Terminally Incoherent

Moving on Up

2006-05-02T10:42:00.000-04:00

I decided that I need to move out of blogger. I like this place, but its a little bit to amateurish for me... I am a proffesional IT person, I have a degree in Computer Science and I'm writing my Masters Thesis. What the hell am I doing here? I need a more proffesionaly looking website, and a more presentable blog if I want to be treated seriously.

I spend allot of time maintaining this blog, and it is a big part of my life. It is only logical to invest a little bit into this part of my life, and get some decent hosting. And this is not just for my blog. I want a place where I could publish my code, creative work and etc... I want to be able to have some online presence I could actually show to people when they are asking me about my web design skills. Blogger cannot give that to me.

Thus, I decided to move to my own place: terminally-incoherent.com. There's not much there yet - just a wordpress installation which I used to import all my posts from this message board. An actual webpage will follow. I might still post here for the next few days as I do housekeeping, and settle in. But at some point you should probably update your RSS feeds and etc.

Twin Sisters

2006-04-30T01:29:00.000-04:00

Is it just me or is Haley Berry stealing Gigi Edgley's Chiana look in X3? I swear, X3 storm and Chiana look like they were separated at birth:

If they painted Haley the same grayish paint, she could play Chiana's sister :P

Can't wait for X3. So far the X-men movies have been getting better. X1 was ok, X2 was better, so if that trend continues X3 should be actually a good movie. But then again, who knows.

Monster Mega Breackfast

2006-04-29T15:41:00.000-04:00

Monster Mega Breackfast,
originally uploaded by maciakl.

Ark and me went to the Red Hawk Diner today. We made the mistake of ordering their Mega Meals. He ordered the Gut Buster and I got the 12" Pankakes.

To my dismay, these pankakes were called 12" because they have a 12" diameter. Duh! I did not expect them to be that big. I don't know what the hell was I thinking. They are fucking huge ass, mastodonic, garganduan pankakes!

The manager told me that if I eat them both, my meal is free :P I tried, but couldn't do it. I didn't even finish one of them. I think I need to bring Nick, our local eathing champion, with me next time :)

Needless to say, I think I'm done with pankakes for a while :P

Best Fan Film Ever!

2006-04-28T20:24:00.000-04:00

Rayan vs Dorkman must be one of the most awesome Star Wars fan films I have ever seen. Check it out!

For more info go to rayanvsdorkman.com

LaTex Annoyances

2006-04-28T16:39:00.000-04:00

I really like LaTex. I much prefer to typset my papers, rather than manufacture them in word. But every once in a while, I find little things that make using LaTex a PITA.

For example, in my document, I have text that often needs to be repeated. For example, I need the title on the titlepage (duh), the copyright page, the signature page and etc... Same goes for actor. I spent countless hours searching how to extract data from the built in variables initialized via the standard \author and \title calls. I even emailed my old mentor in all things LaTex and he also had no clue.

So I decided to fake it:

\newcommand{\printtitle}{Title of My Paper}

Now wherever I need to put title, I just use \printtitle and I'm done. This is not a perfect solution, but it works. At least as long as you don't start nesting functions. For example if you do:

\uppercase{\printtitle}

You get lowercase letters. Why? Latex does not have a proper stack, and so nesting functions may or may not work depending on circumstances. At least that's what I have been told.

This is annoying as shit. Anyone knows the proper way to do this? I know that the answer must be locked up somewhere deap within article.cls which includes the implementation of the \maketitle call. But for the life of me, I can't decipher how to extract title and author from there.

What is a pirate?

2006-04-28T13:40:00.000-04:00

Abso-fucking-lutely priceless!

Every time you say "piracy" when reffering to copyright infringement, you are helping to spread the RIAA's and MPAA's evil propaganda. Think about this.

Makes you think...

2006-04-27T23:53:00.000-04:00

Note, this video is over an hour long, but it is worth it:

Think about this stuff when you watch United 93. Is United 93 an inspirational story, or a governmental propaganda?

Everything you know about 9/11 might be a lie. Including the story of United 93. Watch the clip I posted. It really asks allot of good questions.

Tape Drives for $2k?

2006-04-26T10:24:00.000-04:00

My hardware people recomend switching to a HP LTO2 tape drive for backups. I looked at their qoute, and I nearly fell off my chair. They were asking almost $2,000 just for the drive! Holy poop on a stick!

I was so shocked I actually went to HP website to verify the pricing. And yeah, it is within the ballpark. This is crazy! Absolutely in-fucking-sane. I can get a semi-decent, brand new desktop for that price! WTF! I can't understand why would these things be so damn expensive!

Why don't I just buy 5 250GB firewire drives for half the price of that drive, and use them to image my disk every day of the week?

I just don't see my boss signing off on a $2k tape drive order...

Latex Conditionals

2006-04-25T14:04:00.000-04:00

If you are a graduate student, and have some sort of assistantship position I have one advice for you. Do not tell your professors that you know/enjoy/use latex. Do not talk to them about latex. If they figure out that you do use it from the superb visual quality of your written assignments they may corner you and ask you about it directly. In that case shrug, make a dumb expression and quickly change the subject/run away.

The truth is that today, most graduate students are brain-dead MS word zombies. In fact most faculty members hate non-wysiwyg stuff with a passion. So once the they spot a latex user they are going to pounce upon him, and ride him till he drops dead, or graduates (whichever comes first).

This is, ladies and gentlemen, how I got stuck making thesis templates for Dr. Antoniou who is about ready to strange me these days. I'm officially working on the templates since... Er... Sometime last semester :P

Yes, I am the undisputed king of procrastination. I could teach you all a thing or two about procrastinating to the fullest. But not today. Come back tomorrow... Or next week maybe.

What I really wanted to talk about today are the conditional statements in Latex. I just typed all this back-story to give you some background on the problem I was facing. You see, at MSU it is only possible to submit a Masters Thesis in May, August or January. Thus, I wanted to make my template automatically select the correct month.

I decided to use ifthen package to do the conditionals. The ifthenelse statement seemed to be perfect here:

\newcommand{\shorttoday}{
   \ifthenelse{\number\month<5}
   {May, }
   {
       \ifthenelse{\number\month <8}
       {August, }
       {January, }
   }
\number\year}

Now, whenever you do \shorttoday you should get an appropriate month. For example, right now it displays May. But if I change month to say December using \month 12 I will get January :)

Now my only issue is that for January I should increment the year somehow. Any tips on how to do that? So far I haven't figured out how that could be done.

Update Thu, April 27 2006, 09:57 PM

I finally figured it out:

\newcounter{theyear}
\setcounter{theyear}{\number\year}

\newcommand{\shorttoday}{
   \ifthenelse{\number\month<5}
   {May, }
   {
       \ifthenelse{\number\month <8}
       {August, }
       {\addtocounter{theyear}{1} January, }
   }
\value{theyear}}

It works :)

Text Dumping PDF files

2006-04-22T19:32:00.000-04:00

The other day I got a request to convert a PDF file into a text file or something that could be imported to Excel. The was essentially some big accounting mumbo-jumbo full of numbers arranged in columns with fancy headings. There were over 200 pages of it.

Now the easiest thing to do was to use the Windows version of Adobe Acrobat and simply save the file as .txt. But of course, that knocked out all the white space. All the colums run into eachother and the file looked like crap. There is no way you could do anything useful with it.

Of course my linux PDF reader (acroread) did not have the "Save as Text" option, so the first place I turned to was the nifty linux app pdftotext.

pdftotext bigstupidfile.pdf

This gives you a quick text dump which is roughly equivalent to the buit in Acrobat save behavior. But fortunately pdftotext has all kindso of nifty features. If you want to preserve the whitespace and layout details you should do:

pdftotext -layout -eol dos bigstupidfile.pdf

The -eol dos bit is there to specify the end of line style. Remember, I'm on a unix box converting this file for a windows dude who will want to import this stuff to excel.

Needles to say, the trick worked perfectly. The columns were preserved and the file looked great. So whenever you need to convert some pdf data into text I highly recommend using -layout option.

Save the Internet

2006-04-22T18:46:00.000-04:00

Come on people, this is serious!

Let me show you how the internet works. Right now it is set up like this:

You pay for your own bandwidth (up and down) to an ISP
Google pays for it's own bandwidth
NSP's like AT&T and Verizon route the traffic regardless of where it is coming from

This setup works. But if AT&T, Verizon and palls have their way it will be set up this way:

You pay for your bandwidth
Google pays for its' bandwidth
Google pays AT&T for it's traffic to have higher priority than yours
Google pays Verizon for it's traffic to have higher priority than yours
Google pays [insert NSP name here] for it's traffic to have higher priority than yours
Google pays etc..
If google does not pay the required price, it page will transferred so slowly most surfers will think the site is down

We need network neutrality. Tiered internet is bullshit!

Arcane Java Operators

2006-04-21T15:28:00.000-04:00

I previously posted about the nifty ?: Java operator that I personally love, but that I never see in the code. And then I realized that there are quite a few instances of Java specific stuff that no one really knows or cares about. It seems that most Java instructors these days are C++ people who read a Java book - and thus they rely heavily on their C++ experience.

And that's fine, you can really survive in Java world with a C++ like mindset (as long as you don't try to pass integers by reference). But you miss out on all nifty little language nuggets and syntactic sugar that Java has to offer.

For example, Let's say you have an ArrayList, a Vector or another Collection class. At some point you want to extract something out of it. Since you populate your collection class you know what should be in it. But what happens if someone sticks in an Integer into a Vector that should contain only Strings?

You can always do this:

try
{
    Sting foo = (String) vector.get(i);
}
catch(ClassCastException e)
{
    // error handling
}

This is IMHO a PITA. Of course Java has a much more elegant solution to a problem like that. It is the instanceof operator:

if(vector.get(i) instanceof String)
    // do something
else
    // error handling

Java will gladly let you know, what type of object you are dealing with, as long as you ask it the right way. Granted that this example is trivial, but in the long run, instanceof can save you allot of catching and handling runtime exceptions.

Operators such as instanceof or ?: do not exist in C like languages. So most C oriented Java instructors ignore them completely.

Allot of programmers do not understand the this keyword. For example most people do this:

public class Foobar
{
    private int foo, bar;

    public Foobar(int a, int b) { foo = a; bar = b; }
    public Foobar(int a) { foo = a; bar = 0; }
    public Foobar() { foo = 0; bar = 0; }
}

This is an ok code, but imagine having 5 or 8 fields to handle. It becomes real messy, really quick. What if you have 12 constructors need to change the name of bar to something else? What if you decide to initialize values to 1 instead of 0?

What you shour really do is this:

public class Foobar
{
    private final DEFAULT =0;
    private int foo, bar;

    public Foobar(int a, int b) { foo = a; bar = b; }
    public Foobar(int a) { this(a, DEFAULT); }
    public Foobar() { this(DEFAULT); }
}

This is a good coding practice from the get-go. If you ever rename your fields, or change the default initialization value, all you need to do is to edit the top constructor. If your code is written well, you rarely need ractoring tools for minor stuff like this.

I think there is simply a fundamental issue with teaching the students to use the correct tools for the right job.

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people implementing XOR like so:

if(foo)
    foobar();
else if(bar)
    foobar();
else
    barfoo();

But Java has a perfectly good boolean exclusive or operator:

if(foo ^ bar)
    foobar();
else
    barfoo();

There is a xor operator in C, so I just see no reason why most college level programmers only use && and ||.

This is kinda like using the break on the default case of the switch statement. Code that is not wrong, but obviously redundant, or unnecessarily convoluted annoys me.

Java ?: operator

2006-04-21T13:32:00.000-04:00

One of the least understood, and most underestimated Java language constructs is the ?: operator. Most people never even seen it in action. And those who did, never actually used it to do anything meaningful. Imagine something like this:

public generateFoo(int threshold)
{
    if(threshold > MIN_THRESHOLD)
       return new Foo();
    else
       return null;
}

In this snippet of code we have a function which generates a new Foo object if the passed argument is greater than some minimal threshold. If it is below threshold we return null. This is not an uncommon scenario... But with the ?: operator we could accomplish all of this on a single line.

public generateFoo(in threshold)
{
    return (threshold > MIN_THRESHOLD) ? new Foo() : null;
}

If you didn't catch that let me show you something simpler:

int foo = bar ? a : b;

Java expects to a boolean or an expression evaluating to a boolean before the question mark. If that expression is true, then the whole statement evaluates to a. Else it evaluates to b.

It is elegant, produces a lean code and saves you one return statement. It is a good coding practice to have one return statement per method when possible. I think more Java programmers should embrace this little syntactic sugar. It saves you allot of typing when used appropriately.

Barefoot Shoemaker

2006-04-19T23:07:00.000-04:00

The keyboard on my laptop is fucked. Up and Left arrow keys simply do not work. I figured it might have been a software glitch, but they do not work at the bootloader either. It is annoying as hell, but if I hit down at the GRUB screen, I cannot go back up at all...

My solution? I figured I xmodmap some other, rarely used keys to up and left. I use an external kyboard and monitor most of the time anyway. This is my problem - they pay me for fixing other people's computers, but my own laptop is a pile of junk.

