It occured to me after reading my previous post that I might have seemed to be lashing out against Koreans, or, at best, making unsupported claims (or perhaps these "claims" may not even have been apparent). Here's an explanation. If you visit enough websites made by and for Koreans, you will see that Shockwave Flash animations are considered indispensable.
It may not be so obvious to the casual observer, however. Indeed, I think the Korean obsession with Flash may have cooled down to a manageable fervor at this point, at least among the major sites, while usage is slowly picking up in the U.S. I just visited chosun.com, the site I linked to in the last post, and saw just one Flash animation, a pretty spiffy one. Then I went to Washingtonpost.com. Also saw exactly one Flash (and a quite poor one, I might add, if I only had the guts, one that could just as easily have been done with an animated GIF). So not a big difference there.
But if you use computers the way I do, and in particular, if you use the computer/OS combo I do, it becomes very noticeable. I use Linux on my iBook, and Macromedia doesn't make a Flash Player for Linux on the PPC architecture. Indeed, I haven't found any non-open-source software for Linux on the PPC at all. When a company that makes proprietary (closed-source) software says "we support Linux", what they really mean is, "we support Linux on the x86 architecture". One exception, I suppose, is Hancom and any other company that makes software for a Linux-powered PDA such as the Sharp Zaurus, which uses the ARM processor. OK, back to the topic. No MM Flash Player for the OS I use most of the time means I either use the gplflash plugin, which, more often than not, makes my browser crash after I try to move on to the next page, or I uninstall the gplflash plugin. This is where I see the real difference with Korean and American commercial sites. The American sites detect whether you have Flash installed before sending a Flash video down the pipe. If you don't, they usually have an appropriate substitute in the form of a static or animated GIF. Not as, well, "flashy", but better than nothing. But the Korean sites... well, if you don't have Flash installed, you just get that cyan-colored puzzle piece in place of where the Flash would be, and that annoying pop-up-window insisting that you install a plugin which doesn't exist, which gets buried under all the other popup windows that these sites often throw up.
Here's a better example of the Korean mania for Flash: Global Mission Church, a somewhat more low-budget site. Four different Flash animations on the front page (right click on anything that's moving to find out whether it's Flash or a GIF). Can anyone find me an American church that has that many Flashes on its home page? Or a synagogue? Admittedly, this doesn't look that bad; a wee bit cluttery and move-y (why can't I think of a better word?), but it's OK. But, well, I'd have thought that would all have started to get old at some point.
I was just typing something up for my blog, and Mozilla just decided to crash on me for no reason. Just disappeared. That sucks. Normally Mozilla only crashes after I view something with the gplflash plugin. I do have that enabled ATM, but I'm fairly sure I haven't viewed anything that used Flash today. I'm not, after all, Korean.
I do my part by trying, now and then, to bring my concept of humor in writing over to my writings at work, where the situation allows it. One place where I feel I have such liberty is in the comments for our source code control system. Here's what I wrote for what I checked in today:
Problem:Sometimes you just want to kill everyone you meet.
Solution:
Now we have kill_epoch.ksh. It searches methodically throughout the system for Epoch procedures, Epoch streams, Epoch viewers, anything that has to do with Epoch, even remotely, any process that might so much as have gone to a party where Epoch streams were in attendance, and dipped a celery stick in the same guacamole as said streams. When it finds such processes, it kills them with a savagery that would have put Uday and Qusay to shame, had they been alive to see it. It's a great day for Epoch, yes, sir.
I guess it's Jim Esworthy, doing Music Through the Night. He just announced something either conducted or composed by John Rutter -- except he said John Ritter (recently deceased) before correcting himself. Very interesting....
Too bad the economy just doesn't allow those of us in the 99.8 percentile to get offices this nice. The thing with the outlets being at desk level is so obvious you really wonder why you don't see that everywhere. I've just moved my cube back to the main building at my company, and the too-wide opening on this cube is directly opposite the too-wide opening of a cube belonging to someone I don't like a whole lot. That reminded me of this article, and the way they designed it so that when you're in your cube, you don't have line of sight with the others, so you have a fair amount of privacy (which, for some reason, today I feel like pronouncing "priv-a-see" instead of "pry-va-see").
I am now finishing up a Lean Cuisine "Roasted Chicken with Lemon Pepper Fettuccini". It's really good; interesting flavors. This is not a joke. Just wanted to write that down; maybe someone else will like it. Too bad I haven't seen the Chicken in Peanut Sauce one in a while.
