I Like Parentheses (so get used to 'em) » Tech Blogs I Read http://blog.josh-peters.name “People who like this sort of thing will find it just the sort of thing they like.”—Abraham Lincoln Sat, 14 Aug 2010 19:41:22 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 chmod syntax for Restaurants? http://blog.josh-peters.name/2007/09/26-chmod-syntax-for-restaurants/ http://blog.josh-peters.name/2007/09/26-chmod-syntax-for-restaurants/#comments Wed, 26 Sep 2007 22:09:22 +0000 Josh Peters http://blog.josh-peters.name/2007/09/26-chmod-syntax-for-restaurants/ Continue reading →]]> I can’t decide whether or not Ian Hickson’s system for remembering ratings at restaurants (R3 anyone) is awesome or lame.

It reminds me of the unix command chmod, which is used to specify the permissions of a file.

You see the filesystem has three bits for any given file (this is a generalization of course, but bear with me): read, write, and execute. If you assign a 1 or a 0 to each bit you get 8 unique positions for the permissions of any given file: 000 to 111.

Since base 2 is not the way humans think, chmod lets you use base 10 so you get 0 to 7 with the most interesting numbers being perhaps 4, 5, 6, and 7 (read-only, read+execute, read+write, everything).

Hickson is applying this idea to his restaurant bill. Amazing.

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