I have a broken pointer knob that sometimes short-circuits and sends signals without being touched (causing wandering mouse movements on the screen). I have a bad display that sometimes cuts off, or blooms out into multi colored jumble. And now two dead keys... But this does not bother me that much, because I know how to route around these problems. An average technophobe on the other hand, has a shit-fit every time their screen as much as blinks the wrong way :P

I should get this fixed though. It's really annoying. I just don't have fucking time to sit on the phone with Dell for 3 hours explaining to them that I just need a new keyboard. I can't figure out why don't they sell laptop keyboards on their website. The only way you can get a new keyboard is to call their parts department. And you better have a valid part number, or an open service call...

The case of the switch

2006-04-19T11:50:00.000-04:00

Please look at the following code snippet and tell me what is wrong with it. No it contains no errors, just something really dumb that shows that the programmer does not understand the switch construct:

switch(foo)
{
     case 1:
     // do something
     break;

     case 2:
     // do something
     break;

     default:
     // do something
     break;
}

Do you see what I'm talking about? Come on, look at it!

If you couldn't spot it, shame on you. Look at the default block. Why do we have a break there? The break statement is only there to prevent rolling down the the next case. If you are in the default case, which also happens to be the last case of the switch you are done. There is nothing below default it that can be executed. There is no need to put that break there!

And yet every book, online tutorial, and example I see put it there. Who the hell stated it? Why is everyone blindly copying this pattern? Is it for consistency?

Putting a break on a default statement is not wrong. It is syntactically correct. But that does not mean it does not look dumb as hell when you do it :P

No chanel switching during commercials.

2006-04-19T10:19:00.000-04:00

Holy Jesus Jumping Christ! WTF is this world comming to?

Philips suggests adding flags to commercial breaks to stop a viewer from changing channels until the adverts are over. The flags could also be recognised by digital video recorders, which would then disable the fast forward control while the ads are playing. via New Scientist Tech

The day they start doing this, is the day I stop paying for cable. This is the stupidest fucking thing I have seen since the unskipable DVD previews bullshit, and the broadcast flag. WTF! What if I accidentally switch to an infomercial channel? You just going to keep me there forever?

This is not going to fly with the consumers dude. You may be able to sell the broadcast flag to retarded idiots using that "pirates steal our content" joke. And hey, average Joe will not know about the broadcast flag until he tries to tape a show, or points a camcorder at the screen. But this? Hell, you don't mess with people's TV. That's just plain stupid! If a Philips device would do that to me one day, I would fucking take a hammer to it in 5 seconds flat and then I would cancel my cable subscription.

Hell, they will have to modify the Nielsen rating system stuff to accommodate this. Cause, you know - you may really want to watch Lost or 24 but you are stuck on a channel running a 20 minute infomercial that can't be skipped. To bad...

Implementation of this would be the beginning of the end of American TV industry. People would watch less TV, and download more TV shows with commercials edited out. Less and less people would get cable legally, because the a hacked illegal cable box would probably strip the "no-commercial-skip" flags off the signal.

The only winers would probably be the paid subscription channels like HBO - because this bullshit would make them even more appealing than before. They don't have commercials AND you can flip to a different channel whenever you want :P

Dirty Minds

2006-04-18T23:30:00.000-04:00

Today after Programming Languages class we established that we (tech geeks) are really a bunch of horny perverts :P Only in our field, phrases like these below are considered normal and appropriate:

A floppy is good but a hard drive is better. You may also sometimes need a USB dongle.

Your web-app should have a nice front end and a solid back end. You should also avoid being rooted.

When you log into a unix machine you can finger your friends. You can also get head, and get tail (of a file), take a dump, or mount something (a drive). You may also fsck your drive :P

And apparently on a vax machine you sometimes need to anal (analyze) the drive (thanks Brian).

:P

Bush is a thief by RIAA standards

2006-04-18T23:16:00.000-04:00

Apparently, president Bush has illegally ripped mp3's on his ipod.

President Bush's iPod contains songs by the Beatles; since no Beatles songs have been licensed for the iTunes Music Store yet, these must have come from ripped CDs. Remember last February, when the RIAA told a federal agency that ripping CDs is illegal?

Now, if you recall your lessons of RIAA doublespeak "copyright infringement" == theft. So in other words, Bush is a no good, stinking thief. No better than all the other nasty "pirates" that were sued for file sharing.

Sigh... How can our government enforce the copyright law, if even the president can't figure it out and commits blatant infringement on a daily basis?

Google Calendar > 30boxes

2006-04-18T02:27:00.000-04:00

Google Calendar is possible the best calendaring app online at the moment. I have been playing with 30boxes lately, but the big G is much more polished and feature-full. Hell, for what I use it for it is better than Outlook, Sunbird and KCalendar combined :P

To bad for 30boxes crew - they had a solid design, and really good app. 30boxes is like the Sega Dreamcast of online calendaring apps. When it came out first, there was allot of hype around it - but then we got PS2 and Xbox and Dreamcast died. I suspect that soon Microsoft will start providing a free Outlook whatever bullshit thing to counter Gmail+Google Calendar. And then 30boxes will be marginalized completely.

Of course, the old issue still stands - every new Google app you use, gives Google more information on you. And since Google does not seem to grasp a concept of "delete", their database is a great resource for our beloved ~~thought police~~ government. But then again, Google already reads my emails, and catalogs my web searches (cause I'm usually logged into gmail, and hence google as I browse). Do I really care if Google knows that I have an OWL presentation next Tuesday, or that I have finals in two weeks?

WTF Code moments...

2006-04-16T23:58:00.000-04:00

One of my Graduate Assistant responsibilities this semester is grading homeworks for an introductory Java class. As you can imagine, I see alot of bad code. But every once in a while, I run into something really "special".

The assignment was to write a payroll class, and one of the methods should calculate employees sick days. Every employee gets 1 sick day per 75 hours worked. This is how one of the students tackled the problem:

int totalHoursWorkedTemp = totalHoursWorked;
while(totalHoursWorkedTemp > 75)
{
   totalHoursWorkedTemp = totalHoursWorkedTemp - 75;
   sickDays++;
}
       
return sickDays;

I was about to mark it wrong, but then I realized that this will actually do the job. Ackward, but valid solution.

I don't know... What's wrong with sickDays = totalHoursWorked/75 (integer division)? But then again, maybe I'm being a minimalist here. I should be glad that they figured out how a loop works, eh?

The Shell is Done

2006-04-15T23:06:00.000-04:00

I finished the Shell assignment for my OS class. All the basic requirements are met. I'm planning to play around with it some more, to add pipes, redirection, and allow user to run native apps from within. But that's just extra stuff. The assignment is technically done.

Now I can concentrate on the OWL-Lite project (10 bonus points if you know what OWL is, and 50 bonus points if you can tell me what is it good for), and grading CMPT-183 homeworks (bleh).

Happy Easter everyone!

Achtung!

2006-04-15T01:31:00.000-04:00

Here is a random warning message which could be found on many BBS'es back in the day:

   ACHTUNG!
   --------
Das machine is nicht fur gerfingerpoken und mittengrabben.
   Ist easy schnappen der Sprinngwerk, blowenfusen und
      poppencorken mit spitzensparken.
Ist nicht fur gewerken by das Dummkopfen.  Das rubbernecken
  sightseeren keepen hands in das Pockets.
   Relaxen und watch das blinkenlights...

Taken from textfiles.com.

8D

Writing a Shell

2006-04-13T23:36:00.000-04:00

The new project in the OS class is to write a java based shell emulation. I'm excited - this sounds like a really fun assignment. In fact, it just seems a wee bit easy. All you really need to do is to parse user input and traverse the file system.

Requirements are really easy - do include equivalents of ls, mkdir, cd and date, keep history of n most recently used commands, and m most recently visited directories. Not much else. Sounds like cake...

What I really want to explore is to mimic pipes and input/output redicection, and letting the user to execute native programs by using Javas Runtime exec method. It also doesn't seem that difficult if you think about it.

Dr. Robila reccomended that those who can't figure this assignment out can allways attempt to buy code from zewrestler who was the only person in class who managed to implement this last semester. Hehe...

Wheeeee!

2006-04-13T22:44:00.000-04:00

Best add evar:

LOL!

Sociology of Pornography

2006-04-12T00:13:00.000-04:00

I read an interesting article on pornography earlier today. In it Naomi Wolf claims that the wide availability of pornography in fact contributed to lowering of male libido in recent years.

Sigh... We should really require all these Sociology and Anthropology specialists to take a Statistics class or two at some point during their college career. If I had a penny for every time someone scores an article after making huge generalizations, based on logical fallacy I would be so rich, that I would hire Bill Gates to clean my toilet :P

You see, the name of the game here is Correlation vs Causality. Everyone who majored in science knows that Correlation ≠ Causality. To prove anything in science, you need to show the causality relationship. Correlation is absolutely meaningless.

But people in Humanities, and Business related fields usually have a shaky grasp of science. Thus if you are doing anthropology or sociology research, all you need to do is to identify a correlation. The more obvious is the correlation, the better. Once you have one, you can start making big generalizations and draw baseless conclusions.

This is also the case with this article. Did Ms. Wolf do a controlled long term study of effects of porn on relationships? Hell no, she simply assumed that since we have better access to porn these days, it must be affecting people's relationships. She based this conclusion based on conversations with college students and different couples.

There was no scientific approach, no rigorous data collection, no control group. Naomi Wolf simply talked to few people, and decided that porn makes people unhappy. She doesn't even try to hide the bias. She asked people loaded questions, which were constructed to support her conclusion irregardless of the response. Most of their conclusions are derived from her personal experiences as a middle-aged woman. Abso-fucking-lutely brilliant.

I believe that the lowering of male libido that she talks about is an illusion created by changing of sexual norms in todays society. Yes, we are much more open about sexuality now. But at the same time, we developed the notion of political correctness, tolerance and professionalism.

It is a huge oversimplification to say that pornography has any effect on relationships, male libido, or anything at all. This is the same as saying that video games cause violence. Or that alcohol causes violence and inflates that crime rate. Prohibition proved that we were wrong about that one. Why do people think that this is different in case of video games and porn???

Again, we need hard evidence supported by controlled tests, and clinical studies. We need reliable results that are possible to verify. Otherwise we are just playing the "what if" game. What if porn is bad for relationships? What if video games cause violence? And what if they do not?

I call bullshit on this article. "Men are less able to connect erotically to women" my ass lady! Show me some hard evidence for this? Selectively interviewing repressed girls who are disappointed with their sex lives, or undereducated, stoners who have no clue about life does not count as evidence. It is coincidental correlation.

Naomi Wolf likes romantic tension and mystery. An undergrad guy from Northwestern on the other hand seems to prefer close intimacy without the awkward tension, and second guessing your partner. Personal preference? Generation gap? Both? No, of course not. The fact that some random guy does not share Naomi Wolf's sexual preferences must be a proof that evil porn corrupted his mind.

Give me a fucking break!

How to pull an all-Nighter?

2006-04-10T16:29:00.000-04:00

I was reading Lifehacker, and I found this article about pulling all-nighters. It's all nice and dandy but there is nothing in that article that wouldn't be common sense, and self explanatory.

What is the point of giving advice such as: when you are sleepy, don't like down, take a cold shower, walk around or drink coffee/tea. No shit sherlock!

The truth is - pulling an all-nighter is not difficult. Staying up should not be all difficult unless you are 5 and it's Christmas Eve :P

What is difficult is coping with prolonged sleep deprivation and sleep debt. When you pull an-all nighter, you most likely need to go to school/work the next day. Hell, you might be forced to work late night hours the very same day. Thus you may not be able to "catch up" on sleep till the weekend or something like that.

You will likely accumulate sleep debt, and you will get progressively more exhausted and fatigued every day.

It all really depends on your natural resistance, physical condition and etc. Everyone is affected differently. A stand alone all-nighter is usually harmless, especially if you are young and fit. But when it is followed by several late night coding sessions (or another all-nighter down the road), even the toughest, meanest hard core coffe chugging hacker can start to suffer from sleep deprivation symptoms.

First, and most important tip for those who pull an all-nighter is: try not to not drive the next day. Especially in the evening. Beware of the microsleep lapses. They can be extremely dangerous when you are behind the wheel. The worst part is that you can't control these - your brain simply switches off for a moment.

Most people are not even aware they fall asleep this way. You go from fully awake, to out cold to fully awake again in under a minute. To you it may seem like you "spaced out" for a second but most likely you just had a microsleep lapse. A minute is enough time to drive into a ditch, or hit a tree. So be careful.

Second, be aware of the "Undead" syndrome. This is where you turn into a living zombie and you sit at your desk staring at your monitor for a good hour or two. Your mind will wander, and generally work in low gear. Are sharp like a razor in the morning, chances are that by lunchtime you will turn into a barely coherent, spaced out lump of flesh. Your concentration will suffer, and getting into "the zone" will be twice or three times as difficult as usual. Every time you get interrupted you will be knocked out off the flow, and it will take you a while before you can resume work at your normal pace. This is normal.

Third, Caffeine rush is to be expected. See, you were up all night drinking coffee and soda. Now you are at work/school drinking more of it to keep yourself awake. You should expect to be unusually hyper. You may also be moody, fidgety, irritated or even anxious. And you will crash eventually. Caffeine crash may range from a total physical shutdown to a mild downer. It usually manifests itself as energy drain. At some point you just stop fidgeting, and you slump down into a near coma. You may experience extreme fatigue, muscle pains, dry mouth, headache and etc. The severity of the rush, and subsequent crash of course depend on the amount of caffeine you ingest. If you just drink coffee or soda you will likely experience only a mild crash.

If you are into Jolt Cola, energy drinks, caffeinated mints and Caffeinated soap - and you use them in excessively during your all-nighter and the day after... Well, you will feel like shit when you crash.

