August 31, 2004
Doesn't Everyone Know?
The issue of what frequency to tune A to was brought up recently at the King of Pointland. Read the article and my comment. Do not read the other comments. Also do not go on to read other articles at the King of Pointland; they are not clever and witty, nor are they read and commented on by a large group of the, ahem, "bjournalist's" witty and fun-loving friends. I'm certain that the author in fact has no friends, and that he writes all those comments himself. Just stick to reading my blog. It's better. Trust me.
August 27, 2004
Outlookitis
Yesterday I used the word "Outlookitis" to refer to a top-posted thread that has gone on in a mailing list for quite a while with no one bothering to trim the old quoted stuff. I call it "Outlookitis" because, AFAIK, it was MS Outlook that first started encouraging e-mail users to put their responses above the quoted material, making it easy to be unaware of just how much stuff you were quoting. Only the top few lines of your quoted text will be in your editing window; call that the "tip of the iceberg" effect.
At the time of this writing, the only (Google) search result for that word is a web log post about the bad effects of email in general on productivity. I wouldn't use the word this way; the productivity/distraction factor just as valid a problem using any mail client (and choosing this term reinforces the notion that everyone is/should be using Outlook for their email!) But I used the word on the UM-LINUX mailing list yesterday, with the meaning described above, so said search should eventually give a second result.
August 25, 2004
Hurrah! Hurrah!
Hurrah! Hurrah! My father's gonna be hung!
Hurrah! Hurrah! That dirty son-of-a-gun!
He was very mean to me when I was very young,
And now they are hanging my father!
[Sung to the tune of the Civil War song Marching through Georgia]
This is from memory; couldn't find it anywhere on the Net, so I figured I'd better get it out there.
August 24, 2004
As If That Weren't Proof Enough
I have just discovered that I am able to spell "CAT" in ASCII code in binary form. Just by doing it all in my head.
A while ago (evidently in January), I saw a sig on Slashdot that was written in binary. Rather than wisely ignoring it, I became curious, and couldn't figure out a way to use an existing tool to tell me what the message said. So I set about writing a little Python script to read in groups of 1's and 0's, calculate their numeric equivalent, then print out the letters that those ASCII codes represented. I don't remember what the sig said once I decoded it; probably something like "you have too much free time".
Anyway, I just ran across this utility I had written, only since it was a one-off, I hadn't documented it, so I couldn't rememer just what it was for. Once I figured out roughly what it did, by reading the code, I just had to test it out. And, yes, lacking any handy binary-encoded ASCII text, I had to make some up. I can never remember where the lower-case alphabet starts (93?), but I somehow always remember that 'A' is 65. So, here's what I typed, hoping to get 'CAT':
1000011
1000001
1010100
...and my utility returned exactly what I wanted!
ph33r my 933k|7uD3.
August 23, 2004
It's Official: I'm a Loser
A friend of mine told me he was thinking about trying eHarmony for dating, but was worried it would be expensive. When he told me how expensive the other service he had been using was, one with presumably a much narrower focus, I was shocked, and also assumed that eHarmony would be even more expensive. So I set about trying to find out how much an eHarmony membership(?) was.
So I got sucked into filling out my profile, just so I could get to the point where they would tell me how much I could pay to actually get this thing to work. Well, I turned out to be one of those fortunate few from whom they just wouldn't take money. "Unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching system is not suitable for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply would not benefit from our service", they say. The fact that they had to explain that "not suitable for about 20%" means that "1 in 5 ... would not benefit" shows that they missed the part where I told them I was intelligent. Either that, or something else I wrote/filled out told them not to believe my claims.
It was a long-ass application, and there were one or two areas where I just christmas-treed it, because this was not intended to be a serious application. If I'm super lucky, the reason I got the boot was that my answers in those areas were just too far out of whack (as opposed to "in whack") with the rest of the application.
August 19, 2004
Have I Been Reading Penny Arcade This Long?
Thought I'd dig up this oldie-but-goodie called No One Needs to Know from my favorite Web comic, Penny Arcade. Looking at the date in the lower right-foot corner, I realize it's a 2000 comic; is it possible I've been reading it for 4 years? Another possibility is that I saw this one because it was referenced by a later one, and that I haven't been reading it for 4 years.
Thanks to Bea, the 5th Lemming for helping me find that.
August 17, 2004
Successes, Failures, Rants
Success: After a whole weekend and a day, I finally got a 2.6 kernel to boot and come up properly on my 800 MHz iBook (of the iBook2 variety). Some things I keep forgetting; it has SunGEM ethernet device built-in. I couldn't remember how I had compiled the last kernel, and I had to make a guess that I had compiled the ethernet driver into the kernel. Also, the thing about the ADB bus is very awkwardly worded: "If you have an Apple Macintosh prior to the iMac, an iBook or PowerBook, or a "Blue and White G3", you probably want to say Y here. Otherwise say N." If "MacIntosh prior to the iMac" and "iBook" are two separate things, that's just a little strange, because, from what little I know about Apple history, it sounds like they're saying "anything older than or newer than an iMac -- in other words, anything but an iMac". Anyway, my keyboard and touchpad(?) didn't work until I enabled both ADB and "Support for ADB input devices". Those two were the things that were really hanging me up yesterday and today. When I first started on Friday, I couldn't get the stupid thing to find the right partition and start booting. That problem went away when I discovered 2.6.8 had just become available in the portage tree. Wish I knew what the problem was before, but it's history now.
