2018-10-27

1y USD LIBOR interest rate: 3.06%

...that is, a 2% increase from last week only!
If you contemplate the curve, the interest rate is exploding higher (and past 6 times its value of mid-2014).
Wonder why the stock market is struggling and Mr Trump is nervous?...
The LIBOR-linked market alone weights $7.5 trillion (as estimated by the Fed, cited in this research article) .

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2018-10-20

Rank in Pasta!'s high scores

The display of high scores was confusing when you weren't in the top 6. Now you get your rank after completing a level:


For playing Pasta!, click here. Enjoy!

2018-10-19

1-year USD Libor hits 3%

Perhaps Mr Trump is right when he says that the Fed has gone crazy...

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Click to enlarge

2018-10-18

ReZip new "internal-only" mode

The recompression tool ReZip can now work in a standalone way, using only internal algorithms and without calling external tools.

The command is "rezip -int archive.zip".

Of course the recompression will be less impressive than if external tools like KZIP, Zopfli or 7-Zip were used, but you will still get interesting results, as can be seen on the screenshot below.

ReZip recompression report (click to enlarge screenshot)
If you wonder (by observing the twin white columns in the above table) why the approaches LZMA_2 and _LZMA_3 are rarely optimal in that example (only once for 40 files), there is some logic.
The Preselection method (see in zip.compress.adb) guesses from the entries' extensions that they are source code files. Then it uses an empirical threshold (8000 characters) for selecting either Deflate_3 for the smaller files, or LZMA for the larger ones. But wait, not whatever LZMA! There are 225 possible preset parameter combinations for LZMA, and Preselection chooses one combinaison that is appropriate for the kind of data to compress. So in any case, Deflate_3, LZMA_2_for_Source, or LZMA_3_for_Source are chosen. Obviously the tuning (done with other files a couple of years ago) is working, since the default LZMA encoding is beaten in 97.5% of the cases.

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