I recommend sticking to your regular amounts of caffeine. You really don't need 7 coffees, and 10 Red Bull's and a pack of coke to stay awake all night. If you don't go overboard you may avoid the caffeine rush, and the subsequent crash.

And lastly, long term abuse of your circadian rhythms will affect your sleep patterns. If you pull many all-nighters, your body will try to adapt to all this late night activity. So once you go back to normal sleeping pattern, you may find it difficult to fall asleep even when you are very tired. You may find yourself tossing and turning till 4am for few days/weeks until your cyrcadians return to normal. This is to be expected :P

Please note that IANAD - most of this is from personal experience, and stuff that I heard from others.

The cost of elegant code...

2006-04-09T12:45:00.000-04:00

There are essentially two ways to code:

Elegantly
Optimally

Elegant code, is usually well structured, object oriented and human readable. Blocks of code are neatly divided into meaningfully named methods. All the methods are atomic (ie. they accomplish only one clearly defined task), and encapsulation is complete. All the data is contained in meaningful data structures which have elegant accessors and mutator methods, iterators and etc... Such code is a joy to work with, and a pleasure to maintain. It also runs slow as shit flowing up the river.

Optimal code, is an ugly kludge. It is a nasty hack which lumps everything together. Method calls are computationally expensive, so the optimal code will usually consist of one method which does everything. There will be 8 different, completely unrelated things going on in a single loop (because you want to limit your iteration time). All the data is contained in arrays (preferably single dimension arrays). This code is butt ugly, but runs fast.

I am currently in the process of converting my "elegant" code to something more "optimal". The code is getting less readable and confusing by the minute. But you have to do, what you have to do.

This makes me think though - is it even possible to write "critical" code in an elegant way? We always joke about how bad coding practices introduce bugs that can be avoided. But if you are forced to optimize the shit out of your semi-elegant, program you end up shaving off allot of important stuff. Encapsulation and atomicity are the first things to go - and those are staples of OO paradigm...

Sometime bad code is necessary. This is not an excuse to write a, buggy code of course. But next time I find an ugly hackish code, I will first check if it is and optimized "speedcode" before I start complaining or refactoring.

Bad News

2006-04-08T21:48:00.000-04:00

This one cracks me up every time:

It might be old, I don't know - but it's funny.

Science and Religion

2006-04-07T10:48:00.000-04:00

Can we please establish something once and for all:

Science ∩ Religion = ∅

I might be one of the very few people who think this way, but I believe this to be true. Religion and Science are mutually exclusive. One is concerned with hard logic, and furthering understanding this physical universe we inhabit. The other deals with spiritual growth, and the metaphysical.

I don't get the whole creationist and Intelligent Design movement. Can someone explain to these people that the book of Genesis is an allegory? The biblical story of creation is like a PG-13 version of the history of the universe - with all the mind boggling physics, chemistry and biology details replaced by fluff. Kinda like the "birds and the bees" story you would give to kindergarten kids if they asked.

Before I moved to US I have never encountered this kind of rabidly literal interpretation of the Bible. We already had this dispute a while ago, when Charles Darwin was proving his theory. At some point the Church backed off, and accepted evolution. We all agreed this was a moot point and that there is no need to argue about this anymore.

Somehow we all understood that in religion class (yes, in Poland there is no strong separation of Church and State so religion is part of the public school curriculum) we talk about Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and the Great Flood, while in a science class we talk about the Big Bang theory, dinosaurs and evolution. We allways thought about them as separate, and mutually exclusive. It would have never occurred to me that both can't coexist until I came to US.

Sigh... Don't the creationists, and intelligent design people realize they are the laughing stock of the world?

When a creationist approaches me, I usually don't even bother talking about science. Intelligent arguments do not work well against blind zealotry. So I talk about pastafarianism, which is about as scientific as the "inteligent design theory".

Lucent Sues MS over 360 patent infringment

2006-04-07T10:23:00.000-04:00

Ha ha! Apparently Xbox 360 violates Lucent's patent on MPEG-2 encoding. They want MS to pay up or recall all the boxes from the market.

Didn't they just settle with Eolas not so long ago?

Doesn't this make Sony another logical target once PS3 boxes hit the stores?

The good thing here is that Lucent seems to be in this for money. So they probably will not go after open source projects which free media players and etc. There is simply no money there, and it's not like they are competitive in the media player market either.

Repeat after me: "software patents are bad, mmkey."

Convert a large Access table into Excel files

2006-04-05T20:01:00.000-04:00

I got an unusual request today. Someone sent me an Access file, asking to convert it to Excel. Why? I don't know, I guess people are confused by the database stuff or something. I looked at the file, and figured this would be simple. There was only a single table in the DB.

I had one problem though - the table had over 400k records. An Excel worksheet can take only around 65,536 rows. It's a design choice they made - and you have to deal with it. The export feature in Access however does not take this into account. If the table has more rows than the worksheet can accept it simply discards all the remaining entries and gives you an error message.

I really don't get this. Excel and Access are both part of the same Office Suite. They were likely developed by the same team/department/group. How come no one ever caught this? What is the point of having the export feature if it doesn't work half the time?

Fortunately you can export it to other formats, for example tab delimited text file. I like text files. Text files are easy to process. Hell, text files are absolutely trivial to process - unless of course you are a windows user.

So I exported the DB into a text file, copied it over to my Kubuntu laptop and did this:

$split -l 65536 my_file.txt

Now I had 7 tab delimited text files that could be easily imported into Excel.

That was easy! Easy as π!

Coding AJAXified pages drives me nuts!

2006-04-05T12:40:00.000-04:00

The little inconsistencies between the way IE, and Firefox handle various DOM requests will drive me mad one day. Why can't we just all code to the standard? :(

For example, I wanted to have a collapsible table which displays list of entries. You click on a 'remove' checkbox next to one entry, and it goes away as the table neatly collapses to fill in the gap. In the background you have asynchronous call to remove this row from the db. One would think that the hardest part would be the db call. But that was easy!

First you create the http request object:

request_o = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); // IE
request_o = new XMLHttpRequest(); // everyone else

Then I send a post request to a php script (here aptly named ajax_request_handler.php..

request_o.open('post',  'ajax_request_handler.php');
request_o.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
request_o.http.send('rowid=' + rowid);

This works like an oridinary post request from a web form (ie. php can access the sent value via $_POST["rowid"]).

At this point I don't care about error handling. If there was some error then the php script will fail quietly and no harm is done.

The hard part was collapsing the table! What I initially did is I marked the tr tags with id's representing row numbers:

<tr id="row_1"> ... </tr>

Then I have onChange javascript call to handle the reformatting and AJAX call:

<input type='checkbox' name='remove' onChange='removeRow("row_1");'>

I implement this function in Javascript:

function removeRow(rowid)
{
 document.getElementByID(rowid).innerHTML="";
}

So in effect the contents of the <ltr> tag are set to an empty string. Should work, eh? It did work but only on IE! FF refused to cooperate - and I'm not sure why. I know that the browser does implement the innerHTML property. I could for example grab all the code inside the <tr> tag but I could not erease it. Any clue why?

After several hours of agonizing over this, and constant browser flipping (fix some code, test in IE, test in FF, fix some code, etc...) I gave up and decided to change approach. Instead of removing the information, I would just hide it:

document.getElementByID(rowid).style.display="none";

This is not necessarily what I initially had in mind but it works in both browsers. Good enough for me. When the user refreshes the page the hidden entries will be gone anyway, because they were removed from the DB via AJAX call.

Of course, it was still far from perfect. FF and IE handle the onChange attribute differently! In FF, when I click on the checkbox the entry is removed and collapsed immediately. In IE however it sticks around. I have to click on the checkbox, and then click on something else for onChange to be registered. Gah!

I didn't know that. I don't use fucking IE! I thought that for checkboxes onChange is handled the same way as onClick - immidiately. I guess MS developers thought differently. So I changed my onChange to onClick just to be consistent.

So far everything seems to work correctly. Sigh.. Why does client side coding have to be so painful?

It's pronounced Au-then-ti-ca-tion

2006-04-04T14:47:00.000-04:00

Can I ask a question? Is it really that difficult to pronounce the word authentication? Seriously! I don't know. I have a little bit of an accent going, so I do not always pronounce things the right way. For example, when I say multi-threaded it kindoff comes out sounding like the infamous "Multipas" from the Fifth Element most of the time :P

Saying "thirty three" kills me every single time. You sneaky English people with your soft r's and your "th" sounds. I get it wrong 90% of the time :P

So I usually do not make fun of people mispronouncing words (unless they happen to be the president of the united states - you have no excuse then), especially when they speak with an accent. But most people I work with are native English speakers - and yet they can never pronounce authentication.

Even if I say it first:

Me: "Now check Outgoing server requires authentication"
Luser: "server requires au... au.. authentification... ok, checked"

Really! It's pronounced au-then-ti-ca-tion! Much easier than 33 in my opinion! I mean it's not like I'm making you say for example: "w szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie" or "konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka".

Gmail Manager Firefox Extension B0rked

2006-04-04T00:52:00.000-04:00

If you use the Gmail Manager extension for Firefox you probably have noticed that it could not log in today. It appears that Google has changed something with their protocol again.

However, the newest version 0.4.3.5 (dated for April 3rd) fixes this. I upgraded, and I'm able to receive gmail notifications again. I kinda felt disconnected without that little icon showing me how many emails I got so far.

Todd Long is the man! He fixed the extension the same day Google broke it! Wohoo!

Thank's Todd!

Inuyasha = DragonBall-Z for Girls LOL

2006-04-03T23:04:00.000-04:00

Image: VGCats disses Inuyasha

Hehehe! It so is DragonBall-Z for girls! LOLOL!

My brother was always a big Ranma fan, so I kindoff got suckered into watching Inuyasha on the account off "hey, this was done by Rumiko Takashi". What's funny, is that when you think about it, you can do almost 1:1 mapping of Ranma characters to Inuyasha characters. Just try it:

Ranma = Inuyasha
Akane = Kogome
Ryoga = Koga
Happosai = Totosai/Myoga
and etc..

If you never saw the show, here is what you need to know: Inuyasha is a guy with a Really Big Sword™ which can deliver a single devastating super move that can kill a 100 daemons in one go. He keeps winning with daemons that are much more powerful than him simply using that one move (he gets like upgrades to the move later on, but it's still basically the same damn thing). Then there is some questing plot line (searching for sacred jewel shards), and a classic shipper bent for girls (think Inuyasha is to Kogome as Moulder is to Scully or John Crichton is to Aeryn Sun). So yes, DragonBall-Z for girls kinda sums it up pretty well :P

Strangely enough, I find it more watchable than Dragonball - perhaps because Inuyasha lacks those super powerful individuals that can destroy planets with a fart. Or perhaps because most of Inuyasha combat scenes do not streach longer than 1-2 episodes. Sooner or later every villain gets a Wind Scar (Inuyasha's main super move) in the face, and dies. Consistency, ladies and gentlemen is they key :P

Of course if you were to choose, I would say watch Fullmetal Alchemist instead of Inuyasha. Fullmetal is simply much better, and more original show. Not mentioning Evangelion - which is in a league of it's own.

Code Segments in Latex

2006-04-03T21:01:00.000-04:00

Whenever I copy and paste some code segments into my Latex documents, the verbatim environment eats my tabs. Apparently it is a feature, so I usually make my text editor convert tabs to n spaces before I import or copy the code into Kile. But that's annoying as hell!

The other day I found a simple and elegant solution. Use moreverb package. Somewhere at the beginning of the document do:

\usepackage{moreverb}

Then, instead of using normal verbatim environment do:

\begin{verbatimtab}
% code with tabs
\end{verbatimtab}

Easy as pie! The only downside - Kile does not consider verbatimtab to be a verbatim like environment so it does not highlight the text inside a different color like it does for standard verbatim blocks. But that's a small price to pay for the added convenience.

MPAA still doesn't get it.

2006-04-03T17:41:00.000-04:00

This is priceless. zewrestler told me about it this morning, and now I just found this on boingboing. Apparently MPAA intends to sell movie downloads for twice the price of a DVD. of course we are talking about a DRM, crippled, windows only versions.

Brilliant! Abso-fucking-lutely brilliant! This will definitely put a stop to all that illegal downloading. After all, a free, uncrippled, platform independent version can't compete with a locked down, super-expensive, windows-ony one... Er, wait...

Seriously, who does market research for these people? Do they even do market research at all? If they would offer the movies at 1/2 price of the DVD on account of the stupid DRM cripplage then maybe they would get some buyers.

Let me spell it for you: iTunes! The reason why they are so popular is because the songs seem to be cheap! They are not, but for an average Joe 99 cents for a crippled song sounds reasonable. In the same way, $5 for a crippled movie sounds semi-decent. Think about it - after you pay off costs of online distribution (which is incredibly cheap - you will usually pay a flat monthly fee for hosting and maintenance and bandwidth) it's pure profit. They already did a killing in the box office, profited from DVD sales - and etc.. Online sales are just free cash for them.

But no... Free cash is not enough. They want to sell you downloads for twice the cost of the DVD even though it costs them less than a quarter of the DVD price to host it.

Ladies and gentlemen - this is exactly how corporate greed kills business. Sigh...

Matlab vs Java

2006-04-02T22:42:00.000-04:00

This SUCKS balls! I was at school today, trying to run my NMF algorithm on a 4MB image file. I started running the test around 12pm - it was chugging along happily as I was working on my Programming Languages homework (which is crazy btw).