Failure: I have so far been unable to get a bat out of the hallway of my apt. bldg. I left my door and my balcony door open and the lights off in my apt., hoping to give it a way out, but it just kept flying right by my door when it was still in flying mode. It's now all tuckered out and hanging out -- literally, of course -- on the brick wall where the elevators are, and very resistant to dislodging. Wonder if it'll survive the night. Small things really need to eat a lot, and constantly, but the bat won't find anything on the fifth floor of Charlestowne North.
Rant: It appears a practicioner of the guide to Unmaintainable Code has been employed at ISI. A teammate and I were both perplexed by why you could only get the results you wanted if you checked for a particular flag that, based on the name, didn't make sense for that situation. So I spent hours tonight looking at the places where these flags are set and unset, and figured out that it was all quite consistent, but that the scheme for what flag (or what combination of flags) means what is totally screwed up. Tip #26 on the Naming Page applies here. I think my task for tomorrow will be to add a few pararaphs of comments in the code where the flags are defined, explaining what they really mean.
August 11, 2004
Mobile Wallet Invented
Thank the Great Sky Fairy someone has invented a mobile wallet! It used to be such a pain; you'd be out at the mall, and you'd see that lampshade you just had to have. Shoot! You'd run home to pull your credit card out of your useless stationary wallet, and run back to the store again, hoping someone else hadn't bought the lampshade in the meantime. Soon, everyone will be carrying their wallets with them wherever they go! To restaurants, stores, the DMV -- anywhere you might use money or a credit card. Those clever Japanese.
Seen linked to from this article about backdoor popups, on the "Top Technology Stories" sidebar. It may since have rotated out of the sidebar.
August 09, 2004
Fay Wray Dies
Did anybody else here think that Fay Wray was the name of the character that King Kong was carrying around? That's what happens when people recount scenes, plots or ideas from movies, substituting the names of the actors for the names of the characters.
Wonder how long it'll be before I forget, and revert to thinking that Fay Wray was the name of the character.
August 08, 2004
No More Comment Links
Made a modification to the blog that you probably won't notice.
It's been bugging me for a while that the majority of hits I get from Google are ones following the links that used to say "Comments" on each entry in a monthly archive. I have meta robots tags in my MT template for my comment entry pages, I think, so search engines won't archive those pages, but they still have to suck them down in order to learn that they are not to be archived. I don't want to put a "nofollow" directive in my monthly archives because I want search engines to follow any links embedded in my content. There is, AFAIK, no way to tell a search engine "do not follow this link" -- and I'm not sure there should be one, either.
So I realized that the "Comments" links don't really provide any crucial functionality. If someone stumbles on a monthly archive and wants to comment on one of the old posts, it may not be glaringly obvious how to do so, but they need just click on the time link, and they will get to the individual archive, which, if commenting is enabled for that article, will have the comment form right in it.
So I, er, commented out the "Comments" bit in my MT monthly archive template. Modified a file in the June archive just to give it a test drive. I don't think I'll rebuild the whole thing, I'll just let it get rebuilt as I modify various files from the past. Here's what the monthly pages looked like with the comments link. But for the time being, I plan to keep the comments links on the index page, since that is the time people (as in humans who read my blog) are most likely to comment on articles, so it's worth it to make things as convenient and obvious as possible.
August 05, 2004
Las Vegas Female Escorts
Got two comment spams about female escorts, one specific to Las Vegas. Tempting to leave those up there just for variety (more interesting than drugs I've never heard of), but they used the old "Thanks for the info!" message, which, while better than the "asdfds" message I got once, still just doesn't quite cut the mustard.
Prostitution is legal in Las Vegas. I would assume the "escorts" the spammers attempted to advertise on my blog are in fact prostitutes. Even if prostitution is legal, it's hard to imagine some advertising "Starlight Prostitution Services". Y'know, sort of like Democrats can't use the L word these days. But then, what about genuine, "we-don't-do-sex" escort services? Do they have to go pick a new word to distinguish their profession from the oldest one?
The Refueling Approaches
Well, I'm down to just under a quarter tank of diesel. Probably some time next week, I'll be down to where I want to be before I refill it. That will mark the first time I've used a full tank in ordinary driving in this car -- no trips to Pittsburgh or Chincoteague, just going to work and going about town. That's the best I'm going to be able to do to find out my "city mileage" for the car.
August 03, 2004
Depressing Songs
This morning, I woke up with the song "Puff the Magic Dragon" running through my head. I last heard it performed by Dan Hart at the New Deal. It was not a song I grew up with, although we did have a PP&M record lying around the house somewhere, and although I grew up with a dog named Puff, who everyone assumed was named after aforementioned dragon.
Damned, depressing song, really, innit? First it starts out all upbeat, with Jackie having the best buddy imaginable, and the two of them going on wonderful adventures. Then the second half of the song is about Jackie dissing the dragon, or dying -- it's not totally clear, especially to the presumed original target audience of this song -- and the dragon crying and being lonely and having no one to play with, and dealing with all this by going and hiding in a cave for the rest of eternity. Yeah, that's what I want my kids to be thinking about after I turn out their lights and leave them alone in their room at night. No wonder drugs were such a big hit back then.