appears 48375 Times The Letter z Appears 8122 Times The Total Number of Letter in the Unabridged Dictionary Is: 2099101 #1a) What is the distribution of words in the Unabridged Dictionary as a function of word length? My Unabridged Dictionary contains 213,583 words. Each individual letter in the English alphabet is considered a "word" even though we don't normally think of all of them in that manner. To be sure, some of them we do (such as "a"), but not the majority of them. Number of Words of Length [ 1]: 26 Number of Words of Length [ 2]: 61 Number of Words of Length [ 3]: 627 Number of Words of Length [ 4]: 2988 Number of Words of Length [ 5]: 7198 Number of Words of Length [ 6]: 14163 Number of Words of Length [ 7]: 20452 Number of Words of Length [ 8]: 27015 Number of Words of Length [ 9]: 29824 Number of Words of Length [10]: 29220 Number of Words of Length [11]: 25021 Number of Words of Length [12]: 19966 Number of Words of Length [13]: 14683 Number of Words of Length [14]: 9672 Number of Words of Length [15]: 5890 Number of Words of Length [16]: 3363 Number of Words of Length [17]: 1808 Number of Words of Length [18]: 838 Number of Words of Length [19]: 428 Number of Words of Length [20]: 197 Number of Words of Length [21]: 81 Number of Words of Length [22]: 40 Number of Words of Length [23]: 17 Number of Words of Length [24]: 5 This is a near Gaussian distribution. In the context of this Scrabble game, it shows that there are 2,988 possible four letter words. The question of sparseness or denseness is really more relevant to words than letter. So, how many possible combinations are there for each letter? For Words of Length 1 There Are: 26 Combinations For Words of Length 2 There Are: 676 Combinations For Words of Length 3 There Are: 17576 Combinations For Words of Length 4 There Are: 456976 Combinations For Words of Length 5 There Are: 11881376 Combinations For Words of Length 6 There Are: 308915776 Combinations For Words of Length 7 There Are: 8031810176 Combinations For Words of Length 8 There Are: 208827064576 Combinations For Words of Length 9 There Are: 5429503678976 Combinations For Words of Length 10 There Are: 141167095653376 Combinations For Words of Length 11 There Are: 3.67034448698778e+15 Combinations For Words of Length 12 There Are: 9.54289566616822e+16 Combinations For Words of Length 13 There Are: 2.48115287320374e+18 Combinations For Words of Length 14 There Are: 6.45099747032972e+19 Combinations For Words of Length 15 There Are: 1.67725934228573e+21 Combinations For Words of Length 16 There Are: 4.36087428994289e+22 Combinations For Words of Length 17 There Are: 1.13382731538515e+24 Combinations For Words of Length 18 There Are: 2.94795102000139e+25 Combinations For Words of Length 19 There Are: 7.66467265200362e+26 Combinations For Words of Length 20 There Are: 1.99281488952094e+28 Combinations For Words of Length 21 There Are: 5.18131871275445e+29 Combinations For Words of Length 22 There Are: 1.34714286531616e+31 Combinations For Words of Length 23 There Are: 3.50257144982201e+32 Combinations For Words of Length 24 There Are: 9.10668576953721e+33 Combinations In other words, the set of words that we actually use in our language is VERY sparse when compared with the number of possible combinations. Anyone know why this is so? (There is a good argument as to why this is the way things are the way they are with respect to our language. Yes, it's partly that our lexicon cannot contain so many words (we could not remember them all) but it's deeper than just that answer...) #2) Given the answer in #1a what length of initial word would allow the most flexibility in terms of not repeating words (as has been done many times in the four letter version)? I don't know the answer since I do not know how sparse the words are in relation to one another. Since the rules of the game allow for the changing of only one letter per turn, we would need to know the word length that has the most densely packed set of words each of which has another word of distance one letter from one another using some path to get to another word (i.e. to go from "tail" to "fail" changes the first letter of the word, so these words differ by one letter, but are not near neighbors in an alphabetical list - thus, they are near in the sense that they differ by one letter.) That said, one would guess that the game would have many more possible answers (i.e. playable words) using words of length 8, 9, 10 or 11. However, the initial word choice would determine the space of possible playable words. #3) It is sufficient to answer this question by finding an example in which a word or small set of words is self contained - that is, cannot be expanded to create a new word by the changing of one letter. So - is there either a single word or a small cycle of words of length four that cannot be reached given the starting point chosen for this game of Scrabble? I don't know the answer to this either. However, both this problem and the above problem should be solvable, but the answers are not obvious to me right now. You can bet I will keep looking. After all, what better way to waste time... Cheers, Pagoda

bait Trivia: In N-Word Space, say in some Unabridged Dictionary what is the answer to the following questions: 1) What is the distribution of letters? Is is sparse or dense? 1a) Related questions: what does the word distribution look like as a function of length of word? 2) Given the answer to 1a - what number of letters would allow the most flexibility with the fewest repeated words for this game? 3) For a given length word (in this game four), can all possible four letters words be gotten to given the rules? Next post will include these answers - I already have them (from an Unabridged Dictionary I used to use for, well... black hat purposes... in another life. ) These are interesting questions though (to lovers of language and syntax anyway...) Cheers, Patrick