I left at 6, and my program was still running. That's 6 hours and counting. What's funny is that Dr. Robila implemented the same algo in Matlab and it processed the very same image in under 5 minutes. Aaaagh!

Of course you need to take into consideration that in Matlab matrix multiplication, or a transpose is accomplished with a single operator. This means that there are years of tweaking, and anal optimization behind each of these. I'm doing all of this using loops, and my data is stored in Java's DataBuffers. This means that every access is a function call.

I'm thinking about optimizing this using arrays. I will have to look into how much faster is it to access an element of a multidimensional array, as opposed to accessing an element of a DataBuffer. Perhaps it is not even worth bothering, as Java arrays are sort-of-objects anyway.

If that damn JDS machine freezes before finishing this 6+ hour run, I will take a fucking baseball bat to it or something :P I better see some results tomorrow!

Online Calculator Which Works

2006-04-02T22:29:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know that there is always google to calculate stuff online, but calcr is done with AJAX! This means no waiting for page to reload to see the result!

These guys learned their web design style from Google too - the page is minimalistic, clean and spiffy. It looks really, really simple, but there has to be allot of AJAX code underneath. I love it.

My only suggestion would be - allow the users to pick between degrees/radians for the trig functions. Other than that, it is really neat web app.

Of course I lately do most of my calculations in Octave. I'm continually amazed how much functionality does that environment have. It kicks the shit out of the good old bc :P

Time.gov fears DDOS during Daylight Savings switch?

2006-04-02T15:00:00.000-04:00

time.gov ph34rz DDOS

I don't trust any clocks today. This is what happens when some of your clocks roll over to daylight savings automatically, and some do not. My alarm clock didn't, but my cell phone, laptop, desktop and VCR did. So today whenever check the time, I wonder if this particular clock rolls over automatically or not.

So just to be sure I popped over to time.gov, and this is what I saw (see the screenshot). Apparently, they disable the usual animated clock on the switch days fearing a massive DDOS from time confused citizenry :P This is gay. Hire a better sysadmin people - preferably one that knows a little bit about load balancing, and high traffic management. And if that's not enough, beef up your server for god's sake!

It is a damn shame to see a very popular and useful governmental site removing features during high-traffic days. It kindoff indicates a piss-poor hardware and/or maintenance. This means that theoretically time.gov could be slashdoted, farked or simply DDOS'ed by some script kiddie. And this is just ridiculous. It makes you wonder where your taxes are going...

Ghostly Farts in the Shell

2006-04-02T01:41:00.000-05:00

I was sitting here, at my computer doing some stuff and Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex was playing in the background. My brother was in the same room playing some game. All of a sudden, he started asking me if I heard farting noises. I told him that he is hearing things. :P

But then I also started hearing them. We started looking around the room and we finally realized that the noises are coming from the TV. But why on earth would there be farting noises on Ghost in the Shell? I started paying attention to the show, and whenever someone bent over or made a silly face there was an audible fart effect. WTF?

For few minutes we were watching this, and we could not believe that this was going on. Then I looked at the calendar, and I realized that it was April Fools :P Way to go [adult-swim]! LOL I completely forgot about April Fools!

As a side note, if I knew what was going on, I would play along and keep telling my brother that he is hearing shit. For a minute there he was actually thinking that he was loosing his mind. hehe

This went till the end of the episode. They also kept farting throughout Fullmetal Alchemist. I found it amusing at first, then absolutely hilarious, then annoying, then hilarious again. Finally, it just got plain old boring. I think they stopped it at midnight or something...

They also aired a Chuck Norris and Mr. T cartoons. LOL

Eolas Patent will B0rk IE in April

2006-03-31T13:09:00.000-05:00

You may or may not heard about the stupid Eolas patent on plugins. They won, and MS will now have to break IE and change the way ActiveX, media and applets load in the browser. Wohoo! We are protecting innovation by forcing a company to break compatibility, and re-write parts of it's application due to a submarine patent. As much as I hate Microsoft, this is fucking dumb!

On the other hand, the retardation of ActiveX may be a good thing. Perhaps web developers will now think twice before using it. Perhaps more people will choose browser independent AJAX based and un-broken-by-silly-patents solutions if possible.

What's funny is that Opera, Mozilla and Firefox are still allowed to have plugins... After all, after squeezing millions out of MS, there is nothing that Opera could offer them... And it is really hard to exort money from non-profits like Mozzila. :P

This of course led to a totally hilarious exchange on slashdot:

Tackhead (54550):

They're going to fucking bury that technology. They have done it before, and they will do it again. They're going to fucking kill ActiveX.
(...)
And someone, somewhere, will get an ActiveChair flung at them.

Syberghost (10557):

Now that I've stopped laughing at this line, I can reply with who that will be:

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

Z0mb1eman (629653):

Mushroom, mushroom!

LOLOL!

I think someone should make a Badger-Badger spoof starring ballmer :P

Developers, developers, developers, Googoe, Google, Chair! Oh! A Chair! Developers, developers...

What I learned at Coffe Hour yesterday.

2006-03-31T09:43:00.000-05:00

The CS department has a weekly Coffee Hour on Thursdays at 3:30 in the conference room on the third floor. Both students and faculty are invited. It is a very informal setting where you can chat just about anything with some of your professors or other students.

Yesterday, for example, I learned that Dr. Bredlau is an Anime fan. I would have never guessed that in my life! zewrestler brought me DVD's of Gungrave. He highly recommended the show so I decided to give it a try. He was giving me the DVD's during the coffee hour, and when Bredlau saw them, he commented that he likes Anime. :O

Apparently he lived in Japan for a while, and he can actually speak a little of broken Japanese. Another student there was actually learning Japanese, so this turned into a fascinating conversation about the language and culture of that country. Apparently when you are a guy, and you try to speak Japanese it is important not to "sound like a girl". Males and females speak differently, apparently and it is very common for westerners to sound effeminate if they don't know the right tone and etc... It was quite fascinating actually.

This makes you think... How many of the small details and nuances do we loose in translation when we watch anime? I'm bilingual myself, and I know that there is no such thing as lossless translation. When you translate from one language to another you need to be very careful - and most of the time you will loose something, or inadvertently add some meaning that was not in the original.

I know this, because i watched allot of english movies, subtitled in Polish, and vice versa. And let me tell you - in both cases, the experience is painful, bordering on comical. I would venture a guess than over 30-35% of actual content is completely lost. Puns, idioms, culture specific references, and some of the pop culture related jokes are virtually untranslatable.

70% is not bad - you get the plot, you get all the twist, and turns, you understand your characters and all. What you don't get is the icing on the cake - the subtle interactions, the stuff implied or hinted at. Good translators may attempt to capture that stuff, but then they run a risk of adding to the original. So sometimes you will see culturally adjusted translations which try to capture the spirit, but not the actual content of the original. So you swap a US-centric cultural reference to a native one, or an english idiom, to roughly equivalent one in the targeted language.

If you do it well, it blends in so seamlessly that hardly anyone notices... That is until someone decides that this is the "best line" in the movie/book and starts using it as a catchphrase. When that happens, a simple linguistic trick aimed at "capturing the spirit" of what was said, by using a native reference or idiom turns into "added content". That "brilliant line" was not in the original - you added it when translating. This means that while something was gained here, some meaning was also lost. Your version is slightly different from the original! This is the danger of translation. This is where I get that 30%.

This makes me want to learn more about Japanese language and culture so I can get more out of my anime and manga :P

Banker's Algorithm

2006-03-30T22:59:00.000-05:00

I just found out that I was the only student in class who actually produced a working implementation of Banker's Algorithm for the OS class. My weekend was totally shot, but I submitted a finished product that was runnable some 20 minutes before the deadline.

It's now 4 days past the deadline, and no one else got even close to a working implementation. I'm not claiming my solution is good, or even that it is entirely correct. But it runs, and it appears to be doing what it is supposed to do.

The assignment didn't seem all that difficult to me. It was allot of work, but I have seen harder things that needed to be done. But then again, maybe my implementation is totally wrong. Perhaps I totally glossed over some of the hard parts everyone seemed to get stuck on... I don't know.

Dr. Robila said he will not count that problem towards the homework grade, but he will give extra credit to all people who got close to solving it. I guess that's good, because even if I'm wrong - I might get nice extra credit out of it...

If he checks it and it turns out to be correct though, I'm going to post it somewhere so that future generations can see a working java version :)

To Wordpress of not to Wordpress

2006-03-29T14:10:00.000-05:00

I'm seriously thinking about moving away from blogger... The other day Matt jumped ship and switched to Wordpress. Following his suggestion I created a free account: terminally.wordpress.com.

As you can see, it seamlessly imported my whole blog which is great. The layout is clean and neat. But the best part of wordpress, is probably the Ajaxified user interface. They take the full advantage of the ajax goodies providing all kinds of bells and whistles like drag-and-drop interfaces for arranging your sidebar and etc...

But, it is done at the cost of customizability. Ever wondered why every wordpress blog looks the same? Because they don't let you to tweak the templates! This really sucks! I would jump ship in a heartbeat if I was allowed the same level of customizability as here on blogger. If I switched today I would have to abandon the following things:

Nicetitles: the nifty javascript that draws those nice squares when you hover over links

Floating captions under images - they are done with css. I really like doing the captions...

Custom handling of the <code> tags - I make sure that white space is preserved when I post code snippets using css. This is not the default handling.

Automatic XFN icons - I use a css hack that puts appropriate icon image on links with the rel attribute

Collapsible Posts - I use a small javascript that lets me collapse and expand parts of really long posts. I don't use it often, but it is a nice trick to have!

Using obscure HTML tags - I like to use these "weird" tags that no one ever knows about like <acronym>, <dfn> or <address>. They are in the W3C spec, but to make sure they are handled properly I define css for them

These are all the little tweaks that I have adopted over the last year or so, and I don't feel like giving them up...

My other beef with wordpress is that the default post editor is WYSYWIG. I hate that. I always type my posts in plain HTML mode. This gives me more control over my post and let's me use all the obscure HTML tags that I want. Wordpress does give you an option to edit HTML but it is not very convenient. It seems to be designed only for quick and minor tweaks - not actual day to day use. Ugh...

So for now, I think I'll stay with good old blogger. At least here I can tear down the template and adapt it to whatever theme or layout I need.

But sometime down the road, I might get my own hosting... And then wordpress would be a viable solution. Because if I have the code, I can tweak the templates and the layouts till I'm happy with them :)

Fingering with Finger!

2006-03-28T10:26:00.000-05:00

This... This is just too funny! Boingboing reports that teledildonics devices can now be controlled via finger:

This program is a rudimentary teledildonics application built around the finger daemon - hence bringing generations of CS undergrad innuendo full circle.

It has two modes in addition to what you're seeing now - if you finger [any string]@[this host], a series of random pulses will be generated, proportional to the length of the string.

Alternatively, fingering 0x[hex digits]@[this host] will instead send a direct stream of motor speeds to the vibrator, one per second.

LOLOL!

You have to love our field... Unix world is full of funy innuendos. Sometimes I wonder what do the "uninitiated" people think when they hear conversations like this:

"Dude, just finger freddie to see if he is on" (freddie is one of the main unix servers in our dept - we were trying to see if one of our classmates is logged in so we can message him with the write command)

"Hold on, let me mount your stick..." (uttered while mounting the USB flash memory stick)

"Can you grep the cat?" (as in, can you do cat on that file and then grep for whatever we are looking for)

"Just take a dump and bring it to my office so we can look at it" (as in, make a hex dump of that file, and let's examine it)

Entertainment Industry is Terminally Ill

2006-03-26T20:36:00.000-05:00

I came to a conclusion. The entertainment industry is dying. It will be done within the next few years, unless it completely restructures itself and drops the failing business models it is clinging too. And as every dying thing on earth, it is currently going through the classic 5 stages of accepting the inevitable demise: Denial, Anger/Presentiment, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

You don't believe me? Let's break this down:

Denial: "There is nothing wrong with our business model! You guys just want a free ride!"

Anger/Presentiment: "We are loosing money because of damn pirates! Let's sue them! Let's sue all of them! Even the 12 year olds! Let them feel our legal wrath! PH34R my L3G4L SK1LZ n00B!!

Bargaining: "Listen, if you use DRM we will give you all the content you want! Seriously, it's better for you. We'll even stop suing people! Everything will be good if you only agree to use DRM! Really!"

So, we have 2 more stages to go. Depression and Acceptance. Not bad, eh? So please expect these symptoms intensify as the industry is heading toward an inevitable crash.

There will be big DRM disputes, and DRM related lawsuits. Entertainment people will loose several of them and incur heavy losses. As a result some big technology companies will get locked out of content because of failure to comply with DRM requirements. People will stop buying media they can't play in their receivers.

Allot of people will realize that their iTunes collection cannot be ported to a new computer and will drop the service. Entertainment industry will go under. Facing lawsuits, money draining DRM schemes, and lockout contracts some big studios will close the doors and go out of business...

Those who survive will accept the death of the old business models, and adjust to the new reality. We will win this war.

Ph34R the C0NSUM3R B1tCH3Z!

0\/\/NZ0R3D!

2006-03-25T23:08:00.000-05:00

I don't know who made this, but LOL!

Don't try this at home...