Maybe this is old hat to some, I don't know. I found this article about Pepsi's multi-cultural marketing strategy rather strange, especially in the way it uses language. Here's a sentence I found humorously ignorant: "Forty percent of the Pepsi world is diverse...." Actually, let me give the preceding sentence, which gives some vital background, and has its own strange use of language: "The Pepsi globe... is 20% Latino, 15% African-American and 6% Asian-American." Does this mean that fewer than 60% of Pepsi consumers on Planet Earth are either Caucasian Americans, non-Latino Canadians, or denizens of the Eastern Hemisphere? I suppose this is possible, but if they're not using the word "globe" here to mean "the USA", it seems odd to pick out these hyphenated Americans among the entire global market.
Anyway, back to the "diverse" thing. The notion that some portion of a whole could be regarded as "diverse" seems to me to contradict the very sense of the word. The word implies variation within the group. Well, if there's variation among 40% of that group, then there's variation in 100% of the group. Now if we had a scale of diversity, along the lines of the standard deviation concept, then indeed, if you added the unnamed non-diverse 60% subset into the mix, the degree of diversity would be lower. But the sentence in this article suggests that a group either is diverse, or it is not (surely they don't mean that an individual could be diverse; they wouldn't do that to the language, right?), so they're not quite correct in saying that "40% of the Pepsi world is diverse".
Of course, maybe they're using the word to mean something else entirely. Maybe this is something only a diverse person could understand.
Those who program in the Python programming language have a tradition of naming their tools Py-this and Py-that. Writing a chess program in Python? Call it PyChess, if no one else has taken that name already.
Was just searching through my wxPython installation, since it's about time I learned how to make GUIs in something other than Tcl/Tk, and I found... PyCrust. Got a nice laugh out of that. I decided to find out how to run it, and found out that it was a shell program, billing itself as "PyCrust 0.9.2 - The Flakiest Python Shell". I needed a good laugh. How geeky am I?
Thanks to Isabel, lost power in my neck of the woods at 5 p.m. Thursday, and evidently they got it back up around midnight on Saturday night. Lot of stuff I would have liked to write about, but... there wasn't power. And I seemed to be too busy to write down anyway what I would have wanted to put here. Well, tomorrow we'll see if the muse strikes me hard enough to get me to fill in some details.
Shoot.... people are saying we can just about count on being out of power when the hurricane hits our area. I have no idea how we're doing on batteries, and I haven't even thought of what else I might need.
Somehow I am reminded of when I was very young, and my mother took us kids out to the mall. The power went out at the mall, so we went home. I asked my mother if cars use electricity; she said "yes, a little bit". Yet the car was still going. I somehow concluded that because our car used only "a ilttle bit" of electricity, we could still go, albeit a little slower than usual.
Hey, I never noticed the little buttons for making bold, italic, etc., type in my MT entry, so I don't have to type the cumbersome <b> and </b> tags by hand. Unfortunately, they don't seem to work. I'm using IE now (foreign machine, what're ya gonna do); maybe it works better with the Lizard.
Did I ever mention being disenchanted with capitalism? Anyway, here's an article about the Backlash against the outsourcing trend. The first comment is great, and seems to be the first place I've read where someone saying what I've realized for a long time. That third paragraph is unbelievable (of course, I don't know whether it's true or not), and, as the poster said, "ironic is not a big enough word to describe this."
The second paragraph is, IMO, silly, if for no other reason than the fact that business has inherent risks, but the rest is good.
I decided to tune away from my usual classical stations for a bit. I just found 94.7, and they've played 3 U2 hits in a row ("Still haven't found", "In the name of love", "where the streets have no name", the last of which I'm not so familiar with). I'm going to go out and play ultimate before they finish this one, so I may never find out how long they're going to do this. I like U2.
I get the feeling that my blog is more about my blog than about my life, or about any other useful or interesting topic. It's comforting to know I'm not the only one, and further, that someone is thinking the exact things I'm thinking.
Wow, that Wikipedia can really take a lot out of you. Or me, at least. At first it felt good to make improvements to a widely used resource. But now that I've found how much time it can take to get it right, review your formatting, check with previous editors, etc., just for a lousy little clarification, I think I'm going to have to greatly curtail that activity.
I've finally done something useful for the Web. I've made a few modifications to the Hangul page at Wikipedia. Which I daresay is more beneficial to society than writing awk scripts.
But I can't believe how late I stayed up just do get these tiny changes done, verified, documented, etc.
The fact that MT puts the titles of these entries in the header and the page title means that anything you type in as the title can appear quite high in a Google search. This has made me a little skittish about giving my posts titles that are too generic, lest one of the lamer ones turn up as the top search result for something otherwise worthwhile. Hence my deliberate mangling of the title for this post.
Anyway, I'm thinking about goint to the NBC4 Digital Edge Expo thing going on somewhere in DC tomorrow. Wonder if it'll be the slightest bit useful or interesting.
