qptech blog

I was playing with an old prime number listing algorithm that I discovered back in Highschool. It's pretty simple and isn't going to find any undiscovered primes or anything like that. But playing with it, I decided to list off all the palindromes that are prime within a certain range (say, less than 10 digits).

In a very short time, I realized that there are no prime number palindromes with an even number of digits except for 11. I was puzzled for a while though because this seemed rather odd. I played with it for a while and soon discovered that this is because all even digit palindromes are divisible by 11. It's kind of odd, but it's true. I even tested all the 10, 12, and 14 digit palindromes - usually my algorithm would take quite a while to test this many numbers, but because they're all divisible by 11 (rather early in the list of primes), the algorithm stops there and moves on to the next candidate. It takes just a second or two to test all the 14 digit palindromes when testing a 14 digit prime my take a second itself.

I'll post the code here if anyone's interested

Macromedia does not support the open source community very well... They also don't seem to support recent advancements in micro processor technology very well either.

Macromedia makes a flashplayer for linux - but that's about as far as their support of open source seems to go.

And their linux flashplayer doesn't even work if you're running an AMD Athlon 64 processor in a 64 bit environment - they don't seem to support 64 bit processors at all.

This isn't a problem for windows users because windows doesn't take advantage of the 64 bit mode of the Athlon 64. So if you're running windows, the Athlon 64 may as well be just another 32 bit processor.

There's an open source flash player that compiles fine in a 64 bit environment, but it doesn't support flash versions 5, 6, or 7.

So stop using flash for your animations, look into animated SVG's or something instead.

The company 4Frontiers plans to colonize and mine mars by 2025.

Link to the Wired article.

Yeah, right. I hate Microsoft and everything they are/produce.

follow the link to a nice Slashdot article about how nice a guy Balmer is.

Ever wish there was something like the CDDB for MP3's. Well, if you know what I'm talking about, then you probably do wish there was something.

Well, now there is. It's called MusicBrainz. It uses TRM's (acustic fingerprints) to identify any music file and label it.

I haven't tried it yet, but I will soon and I'll let you know.

Oh, that madman music manager - that's only for linux.

The musicbrainz client that I'll probably try is called "qmbtagger". there's a windows based client on the musicbrainz site and one for mac os x as well