Ð±^H tries to connect to the internet

2006-03-25T17:54:00.000-05:00

Today I have found bunch of interesting entries in my firewall log. Apparently an application named Ð±^H was trying to access the internet at various times. Now, I don't know about you - but if I see a weird sting like that I get suspicious. So I started digging.

From the logs I figured that this thing was trying to do DNS lookups (all the hits were aiming at port 53 on the remote hosts). This is not unusuall - any piece of mallware could be doing this... But, since my anti-virus and spybot scans that run just this morning did not find anything, I started looking for legit apps that could generate port 53 traffic.

I spotted my DynDNS Updater icon in the taskbar which was red (to indicate failure to update). I did a few quick tests, enabling and disabling the rule for my mysterious application and I got it. It was the damn DynDNS updater!

Question is, why the hell does it show up in my logs as Ð±^H? Why haven't I noticed this before? And what the hell were they thinking?

Vaguest Exam Question Ever

2006-03-23T22:51:00.000-05:00

One of the question on my Operating Systems exam today was to show two examples where multi-threaded implementation does not provide better performance than single threaded implementation. We were supposed to write some code/pseudocode to illustrate this...

Every person I asked put down something different for this question. No one was sure what the hell we were supposed to do. Some people used "hello world" as one of the examples. Others mentioned processing keyboard input in a word processor. In fact, allot of people gave purely iterative examples that could not be multi-threaded to begin with...

I'm pretty sure "hello world" was the wrong answer here. The question was worth 30 points - you usually don't see tricky questions like that being worth so much. I scribbled some half-assed code with big loop statements in critical section so that the threads would block and have to wait on each other. I figured the same loop implemented as a single thread would execute faster because there would be no context switching overhead, thread creation and etc..

Other example was treads locking on a shared buffer object and performing some critical section while holding onto that buffer... Still, I'm only guessing that the performance would be worse with a multi-threaded implementation. There is no way to tell for sure without actually testing this.

Of course we could not ask Dr. Robila what he meant in this question because he was not there. I hope he curves or throws out this one completely...

.xxx vs .kids

2006-03-20T18:47:00.000-05:00

There is this idea circulating in the minds of our lawmakers and politicians, that there should be a .xxx tld reserved for pr0n. This idea gets shot down every time, and yet it keeps coming back like a boomerang. All these people keep yelling: "think of the children" as they try to shove their prudish moral values down our throat. But this is not about children. An xxx tld does nothing to protect children from anything! Why?

Maybe because Internet != USA. If you make a law forcing all the pr0n into an xxx tld, this law will only apply in US. If you try to police it abroad many people will become very angry. Do you think UN will like that US courts have the absolute power to decide who is allowed to register .com domain? How about China? Nope, we can't enforce US law onto foreign owned domains - even if we control the top level servers.

So you end up with all the foreign hosted pr0n still owning their .com, .net and .org domains. How does that help to keep children away from pr0n? How does that help filtering software to do anything? This is simply a jab at the porn industry. It is no secret that our government is waging a war on pornography. In fact, I think that war on pr0n, gets more resources and attention than war on terror and on drugs combined. Not mentioning that we have yet to see ANY tangible results of any of those wars... How long are we into the war on drugs? Did we win yet?

If you really want to do something for children, set up a tightly regulated .kids tld. Set it up so that only educational, and child friendly stuff would be allowed there. Problem solved. Now just set up your filter to block everything but .kids and you can let the little bastards browse till they get carpal tunnel. And you are almost guaranteed that they will never run into anything inappropriate while the filter is on.

So why are people pushing for that xxx tld so much? What is the big deal here? The sad truth is that none of these .xxx pushing maniacs gives a shit about children. This is not about protecting kids. This is about protecting you from the "evil pornography" - whether you want it or not.

Karmic Bitchslap for Tony Soprano

2006-03-20T18:21:00.000-05:00

Is it just me, or was Tony Soprano on a receiving end of a karmic bitch slap? If you dream about being slapped in the face by a bhuddist monk you are probably a despicable human being :P

Seeing Tony as dorky salesman is just beyond bizarre. Is this how his life would be if he was not in the mob? Man, that blows... I think he was better off as a crime boss. I seriously think this is actually what hell is like. You wake up as a lame salesman, stuck in a shitty convention town and no matter what you do you can't get out :P

Last week I was sure that Tony will be just fine, but now I just don't know. I have this sneaky suspicion that he might be comatose for the rest of the season... That would be seriously gay!

BTW, I would like to thank Jamie-Lyn Discala for not wearing a bra in this episode. I guess it was cold in there or something because I could clearly see nipples in more than one scene. Yay! :)

Conqueror of Shamballa

2006-03-19T02:30:00.000-05:00

I just watched the last episode of Fullmetal Alchemist, and right after I poped in Conquerror of Shamballa. To my knowledge CoS was never dubbed. My version was in Japanese with English subtitles. Ed's voice just sounded so bizarre... I guess I was just so used to the English dub :P

The movie was good, but I was not all that impressed. I think the best part of Fullmetal was the slowly unveiling mystery of the philosopher stone, alchemy and the haemonculi. The show started bright, and cheerful and then it got progressively darker, and more sinister and the Elric brothers uncovered the secrets of alchemy. In CoS all the secrets have been revealed. The plot is fairly straightforward. It is definitely worth watching but please do not expect something out of this world. The movie is essentially as solid as a good stand-alone, Fullmetal episode. It's top notch anime but simply not as capturing as the last few episodes of the series.

[Minor spoilage may lurk below]

The plot is simple - you have two brothers, one stuck at each side of the gate. Al is trying to bring his brother back. Ed wants to go home but unfortunately in our world alchemy does not work... So he is stuck in Munich where he can witness the birth of the Nazi party.

A German occult organization called Thule Society manages to find Envy in his dragon form (last shape he assumed when traveling through the gate) and use his body to temporarily open the gate to the other world. Ed finds about it.

And it goes from there. You can expect to see people on both sides attempting to create a stable gate, brothers getting reunited, a war between worlds, and appearances by all the main characters. You can probably figure out what happens in the movie just from this description.

But this is Fullmetal, right? One would expect some shocking, mind boggling revelations at some point during the movie. But, unfortunately there is no deep underlying mystery. There are no shocking revelations about the nature of alchemy or the world. It's just action and adventure. Not that there is anything wrong in this. I just expected more.

German Hues comes off as a real dick. Munich Bradley on the other hand is a good guy. We also see Scar driving a truck at the end of the movie :P

I give it a solid B. It really could have been so much more if they just added some of that of that Fullmetal mystery and shocking twists into it.

No breaking DRM, even if it may kill you

2006-03-18T20:59:00.000-05:00

Wow... Just wow... The *AA organizations just transcended to another level of unspeakable evilness. This is from Freedom to Tinker:

There were many suggestions to legalize breaking DRM if it would compromise critical infrastructure and/or directly endanger human life. The response from the RIAA and MPAA corner was a categorical no.

They’re worried that there might be “serious doubt” about whether their future DRM access control systems are covered by these exemptions, and they think the doubt “would be even more severe” if the “exemption would turn on whether access controls ‘threaten critical infrastructure and potentially endanger lives’.”

(...)

One would have thought they’d make awfully sure that a DRM measure didn’t threaten critical infrastructure or endanger lives, before they deployed that measure. But apparently they want to keep open the option of deploying DRM even when there are severe doubts about whether it threatens critical infrastructure and potentially endangers lives.

And here’s the really amazing part. In order to protect their ability to deploy this dangerous DRM, they want the Copyright Office to withhold from users permission to uninstall DRM software that actually does threaten critical infrastructure and endanger lives.

So there you have it... It seems that they haven't learned a damn thing from the Sony debacle. Now they are trying to buy themselves laws that would allow them to continue using dangerous rootkits...

Tech Support Stories

2006-03-17T21:01:00.000-05:00

Part of my job is tech support for our field employees... On most days the calls I get are easy to fix, but sometimes I get these bizarre issues that just boggle my mind.

I encountered the weirdest email problem ever today.

A guy called me up complaining that his Outlook won't pull email anymore. I run him through the usual hoops, checking and retyping all the settings, creating a new Outlook profile and etc... Nothing worked.

He can ping both the POP and SMTP servers. He can telnet to both servers and issue commands. When creating a new profile (via Control Panel), the "Test Account Settings" shows him that everything is set up correctly, and he can connect without a problem. And yet, when he runs the same test in Outlook it fails to even connect.

Something is preventing Outlook from connecting, but it's not the firewall. The guy swears up and down that the firewall is disabled, and switched off. I made him check it like 20 times. But there has to be something blocking it - I just can't get any useful info out of him. Clueless people make phone support really difficult...

I told him to install tightvnc - and on Monday I will make him plug the laptop directly to the modem so that I can remotely get in and poke around. I bet this is something fucking trivial - he is just to clueless to notice...

Another guy actually managed to completely destroy a fresh install of Win2k in 3 days. I sent him a clean laptop with Norton AV and Windows AntiSpyware crap on Tuesday. I run a virus and spyware scans before I packed it into a box. Today his machine was barely moving at all. Norton is completely disabled, and something is locking his task-manager (when he does Ctrl+Alt+Del, or right clicks on taskbar the Task Manager option is grayed out). He said that AntiSpyware found tons of things and removed it yesterday. When Norton was still working, it also removed 5 or 6 viruses in the past few days. And then it just died. I actually don't know if it is even possible to recover from this shit. It sounds like his system was completely overrun...

I seriously don't know how people do this... How can you get your system so badly infected? Sometimes I think it would just be easier to have a training session on how to download pr0n without destroying your system. I'm pretty sure this would really cut down on the amount of tech support we need to do here...

Some days are just weird...

2006-03-16T19:46:00.000-05:00

Today was a weird day...

I think I saw the stupid ProLiant logo in my dream... Damn that stupid server. This is the only thing it does these days - it shows ProLiant on the screen and stops. I have seen so much of that logo in the past 2 days that I think it got burned into my retina...

When I was getting ready for work today, the TV was on some news station (I think CNN). I actually caught a glimpse of a HP commercial on TV at some point. Guess what were they selling? Pro fucking Liant servers! Agh!

HP technician finally showed up to replace the mobo. After he plugged in all the hardware into place, but before he put the air-guards, latches and all the other funky bullshit in place he did a test. The server zoomed through the ProLiant logo and started doing the POST. I was ready to hug him! But my joy was short lived... Soon after POST finished we run into a non-system-disk error.

The technician said not to worry, because we might need to fiddle with the BIOS a bit to get the RAID working and all. He powered the machine down, put it together, closed it and and booted back up... Only to see the static ProLiant logo. He spent the next hour and a half fiddling with the parts and scratching his head.

He is supposed to come back tomorrow with a new CPU and power supply... Will it get fixed? Who knows. This damn thing is shot... I'm just praying that the MySQL database and the nightly backup dumps are on the backup tapes... If the drives are dead, I am going to puke.

Fast forward till after the lunch. One of my co workers went absolutely hysterical. Apparently her boyfriend tried to commit suicide, took something and then called her at work while being barely coherent. It sounded really serious... There was really nothing we could do. We all sat there listening to her pleading on the phone with him. Petrified... Another girl quickly called in an ambulance for him (while he was still on the phone), and then offered to drive her home. That was pretty much all the assistance we could give.

What do you say in that situation? What do you do? It's messed up.

When I got home I saw another ProLiant commercial... Fuck ProLiant! I hate their guts!

Some days are just weird like that...

Plan B? There is no plan B!

2006-03-14T21:25:00.000-05:00

Our server at work went down... It went down hard... So hard that it's out of comission till tomorrow, when a new mobo and cpu get here. Sigh...

Why on earth did we cheep out on the super-duper HP care package warranty thingy? I really wish I we had it now - I could have a tech at my location in 4 hours flat. When you deal with a critical server, next business day service just doesn't cut it.

I hope to God that this is just a bad mobo. If the drives died I will fucking shoot someone... But since we had a RAID setup we should be ok. Both drives would have to die... Of course, with my luck that is certainly not ouf of question. So I keep my fingers crossed and pray for the best.

Of course we do have a a tape backup - but that's only data. Setting up this system from scratch will drive me up the wall.

We are pretty much dead till the new mobo is sitting in the case. This server was our domain controller and hosted our DNS server, DHCP server, SMTP server and HTTP server. This was a really bad idea to have all that shit on one machine. And we have no backup strategy, no contingency plan, no nothing. If the server goes, we are royally fucked. And it just happened.

I turned our sonicwall into a temporary DHCP for the office so at least people can use internet in the morning. That's as much as I could do today. I can't just plug in my RAID SCISI disks or the SCISI tape drive to our low end Dell office boxen... Sigh...

Once we get up and running I'm thinking about distributing the workload to more than one machine. I would really prefer to have a separate box for the webserver and another one for mailserver. We will probably need to keep the file and printer sharing, DNS and DHCP on the windows box... But there is just no reason why we should not have a dedicated webserver and mailserver in the office...

It doesn't have to be a beefed up server beast either, as we are only hosting web apps user internally by the employees. This is all low traffic stuff. Our official webpage is hosted offsite (and is crappy as hell, but it's not my pair of shoes so screw that). We can probably put in some low end Dell server to accommodate our mail and web needs - as long as we have a backup strategy for it it should be ok.

I need to run it by the boss. As it is right now our biggest issue is 50+ employees in the field trying to push their outgoing mail through our dead server, and trying to access out web apps. If we had that on a separate machine, we still would be fucked but at least it would be an internal thing - leaving all the people in the field unaffected...