Found the Holy Grail: Wikipedia has a full page on Slashdot trolling phenomena, which describes stuff I've talked about, like "in SOVIET RUSSIA", "insect overlords", and some other stuff I either didn't mention ("Natalie Portman/hot grits down someone's pants") or hadn't recognized as a pattern (various forms of trolling).
Yes, I am a proud member of the unwashed masses, as defined by Joel Spolsky.
Figured out how to make MT show a list of the most recent comments (à la Chris Ruzin's Site), which you can now see in the sidebar. This is mostly for my benefit, so that I can see if someone has commented on my site, since I haven't been able to get MT to email me when someone comments. Well, let's face it, this whole blog is for my benefit (or enjoyment, at least). So I guess what I mean is, I don't think readers will be so terribly interested in what the recent comments are, anywhere near as much as I am. Indeed, this new feature will probably make it painfully clear to the world that no one comments on my stuff, a fact I'd prefer not draw attention to, all other things being equal.
If you get past the crap about why and how to hire only gods, and move on to the bit about programming in Joel Spolsky's Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, you find a few mistakes. Actually, there are two mistakes in the example used in the sentence, "Occasionally, you will see a C programmer write something like if (0==strlen(x)), putting the constant on the left hand side of the == ." One of them I just discovered was not a mistake the moment I pasted that quote into my edit window. See, I could have sworn that that was a lowercase 'o' (ASCII value 0x6F) on the left side of the conditional expression; the font he uses (which may be the same one I am currently using on this site) makes the zero look all short and round. In any case, had it really been an 'o', you could have written that off as a typo, if you were in a forgiving mood. But here's the slight logic error in what he's trying to communicate. The recommendation he seems to be spewing (heh, "spewing", there's a vitriolic word. Just trying to spice things up a little; is it working?) is, put constants on the left side of your comparisons. That way, if you mistakenly write an "=" instead of a "=="1 (which, for you non-programmers, can result in notoriously hard-to-track-down run-time bugs), it won't compile. But guess what: if you instead put the strlen() call on the left side of this expression, and mistakenly use an =, it also won't compile (yes, I checked it, on a Linux box, gcc2.96 (one of those Red Hat specials)). This example is one that can't give you a run-time error, no matter how hard you try to fuck it up.
The correct strategy he should be endorsing is: when possible, put variables on the right side of a conditional expression. Of course, this is not possible when both items for comparison are variables. And, as stated above, it's meaningless when neither side is a variable. So I really question the value of acquiring this habit whose use you have to put so much thought into, can't use it all the time, so you have to work even harder to remember to use it; seems you might have better luck simply trying to remember to use == when you mean ==.
[1] Pronouncing "==" as "double equals" here, hence the use of 'an' with '=' but 'a' with '=='.
Well, not fully. Roommate bought a wireless router, and we got it basically working on Saturday night. Trouble is, in its current configuration there's no way for it to handle both of our real-world IP addresses, forwarding traffic for one IP to his computer, and traffic for the other IP to mine. So we can't have both computers going wireless, and serving up our respective Web sites at the same time. Currently, the only benefit to me for this whole thing is, if I want to sit on the couch with my laptop on my laptop, without a wire (which never bothered me terribly much), I could do this, sacrificing the availability of One Idiot's Blog for that time. The thing is, I can do this anyway, because someone else in our building evidently has an open access point, which I've used a couple of times, both in OS X and in Linux.
Our only hope is that Buzbee's WRT54G Linux distro might be able to allow the router to assign itself multiple real-world IP addresses. Otherwise, this will just have been a waste of money for me.
I decided to go through my bulk mail folder in my free web mail account today [they're still junking my SourceForge newsletters]. I found one email particularly interesting.
Of course, it's been several months since spammers figured out that they can't put the word "penis" in their subject lines, so they've been using words like "manhood", "anatomy", or simply saying "grow bigger and longer" for quite a while now. Well, today I found one that said, "Never Be Ridiculed For Your Size Again!"
Geez. I mean, I don't mind so much if they say something like, "bring more pleasure to your woman", but the "ridiculed" remark is really playing against the insecurities of the most insecure men. A quote quoted in Newsweek on the subject of penile enlargement surgery: "the commonest complication is failure to make any difference". Newsweek says that Dr. Alfred Lewis, President of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgery, "believes that men who ask for such operations have a 'fairly profound psychological disturbance'" (From August 25th issue). Now, that may be painting these men with an overly broad brush; surely there must be some men whose wives/girlfriends asked them to do it, for example; or maybe this doctor just has his own personal prejudices (doesn't say, after all, that he himself has ever performed the surgery). Still, an interesting point, and likely valid in a lot of cases. Anyway... man, that's just low.