happy

Hi, Here are a couple of potential things to try to see what the results are - I see that you've altered the registry for TTL for connections (which defaults to 86400 sec = 1 day) but perhaps you have not tried this - in: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\DNSCache\Parameters create a new DWORD value of MaxNegativeCacheTtl and set it to something very small (it defaults to 300 s or 5 minutes - this is of the order of the issue you reported, which is why this stood out). This sets the TTL for _negative_ responses (i.e. those that do not connect using the default DNS entries. I mention this strictly based on the similarity of the order of magnitude of the default time and the time you report you are having problems with your browsers refreshing to the correct site. Another possibility is: do you perchance have HostnameLookups set in your Apache configuration file? If so, this will definitely degrade performance, especially when switching between a FQDN and a fictitious domain name you use for development. Other than these things, I am unable to come up with anything. I tried to reproduce the result on my machine, but could not. I even seriously (intentionally) messed up my DNS settings and then set various common websites (that were already in "ipconfig /displaydns" - such as google, and a bunch of others) but again could not reproduce the effect. BTW - I incorrectly stated that in Windows hosts files you could only use one domain name, some people claim (as does Microsoft) that you can use an "alias" of the form: 192.168.0.10 mymachine.somewhere.com mymachine That said, this has always failed for me for some reason. Anyway - once you get your machine to a stable state, and can reproduce the error (perhaps you already can) then you might look at the output of "ipconfig /displaydns" just to see what's in there. I would be remiss if I also did not mention that one my machine, given that I route everything through a Linux box, I have no Primary DNS Suffix (which I believe is similar to the information in /etc/resolv.conf on a *nix machine). In other words, my machine has a name of the form "mymachine" and not "mymachine.subdomain.tld". I do, however, map mymachine.subdomain.tld to 127.0.0.1 in Windows ../etc/hosts. I do not know if this is salient information or not. I'm about to check out for the day but will think on this and check back tomorrow. Cheers, Patrick PS: What does "tracert www.somewhere.com" show both before and after running your script?

Greetings, A quick Google search shows what may be some interesting items for you (or may not be, or perhaps you've already seen them): 1) http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hostsfaq.htm 2) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727005.aspx (Straight from the "horses mouth" so to speak - Microsoft's view of things) 3) http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm (Another very good site : implies that you might want to use 127.0.0.1 for the site you are working on - I dislike this answer personally, but perhaps it is just what you need?) Cheers, Patrick

Greetings Again, Hmmm... I did not see where you specified the browser you are using that takes so long. However, I used to have an identical problem but only with one browser (being a web developer myself I use many browsers to ensure that my content is at least somewhat consistent). The offending browser was always MIE 6.x. Personally, I use Firefox for my own browsing and I now use MIE 7.x for development (unless a client requests an older version - but I live in a town that has the highest per capita number of Ph.D.s in the world and thus is very technically savvy - this is both good and bad ) Anyway - with MIE 7.x, Firefox *.x and Opera, Safari for Windows, Dillo for Linux, etc., etc., I do not have this problem of the network not updating when I change the hosts file. Now, that said, when I used to use MIE 6.x my only recourse was to kill the browser and reopen it after changing the hosts file. I know that sucks, but at least for me it worked. In the world of Linux or other *nixes I would simply issue a "kill -HUP NNN" where NNN was the process number to refresh the process - but I am unaware of an analog for Windows for doing this. I only mention this on the off chance that you actually DO know how to do this and perhaps this jogs something in your memory. Sorry I cannot give a more concrete answer. Just out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing it, what does your ../etc/hosts file look like on Windows and the script you are using? If you do not want to post this publicly, feel free to PM me if you would like. I do recall once having a loop in my ../etc/hosts file on Windows that caused me huge headaches. I still have the notes about how I fixed that, so perhaps this is something similar???? Cheers, Patrick

Greetings adephue, Although you did not specifically use the word "Windows" to describe your PC, I am going to assume that was/is your intent... Even if this not the case, these same concepts work on *nix machine except for the files /etc/hosts. What I do (I too am a web and graphic design - meaning fundamentally marketing and advertising) is to do one of the following depending on the mood I am in and the complexity of the site: 1) The Simple Solution: Look in D:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. If you are familiar with Linux or other *nixes then this will be a cake walk. Simply add the appropriate entry into this file. It is ever so slightly different than the *nix world in that the entries can only have one domain attached to them. However, you can use multiple domains on separate lines. Using your example, this might look like: 205.205.205.205 somedomain.com 205.205.205.205 www.somedomain.com 205.205.205.205 ftp.somedomain.com etc... Where 205.205.205.205 is a your live domain name (available using WHOIS). Now, to work on your local machine, regardless of whether it is Windows Box, Linux Box or Mac (these all follow the same conventions per ICANN rules) you would most likely set this up as follows: A) Remove (comment out with # the entries above) and edit the same ../etc/hosts file and add: 192.168.0.10 somedomain.com 192.168.0.10 www.somedomain.com 192.168.0.10 ftp.somedomain.com etc. This preassumes that you have the correct software set up to use ftp (if you in fact want to, although there is no need when editing locally, etc.) 2) The second method is to create a dummy directory on your life server at TCH. This may be something like www.somedomain.com/devel and then use relative links instead of absolute links (which is, in general, good practice anyway). This bypasses any quirks that may occur while trying to develop on a Windows machine using Apache, MySQL and PHP. I too use Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Tcl/Tk, Python and Ruby on my Windows XP machine and their are subtle, but significant differences when pushing the sites to the the TCH Linux machines. Bottom line - if you are comfortable learning these subtleties, then I recommend using the Windows platform to develop on since it integrates nicely with Dreamweaver and Komodo, two very powerful tools. 3) Finally, there is an even more elegant solution that you may wish to try: I have several Linux systems at home (my business is home based) - one of these is set up to almost identically mirror the environment on the TCH machines. Thus, you have the option of developing in an environment like this and then pushing the content to TCH. I hope this helps. Cheers, Patrick

mail

poor

prince

fail

crown

full

pall

vanilla

hull

cherry

fudge

knead

mull

milt