I never thought I'd say that, but thank god that our POP3 server is hosted and maintained offsite by a consulting company. It is usually annoying as hell to go through them to set up new accounts and do tweaking... But at least our employees can still receive email now.

Update Wed, March 15 2006, 09:30 PM

Server is still down :( HP dispatch did not have my parts. The motherboard will be shipped tomorrow morning, but the CPU is on back order and they don't know when they will have one. This is absolutely ridiculus. If this is not fixed by tomorrow my boss will explode... HP tech support blows!

Update Thu, March 16 2006, 15:17 PM

Replacing mobo on the server did not help. The technician should be back tomorrow with a new CPU and a power supply backplane. This is day 2 of downtime, going into day 3... We have never been down so long... Fuck!

Update Fri, March 17 2006, 08:59 PM

Server is finally up! Yaaay!

Donnie Darko

2006-03-14T11:24:00.000-05:00

I just watched Donnie Darko. I can honestly say this must be one of the best movies I have ever seen. Amazing, profound, thought provoking movie. Zewrestler mentioned it was good, but damn - I was completely blown away.

I'm not even going to talk about the plot here - this movie just needs to be watched. The director actually managed to make Drew Barrymore act in this one - something I didn't think was physically possible. If he got her to actually work for once, you can just imagine how the the rest of the cast performed.

This is one of those movies that causes an instant thoughtstorm start brewing under your skull. I still can't shake it off. Was the tangent universe real or only a figment of Donnie's imagination - a side effect of his mental illness? Does it really matter? What is reality anyway?

We all assume that reality is the objective state of truth. We establish reality by comparing and contrasting our own subjective perceptions, against those of other individuals around you. You take what you perceive to be true, and what other's do and take a simple set intersection operation. Whatever you get is the objective truth. The rest are subjective distortions, dreams, hallucinations, and illusions.

But there is a problem here. What if my brain is not working correctly? Why if the individuals whose views I use to generate my definition of objective reality are only figments of my imagination? The only way I can even try to establish what is real, is by process of subjective, and biased observation. Everything that I ever knew, saw or experienced may have been a dream. How do I know it wasn't if I haven't woken up yet?

Do you really exist as a separate entity? Or do you only exist with respect to me? This is the dilemma of the Demirug. Am I a lonely architect of my own personal universe that lives and dies with me? We are truly tragic beings, yearning to connect with each other but destined to exist in solitude. As Granny Death said in the movie: every living thing dies alone...

Sorry for the existential outburst. Just go and watch the movie and you will understand :)

6 Firefox Extensions I could not live without

2006-03-13T21:59:00.000-05:00

Here is the list of 6 Firefox extensions I could not live without:

Adblock - I do not consider Adblock an extension anymore. I feel that this is an essential part of the browser. Adblock is the reason why I refuse to use any other browser ever. This extension allows me to enjoy the web the way it should be - clean, and without blinking banners, and loud annoying flash ads. If you are not using Adblock, you are missing out.

Session Saver - this must be one of the most useful extensions of all times (except for the king of extensions - Adblock of course). It will save your browsing session, and restore it next time you open your browser. Have you ever closed the browser window by mistake, loosing your long blog post or comment? Have you ever lost a link to a really cool website because of a sudden crash? If you did, then this is an extension for you. I absolutely love this extension, and it made my life so much easier - I can simply close the browser whenever I want and have all my tabs restored for me, from a cashed version - complete with scrolling, and data entered into text forms. This one is a must-have.

Spellbound - spellbound is a spell checker for online text forms. It allows you to check and correct text in virtually any web form. I can't spell to save my life, so this extension comes extremely handy when I post comments to other people's blogs, or use online forms that do not have a built in spell-checker. I use it even on sites that provide spell-checking features - because my SpellBound is trained to my style, and contains a custom dictionary of geeky words that I use on daily basis.

del.icio.us - as the name suggests this extension allows you to post del.icio.us bookmarks with a click of a button. The dialog box provided by this extension, replicates all the functionality of you get when using the bookmarklet.

Gmail Manager - the ultimate Gmail extension. Unlike some other extensions that I tried, this on just works. It always shows the updated state of your inbox, and never "gets stuck" on some rogue email. In addition, it allows you to manage multiple accounts.

Greasemonkey - Greasemonkey is one of these extensions that you either don't care about, or absolutely love. I would die without Greasemonkey. I mainly use it to streamline adding technorati tags to my blogger posts. Until Blogger adds folksonomy tagging, I use a Greasemonkey script to add that feature to my Create Post pages :)

These are my favorites. Few others that do warrant a honorable mention are ImageZoom, Disable Targets for Downloads and Timestamp.

Woke up this morning, got myself a gun...

2006-03-12T22:12:00.000-05:00

Sopranos are back! Yay!

First things first - Medow's strip dance thing scene was definitely to short. Was that a flashback scene or was this new? The whole beginning sequence was kinda funky, mix so I don't know anymore. I don't remember seeing it before though, and I can't google up anything at this moment so I guess this is new. And I want more.

Could someone please explain to me the whole Burrough's Western Lands quote? It went totally over my head the first time around (mostly due to distracting Jamie-Lynn DiScala's sexy dancing thing). Burroug's piece is talking about the 7 souls in Egyptian mythology. Here is the actual text:

The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls.

Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren the Secret name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that's where Ren came in.

Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power. Light. The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she or it is third man out...depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense - but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead.

Number four is Ba, the Heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk's body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka, the double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands.

Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

Number seven is Sekhu, the Remains.

- William Burroughs, The Western Lands

I'm to tired to actually do some proper analysis but I bet this is supposed to be some really deep shit right there. The die-hard Soprano fans should get cracking on deciphering the symbolism here.

I'm guessing this is about Tony's life falling apart and him slowly dying inside, and getting more fucked up (and thus loosing his souls) or something like that. Although he seemed to really be doing well recently... Maybe this is supposed to be foreshadowing, or whatnot? I don't know. I'll leave it to the true soprano-heads to figure this one out.

I know one thing - there is no way Tony is dying. He is the show, so killing him off in the first episode of a new season would be ridiculous. Nice attempt at a cliffhanger, but we know better than this. :P

New Caprica is a Dump!

2006-03-11T18:32:00.000-05:00

Some comments on the Battlestar Galactica Season Finale last night:

Why the hell did Cylon's send Al from the Quantum Leap to deliver a peace message to Galactica? Wouldn't it be easier to send another Boomer or #9? Now humans know about another Cylon model... I guess this was supposed to be a show of good will or something. By outing their our own agent they wanted to show humans that they are serious about it... I think this was really stupid. Humans would be skeptical whether or not an agent was outed.

New Caprica is a dump! The settlement was a dumb idea. I would much rather live in one of those cozy apartments on Cloud Nine than in a fucking tent on the surface. What were these people thinking?

Wouldn't a year be enough to actually build some normal houses? Or at least some sort of huts and whatnot? Baltar lives in his nice starship landed on the surface, and the rest of the population sleeps in crappy tents. I understand that the planet may have few natural resource, but come on. Even little mud huts would be better than the shitty refugee camp they built.

I also don't get why all the people were living clumped together in this really poor looking camp. I mean, they have a whole planet for themselves. It's not like they are running out of space. Why does the camp look so congested then? Shouldn't the people be farming the shit out of the land, building settlements and stuff? The camp looked like it was built last week, not a year ago...

Sigh... I don't know - I just had hard time buying this 1 year gap. I feel like we missed up on some good character development. What happened to Sharon in that year? Is she still locked up on Galactica? What happened between Starbuck and Apollo? How did Chief and whatshername patch things up?

I guess we will get to see at least part of this stuff in flashback scenes but.. Meh...

MobuzzTV

2006-03-08T23:52:00.000-05:00

Karina from MobuzzTV is Hot!

Recently I discovered a great little vlog news site called MobuzzTV. It is a daily 3 minute vidcast, talking about the things that are currently hot news on the interwebs.

The site describes itself as "A vlog for the mobile generation". The self imposed goal of the Mobuzz people is to provide us daily news in byte sized chunks that can be easily watched on a mobile phone or an ipod. I like this format. My attention span is way to short these days, and I just don't have time to sit through the lengthy podcasts.

Mobuzz is done very professionally, the commentary is clever and witty and the news presenter Karina is hot. I swear, there is nothing hotter than an attractive girl delivering an intelligent, and passionate commentary on technology related news, quoting slashdot, boingboing and the like. The fact that she really seems to know what she is talking about and this makes her so much more irresistible :P

So this is not just some random silly vlog. This is the fresh web and tech buzz, professionally delivered by hot chicks in byte sized increments for people without any attention span. I think I'm addicted...

Picky Fast Food Eaters

2006-03-08T20:49:00.000-05:00

One of the most annoying things in the world is a picky fast food customer. I bet you saw one of them at least once in your life. Those are the people who make ridiculously complex orders at Burger King or Taco bell. For example they order a Whopper without mayo, onions pickles and tomatoes. Or a Big Mack without the middle bun... Or a chicken Quesadila without the spicy sauce.

Meanwhile you are on your short lunch break trying to eat something really quick and go back to work. But no... You have to wait 15 minutes, as the picky eater makes up their mind on the order, then changes it, and then complains when they mess up his crazy ass order. And the fast food employees always mess it up - partly because they are not the smartest or motivated folks on the block to begin with (otherwise they would not be flipping burgers) and partly because these orders are plain stupid.

When I go to a fast food place, I'm not picky. Hell, all fast foods sell you garbage. If you want to customize your sandwich go to Subway or something. But when you are at Burger King just picked a numbered combo item, and move along... It's all the same shitty food anyway.

Open Letter to Earthlink Wireless

2006-03-08T10:22:00.000-05:00

Dear Earthlink Wireless,

You suck! If you want to stay in this business, please get your shit together. You already lost me¹ as a customer, and I will make sure I tell all my friends and business contacts to stay away from your wireless services.

Let me give you a hint - when you send your customer a new blackberry using next day delivery, that said customer expects the device to work upon arrival. Not 3-5 days later. Not 2 weeks later. Not a month later. We really want to take the device out of the box, and stat using it.

Why is it so difficult to get a blackberry activated on your system? I went through this process 3 times in the last few months, and each time it's the same old story. After the mandatory 5 day wait, your customer service apologizes profusely, offers me downtime credit and escalates my case. I am told to wait another week. Another week goes by, and my device is still not working. I call you, threaten cancellation. Usually at this point one of your managers promises me to "personally" take care of the case.

This happens every single time!

Is it really that hard to get these thins squared away quickly? Why do you make your customers wait half a month, and make no less than 6 customer service calls just to get their mobile device registered on the network?

On more than one occasion I have been told by your reps, that the communication system you use is really bad and not all the requests go through. I don't care about that. This is your problem! This is not an excuse. All I need is a working blackberry - I really don't care how you guys do this. I don't care about the poor implementation of your systems, or the lack of communication between the departments. If it is so bad, then fix it! I really couldn't care less.

How can you call yourself a service provider, if you failt to provide me with any kind of timely adequate service. I do not need my blackberry to be activated in April - I need it working NOW! What is this so damn difficult?

I do understand that according to the blackberry warranty the replacement device will be a refurbished one. However, last time I checked "refurbished" in the dictionary it did not mean "broken piece of garbage". That is exactly what you have sent me 2 weeks ago. The blackberry refuses to sync up with the PC. The only thing your tech support is able to offer me is a ~~new~~ another refurbished blackberry.

I have waited 3 weeks to activate my replacement device. There is no way I'm waiting another 3 weeks again. I had enough of this. I'm switching to Verizon. You people suck.

¹ - when I say me, I actually mean my boss. It is his blackberry, but I figured that this letter would sound better if written in first person. Especially since I am the person doing all the footwork and making all the calls in this case. :)

Patriot Act Renewed

2006-03-07T21:53:00.000-05:00

Sigh... It seems that Patriot Act is here to stay.

Please excuse my language but the only thing I can say to this is: [click to view]

But hey, we are much safer now, right? I feel so much more confident knowing that the ~~Thought Police~~ Homeland Security will be there to make sure that people are not watching online porn or that they don't pay off their credit card bills to fast.

The man says Patriot Act is doubleplusgood so it must be true! And we get new provisions! Wohoo! We can probably expect more of the same in 4 years, unless we get some sane, people in the government. At this pace the bill of rights should be completely dissolved within my lifetime...

The blatant anal rape on freedom continues.

I just want you people to know that if you voted for bush, it is all your fault :P

Homeworks From Hell

2006-03-06T23:47:00.000-05:00

I just spent an inordinate amount of time on Dr. Deremer's BNF homework. I'm still not sure if I got everything right but I just don't feel like looking at it again. I still haven't figured out a way to typeset BNF's in latex.

What I do is I use the inline math environment to treat the BNF as a math formula. This has an unfortunate side effect, as the default latex behavior is to break line on inequality symbols. Most BNF tokens are of the form <token> so, if the line is broken on < or > it looks absolutely ridiculous. I simply enforced manual line breaks, and forced alternate spacing using \quad and \qquad. This is far from optimal solution. I need to find a better way to do this for the future.

On the other hand, I found a great way to draw parse trees using the pstricks package which should be bundled by default with most modern latex installations. I drew all my trees by hand, and then just coded them up. The syntax is super easy:

\pstree{ \TR{root} }
{
   \TR{child-1}

   \pstree{ \TR{child-2} }
   {
      \TR{sub-child-of-2}
   }
}

It was quite painless to modify and change these things. I really don't envy people who were doing these things in Word. I wouldn't even attempt to make tree's in word if someone paid me to do this. As far as I'm concerned, WYSIWYG office suites are retarded. The only proper way to write documents is to typeset in latex. But that's just me...

