Ben Scott <dragonh...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 11:52 AM, Joshua Judson Rosen
> <roz...@geekspace.com> wrote:
> > ... thwarted by the unholy amount of hole-iness in the map:
> > you can't just start at the center, walk until you hit `the end'
> > of the world ...
>
> Why not? I mean, I get that not all the tile locations actually
> have image files there, but presumably you just get the 404 error and
> move on.
>
> wget hxxp://imgs.xkcd.com/clickdrag/{1..256}{n,s}{1..256}{e,w}.png
>
> Granted, this would hammer the server with lots of requests for
> non-existent files. And I imagine it would take some time to run
> through 256*256*2*2 HTTP GET requests. And maybe hit command line
> length limits. So polite or efficient, it's not.
How do you know whether you've stepped into the ocean or just
a really big lake?
i.e.: what if the limits of the world were further out than you guessed?
Luckily, he does have the actual outer bounds of the world specified
in an (only slightly-obfuscated) array. But...:
> But if you want brute force and ignorance.... :)
Actually, I didn't--I wanted to be as polite as possible. My initial
"brute force" approach was brutish only in planning, not in execution.
I ultimately didn't see any way to ask politely for only the small number
of coordinates/tiles that were actually of value, though. So I still
ended up just beating on him until he gave me what I wanted.
That'd be the `moral abiguity' (as opposed to `moral-ambiguity')
part of the story.
("him" & "he" being the xkcd *server*, of course--there wasn't
*that much* moral ambiguity!)
--
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."
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