BTW, you won't be hearing from me for a week or two starting this weekend. I'm going in for some elective surgery which I'd rather not discuss here, and I'll be incapacitated for a while.
Just kidding.
A Chinese colleague yesterday was telling me about Chinese holiday customs. One Chinese holiday she described as falling on "August 15th" of the lunar calendar.
Why "August"?
In East Asian countries, they use the Western (solar) calendar for daily use, while the traditional lunar calendar is used for a few things, such as traditional holidays, and birthdays for some people. Now, in Chinese, the names for the months are shared between the two calendars; that is, the first month of the solar calendar has the same name as the first month in the lunar calendar. The reason for this is simple: each month name consists of the number followed by the word for month. Thus the first month of the year is referred to as "one month", literally, or, in better English, "the first month". But what to call the months of the lunar calendar in English? I've usually heard Koreans refer to them by the English names for the numerically corresponding months of the Western calendar, though there is not even an overlap in the time periods that the two "Januaries", for example, cover. And now I've heard the same from a Chinese woman.
If there is any logic to using the Western names, it can only be the following: "We East Asians have the same name for these months between the two calendars in our own language; therefore, why should we -- or anybody -- use different names for them when speaking English?" It might seem quite natural to East Asians to do this, as they have two concurrently operating calendars, which they routinely distinguish by adding "in the solar/lunar calendar" when it is necessary for clarity. But that logic just isn't very solid. Does the word "January" mean "the first month of any 12-month calendar system"? Does the Chinese word for the first month of the year relate in some way to the Roman god Janus, or to any two-faced god from any other religion? Did they name the eighth month of the calendar after a Roman emperor?
In the end, I suppose this is just a pet peeve. I get the feeling the CJKs think they are making these concepts easier for Westerners to digest by using the familiar names from the Western calendar. I think it probably confuses more than it helps, though. And I did feel vindicated when I looked up "january" at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary site; the definition there is "the 1st month of the Gregorian calendar". Ha! GREGORIAN calendar, people!
Oops, time to get back to work.
A few days ago I mentioned how I loved "Office Space". It's all the details that you get the second or third or fourth viewing, like how the answering machine moves slightly when Anne screams into it, or how the voice of the girl who always says "just a moment" on the phone, hitting about a G on the word "just", can often be heard faintly in the background throughout the movie, whenever there's a moment of silence in the office.
I was very tempted, then, to do some searching for "Office Space details" or something like that, to see if there were, well, more details, or really to see if other people felt the same way I did about the details. But I restrained myself. I resisted. I somehow remembered how pointless little endeavors like this are often the very things that suck hours away from my life.
I really need to do catch myself like that more often. I have a lot of things I want to do on the computer (e.g., right now I'm supposed to be studying XML), but I always give in to these idle thoughts, like, "Gee, I wonder who's written about X?" "I wonder what movies Robin Williams has been in?" Etc. If I had a little more concentration, I could think about what I'm doing, and decide how long I want to spend on a given bit of fluff. Life's not worth living without a certain measure of frivolity, but, well, I hope I can plan the frivolity a little better.
This week's cover story in Newsweek is about autism. Oddly, reading the story makes me feel better, while reading Nick Hornby's allegedly fictional stories of the grim realities of adult relationships tends to depress me (hence the word "grim"). Last night, probably due to my late-night consumption of a very large latte, I couldn't get to sleep, and something was depressing me. So eventually I got up, thinking that going back to the book would provide some diversion, as I had enjoyed what I had read earlier that evening at the New Deal Cafe, where he talked about getting it on with Marie. But what I read in my insomniatic(?) state was the part where he meets up with each of his past girlfriends, and sees what wonderful lives they've made for themselves after splitting with him, or, in at least one case, a woman whose situation is even more pathetic than his, which really isn't any more fun to read about than how all the other women are doing fabulous. Since the tone of that part of the book was pretty well mirroring the stuff that was getting to me that particular night, well, it didn't help.
But reading Newsweek's rather upbeat article on autism did. It reminded me of how much worse things could be, while putting a positive spin on the traits of autism -- which are very similar to many of my personal traits -- and how they (here, the "undesirable" traits) can in many cases be worked around, which I sort of feel like I'm doing now/have been doing for quite a while.
My original plan was to post my answers for the autism test that appears in Newsweek, but I ended up talking about how I couldn't sleep last night and all that, so I think I'm going to have to postpone (really, likely bag) that.
Reading "High Fidelity" right now. Been struggling through it (due to lack of interest and time, rather than difficulty) for a couple of weeks now, but I'm starting to gather speed on it, I guess. I'm not a big reader, of books, at least, but my sister gave me this book for Christmas, and I felt like I should, like reading will make me a better person. Plus, it will enable me to put a relatively recent book on my Nerve profile.