Btw, if you are wondering about problem 13 here is a hint: the parse tree for the grammar needs to grow symmetrically on both right and left. Focus on the middle node. Think "christmas tree". The grammar is a one liner actually - very simple and elegant in a way. It took me hours to figure this damn thing out. I think I was over thinking it way to much.

AOL Determined to Suck Even More!

2006-03-04T22:40:00.000-05:00

AOL seems to be determined to implement their email tax scheme. As if they didn't suck already... If people didn't see a reason to quit this shitty ISP before, this should be a good incentive.

My dad used to used to give his AOL email to his customers. He doesn't really have a need a professional email account or anything but he likes to be reachable that way. I'm concerned he might miss important emails due to the whole AOL tax issue. I'm considering setting him up with gmail or something like that.

I should probably set him up a domain, so that he can have a professionally sounding email for business use. The bottom line however is, that we can't trust AOL anymore.

Btw, go and sign the open letter to aol. They already said they don't give a shit about it, but hey... It can't hurt, can it?

Dumb Internet Laws... Again

2006-03-04T19:03:00.000-05:00

I really think that our NJ Assemblyman Peter J. Biondi got flamed on some messageboard recently. I'm saying this because he apparently introduced a bill that would institute mandatory online identification.

Yup, this guy wants to abolish online anonymity. It is very obvious that he does not understand the internet. If I had a penny for every jackass who wants to legislate the internet, I would probably be invited to join the Skull and Bones club by now :P

I wonder if Mr. Biondi knows that Internet != ~~USA~~ NJ. I wonder how he plans to enforce this bill on message boards hosted outside the US state? Does he realize that this bill will close down free blogging services, severely impact online social networks and force ~~hundreds of American~~ most NJ interner companies ~~out of business~~ to move out of state.

How would you enforce this for email? For java or AJAX based chat clients? For IRC? If google implements an identity check for Blogger, it will likely loose 80% of it's user base. There is no way anyone in their right mind would even consider complying with this. ~~The only people who will benefit from this are... Canadians. Because if such a bill would pass, there would be a mass exodus away from US based hosting to Canadian based~~ :P

~~If this bill passes, then we are not better than China...~~The only thing this bill can achieve is to create a gigantic traffic jam on interstate highways, as people move the servers to more internet friendly states.

We please send some letters to this dude and tell him that he just ruined his political career? I would never vote for someone who actively tries to break the internet.

Update Tue Mar 7 09:49:43 EST 2006

Um... I updated the post slighly, because zewrestler mentioned this bill will only apply to NJ - not the whole country. I appologize for spazzing out. :P

The Scope of Support

2006-03-03T10:35:00.000-05:00

One of the students approached me yesterday after class, and asked me to take a look at his laptop. He had some major issues with it and wanted some advice. I find it funny how people always assume that if you are computer scientist, you must also be a "computer guy" and a tech support wizard. In my case this assumption is true, but I know allot of people that were brilliant programmers but could not take care of their computer if their life depended on it. Hell, I don't consider myself a "hardware guy" either. Whenever I need to buy a part I just call Marinos and ask him what is good out there and where can I get the best price. But that's a topic for a whole other rant.

First thing I wanted to do when the student approached me is to suggest contacting helpdesk. I really don't have time to fix computers for my students - and I'm not getting paid to do it. However, I'm always willing to take a look and give advice if they need it.

I was shocked to find out that OIT Helpdesk turned him down saying that there was nothing they could do... So I decided I check out the machine. The laptop had a classic BSOD on boot-up issue. When your computer consistently BSOD's while booting, even in safe mode, you probably have probably a corrupted registry hive.

Windows registry is funky, and when it gets trashed it usually takes down the whole system. You can of course try to copy some system files from the installation CD hoping that you will restore it to a usable state. But I have never, ever seen that working. Essentially the best course of action in this type of problems is, recover data and reinstall the OS.

Is this stuff out of scope for helpdesk? I really don't know. I sent them an email describing the issue and asking for advice. Let's see if they respond.

It's not like this is a complicated process. All they need to do is to grab a 2.5" enclosure and extract the students' data. Either that or use Knoppix to burn his stuff to CD's/DVD's. Or walk him through a parallel install of windows... This is really not rocket science. Especially that last step seems to be reasonable.

All this poor guy wants is to get his iTunes music,and his homeworks out of there :P Of course there might be an issue with the DRM and transferring songs between computers... But once again - this is a topic for a whole new rant.

Isn't this the type of stuff we have the helpdesk for though? Helping students to fix their machines when they break, and help them recover homeworks when the machines die? Maybe I'm wrong here...

Ill update this post when I get a response form the helpdesk... Let's see if I end up being quoted at Giant Robots for this one :P

Update Fri Mar 3 13:57:26 EST 2006

Yes, this seems to be out of scope for the helpdesk. Korun who works for OIT says that they are only supporting faculty, and only with computers that are MSU property.

If you ask me, this kinda sucks... We should really have some tech support for students on campus. I saw people doing the "Virus Clinic" thing in SC several times... I think we should ~~have something like that running all the time somewhere~~ extend the services they offer to stuff like data recovery, and OS reinstallation assistance.

Update Fri Mar 3 15:21:29 EST 2006

Here is the official response from the helpdesk:

Thank you for contacting the Technology Solutions Center about your student's computer problem. At this time, the TSC cannot assist this student further. The Technology Solutions Center can only provide limited technical support to students on the following three issues:

1-Virus Removal
2-Spyware Removal
3-Campus Network connectivity

It is suggested that the student contact their computer manufacturer for further support. Again thank you for contacting the TSC.

So there you have it... Case closed :( I suspect that there is a reason why they only offer such limited support. Maye they don't want to be liable for loosing student data, voiding their warranties, or breaching wierd manufacturer EULAS. Eh...

Update Tue Mar 7 09:53:09 EST 2006

I talked to the student yesterday. I'm happy to report that a Knoppix CD that I gave him allowed his more computer literate firend to save all his data to an external drive. Then they reformated, and as of yesterday he is back in business.

I'm telling you - knoppix saves lives! Always have a Knoppix CD's on you!

How good are Digital Pens?

2006-03-03T01:03:00.000-05:00

Logitech Digital Pen

I keep looking for a good way to take notes in school. I like to have digital copies of my stuff, because they are easy to backup, transfer and share. Paper based notes are by far the most efficient note-taking method, but they have a big downside. They need to be scanned in at some point - otherwise they are just clunky, physical objects. Scanning notes is tedious, and resulting documents tend to be large and not very printer friendly.

Taking notes on my laptop is not very convenient either. I still haven't found anything on linux that could even approach to match the flexibility of OneNote. But there is no way I'm booting windoze just to use that app.

Besides, drawing with a mouse is a pain... And I'm not planning to get a tabletop anytime soon. These things are nice for note taking, but kinda clunky for almost everything else. And the Linux support for these things is nearly non-existent, so they are useless to me.

Recently I began noticing these digital pens popping up on the market. Probably the most notable example is the Logitech IO₂. This thing is a regular pen, with a built in motion sensor that tracks the movements of the pen on paper, are records them. Sounds great, but I'm wondering how good is it in practice. Drop me a comment if you had any experience with one of these things. How good are they at actually capturing the handwriting?

I'm not planning to buy the Logitech product. I just picked it because it comes up in the top 5 in a google search for digital pens. But it just to damn expensive for me. I am not willing to shell out $200 on a pen, that I may never use because it's tracking or storage capacity sucks. Or because it does not work with linux...

The system requirements blurb on the Logitech store page only seems to acknowledge windows. This probably means that unless I hack it myself, I will not be able to use it in a non-windows system. To get it working you need to install proprietary drivers, and support software. The target consumers here are obviously only windows users. In other words, this product is completely useless to me.

What I really need, is a pen just like that - but with a built in solid state memory stick. I want to be able to plug this pen directly into a USB port and find my documents neatly saved as files in an open format (preferably eps or svg, pdf or something related). Just give me raw data in some kind of standardized format, and I'll convert it to whatever I need it to be.

The pen should be able to take in standard, off-the shelf ink replacements (pick a popular size carried by Bic or someone else and stick with it). It should not require me to install any software, but you can provide some premium conversion app for lazy windows users.

The pen can take a small battery, or charge from the USB port. Battery would make it heavier, but also more reliable. You can always replace a battery in a middle of a lecture, without missing to much notes. You can't do that with a USB charged gadget though. So I would be willing to trade the extra weight in for added reliability.

So, is there anything like that out there on the market? And if not, how hard would it be to make one? People would buy this stuff, if the price was right!

Who is going to make my pen?

Does anyone get any support from CORE?

2006-03-02T23:14:00.000-05:00

I know that I complained about CORE before, and that got me ~~mis~~quoted over at Billy Gray's Giant Robots Blog. I assume I will be throughly ~~scrutinized~~ analyzed this time also... But, oh well...

Here is the prime example of how CORE sucks. I was trying to install ENVI on that spiffy new JDS Machine. ENVI is expensive proprietary software, so of course we need to obtain a license, activate and all that stuff. Dr. Robila called up CORE to figure out how to do this. They told him the name of the license server, and the port that he needs to use and not much more... 2 minutes later, he got a notification that CORE opened a ticked for his call, and then closed it showing that the problem was resolved.

Funny thing is, that while checking up our bran new "resolved in 10-seconds flat" ticket Dr. Robila noticed that he still had few open tickets in their system. One of them was open since April of last year... And I think that one also dealt with ENVI licensing stuff...

To make the long story short, I'm running ENVI in demo mode till we figure out the license deal. I only need it to view results of my image transformations in a reliable way so demo is good enough for my purposes. But still...

My complaint number 2 is, could someone PLEASE fix up the RI 108 lab? The comweb boxes are literally sprawled on the floor or hanging between student's legs by the power cable. The kids keep kicking the cables out and that takes down their whole machine.

Sometimes it seems that the only way to get something done is to actually go downstairs and personally nab one of the CORE guys and keep pestering him till he agrees to help you.

I have nothing against these guys personally. They are good people... It's just the turnaround time for most of the requests is... Well, less than satisfactory.

Skull and Bones - American Iluminati

2006-03-01T21:16:00.000-05:00

Check out these wacky videos posted by synackal.

If you like conspiracy theories, occult stuff, or just wierd shit you will get a kick out of them. The scarry part is that some parts of these may actually be true...

If you have nothing to hide...

2006-03-01T20:20:00.000-05:00

I had one of these lunch conversations today... It actually started when one of the girls expressed her concern about the well being of the music industry. For some reason she really believed in the RIAA propaganda. So I explained to her how they actually calculate their "lost sales". I explained how they are clinging to an outdated business model that will die within next 4-5 years. I told them that the only way for entertainment industry to make profit using it's current model, is to stop all technological progress in the digital media. Hell, not only stop but roll back and outlaw some of the technologies we enjoy today.

It actually made them think for a bit. They just realized that there were actually 2 sides to this story. I figured that there is still hope for humanity :)

Unfortunately, I lost the thread of the conversation and somehow the topic ended up on wiretaps. Not a good topic because people tend to get really worked up when you talk about politics.

What do you say to a director when she claims "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about" and follows it up with "People who don't like how we do things here in US can just pack up and leave"? Sigh... This is what we call a politically induced cognitive blockage. Further discussion of the subject is pointless.

In cases like that I usually shut up, and let people sort it out themselves. The last thing I want is to have an all out political argument at the workplace :P It is very difficult to change people's views on political matters. It's just like trying to convince someone that their religion might be wrong about something. In both cases you need to shatter world views - otherwise the discussion wont go anywhere.

What saddens me the most though, is that the outrageous breach of constitution like the unlawful wiretapping was diminished to a minor political issue. This is something all Americans should be angry about...

Cat Piano

2006-02-28T22:51:00.000-05:00

Excentric 17th century inventor Athanasius Kircher once designed a cat piano.

Dude... WTF!

Crunchwrap - not portable!

2006-02-28T21:42:00.000-05:00

Crunchwrap - not portable!

You know how Taco Bell always runs those commercials about their Crunchwrap™ thing being all portable and "Good to go™"? Guess what - they lie like dogs!

The crunchwrap is anything but portable. Today I popped into the local Taco Bell and grabbed one to go, cause I was in a hurry. I decided to eat it quickly at the bus stop while studying programming languages. I figured that I should be able to eat the damn crunchwrap with one hand and use the other hand to hold my book.

But that does not work that well... You see, a Cruchwrap contains the usual taco garbage inside - lettuce, tomatoes, and etc... That stuff starts falling out as soon as you take a bite out of the thing. In addition they did not fold my crunchwrap right, so it had a hole on top, and was falling apart to begin with.

This type of food was just not made to be portable. Remember this whenever you see that stupid commercial again. It's not "Good to go™". It is tasty but not portable!

The title of the mobile fast food of the year still belongs to the Chicken Quesadilla. This is possibly the easiest food to eat on the go...

Wait... Why the fuck am I going on and on about Taco Bell????

I'm not the only one who hates the "IT Crowd" show

2006-02-26T22:03:00.000-05:00

It seems that I'm not the only one who hates the stupid British show IT Crowd.

I have seriously no clue what people see in that pile of stinking garbage. It's not funny, it's not clever and most importantly it is not geeky. It's a lame, lame show.

The people who like this show should turn in their geek badges and quit IT forever.

Dawkins Slams Religiosity

2006-02-25T21:29:00.000-05:00

I just watched a great documentary by Richard Dawkins titled Root of All Evil. I found it via boingboing, and it intrigued me. So I went searching for a download. Thanks to the wonderful world of of p2p I found both part 1 and part 2 of this show.

Just a warning - if you are devoutly religious, poorly educated, or both - this show may offend you or piss you off. On the other hand, if you are like me - and you proudly display the FSM logo on you page, you might get a kick out of this.

Dawkin's point is simple - blind, unquestioning, uncompromising fate is bad. All organized religions are guilty of encouraging groupthink, breeding prejudice and often clouding people's reason and logic. Everyone gets roasted here - Catholics, Evangelicans, Jews and Muslims are all criticized.

All these religious groups are set in their ways, intractable, and determined to convert others to their way of life. Dawkins shows how this leads to escalating tension and conflict between members of the worlds major religions.

The most notable bit from part one is of course Dawkin's visit to one of the biggest Evangelican churches in the country. There he has a chat with a bigoted, and ignorant pastor who tries to preach creationism to him. Dawkins marvels at the near-militant rejection of science among the evangelicans. His analysis of that movement leads him to believe that religion and science cannot coexist because they contradict each other.

I think that for the sake of sensationalism, and controversy he overgeneralized this. In essence, he concentrates on studying on what can be only described as the Kierkegardian "religiosity". A shallow, and superficial faith based on groupthink and social conditioning. Religiosity can easily produce zealots, whose faith is only skin deep. Their religious zeal is simply a thinly veiled prejudice, bigotry and ignorance channeled through the filter of religious devotion.

In my opinion, these people do not even deserve to be called "religious".

Real religion is in fact philosophy of the infinite and paradoxal. It is not a doctrine, and it does not require blind obedience, or zealotry. In fact it demands intellectual involvement, introspection, and a flexible mind. The domain of religion is the metaphysical, the unanswerable and the intangible. It is the study of the infinites, and the logic of paradox. It is the home of allegory, fable and mythos.

The true religion is not providing you with moral templates, or answering any questions with dogma. True religion poses questions and forces you to deal with them. All religions in a way try to give you a framework, or a road map to some kind of enlightenment or spiritual betterment.

Nothing in the Bible (or any other holly scripture) needs to be factual, or real. All biblical stories are allegories, that should not be read literally. Bible was heavily edited, and re-translated thousands of times. Names, places, and events might have been changed in the process. But that doesn't matter. It is still a profound piece of literature that forces your brain to deal with infinities, and paradoxes that are hard to comprehend.

Thus, the one thing on which I do not agree with Dawkins is this: religion and science can coexist. They are supposed to be mutually disjoint. The fact that some religious organizations seem to be hell bent on overthrowing modern science, and replacing it with medieval mythos does not change the primary function of religion.

I used to think just like Dawkins, but then I met some truly amazing philosophers and religious scholars. People who were not only brilliant, but also open, tolerant, and approachable, while at the same time being deeply religious. We had some of these people (and still have them - I home) in the Philosophy and Religion dept. at MSU. :)

Creationist Pamphlet

2006-02-23T23:01:00.000-05:00

Creationist Pamphlet,
originally uploaded by maciakl.

Someone gave this creationist pamphlet (click on the thumb to view) to my brother's girlfriend on a bus. She found it funny so she kept it to show to my brother. He in turn knew that I will get a kick out of it so he ended up saving it for me.

Of course I immediately scanned the funniest bits it and uploaded it to flickr to share the humor with the world! I find it hilarious! Especially the banana bit. Did you know that bananas proove inteligent design? Check it out:

The bananna--the atheist's nightmare

Note that the bananna:
Is shaped for human hand
Has non-slip surface
Has outward indicators of inward contents: Green--too early, Yellow--just right, Black--too late.
Has a tab for removal of wrapper
Is preforated on wrapper
Bio-degradable wrapper
Is shaped for human mouth
Has a point at top for ease of entry
Is pleasing t otaste buds
Is curved towards the face to make easting process easy

To say that the bananna happened by accident is even more unintellingent that to say that no one designed the Coca Cola can.

LOL! Wow.. Where do I begin. What if you hold the bannana wrong? Then it is curved away from your face! Is that a proof against inteligent design?

Has a point on top for the easy of entry? Entry where? I admit, I have a dirty mind by nature, but that just sounds wrong!

Bio-degradable wrapper? Dude, it is a fruit! All fruits are bio degradable!

How about I make a little super biased test in the same way they did on that pamphlet:

A person who rejects evolution, despite overwhelming scientific proof supporting it is:

A. Intelligent

B. A fool

C. Has an ulterior motive for denying the obvious

I almost feel guilty making fun of this... They just make it so easy!

AJAX and me

2006-02-22T21:58:00.000-05:00

As part of my job I do some development on web applications. Mostly LAMP and WIMP shit. I'm not a graphics designer though, and my Photoshop skills are limited. This is something that I plan to work at, but for the time being I usually opt for a simple css layouts with minimal amount of graphics.

My philosophy for the most part is to use the database and php to do the heavy lifting, and leave the client side simple and basic... This approach is good for most websites, but some web applications written this way suffer from the click-refresh-click-refresh issue. My users were complaining that they spend more time waiting for the page to reload after they submit a form, than they used to when working with their old spreadsheets and hand written forms.

On of the ladies at work asked if it would be possible to redesign the page so that she can make changes without constantly reloading it... Yes, it is possible - it is called AJAX. I avoided AJAX for all this time, but it just caught up with me.

As much as I hate working with javascript, this is the direction where the web applications are going right now. So I spent my day today doing my first, shaky steps in the AJAX land. It is not as bad as I thought.

AJAX essentially boils down to few basic asynchronous request calls, and everything else just builds on top of that. You can actually accomplish some really cool stuff with just few lines of javascript. So it is not all bad.

I produced a functional app today, but I'm still having trouble with few things. For example, I'm still not sure how to get a pointer to the DOM object that generated my asynchronous call, in the event handler that updates my page after I get the data back from the server. Most samples I have seen on the web simply use the getElementByID method but that does not really work for me. I have oodles of text fields on the page that can generate AJAX requests, and I need to update them accordingly.

When I marked them with unique id's and passed that ID to the server so I can pass it back to javascript again, I run into some bizarre XUL issue with firefox. That and IE 5.0 refused to display my page at all for some reason :P

I will need to work out few of those issues, but so far I'm happy with the progress. I'm learning some new stuff. I plan to look into some of the existing AJAX libraries out there. Maybe I can lean on some more mature code, and have it do most of the dirty work for me as I work on this project :)

Is CIA Secretly Rewriting History?

2006-02-21T13:34:00.000-05:00

It appears that in the last few years CIA was secretly reclassifying some historical documents that used to be public. In most cases these documents did not contain any sensitive information that could impact national security.

However, some of these documents did contain information about embarrassing governmental blunders, and CIA mistakes during the Korean war, and early years of the Cold War. The NYT article linked from /. gives a great example of this:

One reclassified document (...) gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Why are these things reclassified? And why is this done in secret? Call me paranoid, but stuff like that makes me nervous. If the governmental agencies bend the regulations to secretly reclassify public records and get away with it, then how do I know that next time they won't bend them even more? What is stopping them from altering the reclassified documents?

How do I know that one day they won't secretly de-classify altered historical facts? And if anyone happens to own an original copy, they can use the Patriot Act to confiscate it, and slap the guy with a gag order...

Welcome to 1984 ladies and gentlemen. Repeat after me: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia...

Weekend Coding Sessions

2006-02-21T00:33:00.000-05:00

I spent the whole Sunday locked in my little office, hacking away on the code for my thesis work. This was first time in weeks when I left school without feeling frustrated and stressed about this work. I finally made some progress, and actually got stuff working for me without having major issues. I was happy, with the work and I no longer felt guilty taking the evening off and playing Dawn of War :) It also freed up my Monday schedule for other stuff.

Heh.. I not only caught up with my thesis work. I also managed to grade all the homeworks for the 183 class, and do some blogging :) It's amazing how much you can get done if you are not interrupted or distracted every 5 minutes.

I'm definitely doing this again this coming Sunday. If I take one day each week and spend it working towards my thesis, I think I can finally catch up with my work, and get back on the right track.

It has come to my attention...

2006-02-20T22:33:00.000-05:00

LOLOL!

Shamelessly stolen from PVP.

Coding without an IDE is like eating soup with a fork

2006-02-20T19:24:00.000-05:00

The more I use Eclipse, the more I learn to depend on it. I cannot imagine coding anything serious without Eclipse "compile as you type" error checking, one-click correction tools, automatic code generation tools and refactoring utilities. Vim is great but it will not detect a thrown exception as I type and it will not give me a choice to automatically generate a "throws" clause or catch-try block.

No simple editor will automatically rename my file and refactor all references in the code when I change the name of the class. And neither vi or notepad will generate getters and setter methods for me.

Here is an example. Today I had to code up a big data structure which had around 8 fields that needed to be accessible, but not public. How long did it take me to write all the accessor and mutator methods? 10 seconds! Clickity click, done! Eh... Sometimes I think I'm just getting to lazy with all these nice features. But then again, you do not want to waste time typing silly stuff like 20 different accessor methods when you could be putting that effort into making the algorithm work.

Eclipse is my personal favorite. I think it is possibly the best IDE for Java out there, but your millage may vary. Allot of people like NetBeans. I briefly used it at one point, but I went back to Eclipse. It was just not for me. But it is still a great alternative if for some reason you dislike the IMB brainchild :)

Actually any piece of software that attempts to call itself an IDE should provide similar set of productivity increasing functionality. These things are here to make our life easier.

If you are really thinking about writing that Really Big Project™ using vi, think again. I know that talking about editors is kinda like talking about religion. Personally I think vi is great tool for programming. But when you are facing a huge, complex project you may want to put your religious beliefs aside for a minute and think about stuff like productivity, convinience and etc... You might be more productive with vi than with an IDE initially. But once you start using some of the advanced features you will quickly realize how much less typing you need to do :)

If you are vi/emacs guru and you can do amazing stuff with your editor, then please ignore my ramblings. Hats off to you and your impressive skills :)

On the other hand, if you are planning to use notepad, or pico you are insane. Repeat after me: pico is not for coding. Notepad is not for coding. Get an IDE, or at least switch to vim/emacs where you can get some syntax highlighting and helpful features.

Myspace Customized Layouts Suck

2006-02-20T01:18:00.000-05:00

I hate when people fuck up the standard layout of their Myspace profiles. That website obviously was not made for customization. If the creators wanted to allow this type of creativity, they would likely built in a customizable template structure similar to the ones behind blogger and livejournal.

When you inject CSS in weird places to reformat the page you are making a mess. If you don't watch what you are doing, your profile is likely to look like crap in non IE browsers. But if you redefine a few classes that's not the end of the world usually.

But I have to ask - why does everyone with a customized profile opts for ass-ugly dark background image, with bright, fluorescent text? Why does everyone remove the borders that nicely divide page sections into readable chunks? When you remove all the spatial formating and delineation you remove the visual clues that are supposed to help the reader focus on the content. Without those borders, everything seems to clump together into an unreadable mess.

When you put a dark, or vividly colored image in the background you once again shift the focus from text onto the background. As a rule, light background + dark text is easier to read than dark background + light text. It's just easier on the eyes.

Mousover effects are only effective when they are subtle. Font and size changes are horribly annoying as they tend to shift things over and change the layout each time you move the pointer.

And why, for all that is holly in this world, do you people put music or videos on your profile? Do you think I'm entertained by it? No! I hate these things. They slow my browser, they take forever to load and if I have more than 1 profile open at the same time I am treated to instant a cacophony of sound. Background music was a stupid idea in the 90's and it is still a stupid idea now - regardless of the technology used to play it.

If you really must have some moving shit in there put a Youtube or Google based vid - one that needs to be clicked in order to start playing. Anything that starts automatically is annoying waste of bandwidth. I'm sure your favorite song is really awesome, but why do I need to listen to it every single time I want to leave you a comment or send you a message?

Sigh... I swear that these myspace customization attempts are the modern equivalent of the blink tag, running dog gif image, frames and annoying midi tune playing in the background.

Everybody Loves President Cole

2006-02-19T16:40:00.000-05:00

Everybody Loves President Cole,
originally uploaded by maciakl.

This is officially the best poster ever. Zewrestler said that this is a rare un-edited picture of president Cole. Usually they photoshop out the horns and the goatee :P Somehow this one must have leaked out without editing.

I heard all kinds of wild rumors about the horns and etc., but I never really believed in them... Untill now...

Note, this poster is hanging in one of MSU offices. Bonus points if you can tell me which office it is. Zewrestler is not eligible for bonus points because he found it :)

Silly T-Shirt

2006-02-19T02:19:00.000-05:00

Hehe... I don't know why but I find this amusing:

Samelessly stolen from ldopa.net.

CSAM is Down

2006-02-18T18:31:00.000-05:00

The csam server has been down since yesterday. It appears that MSU had yet another power outage. This is why my picture on the sidebar is not showing up. It is served up by csam.montclair.edu which apparently went down.

I can still ssh to pegasus, which tells me that the coverage in RI is spotty. Either way, my pic will probably be gone till Monday, unless I move it over to another server and update the html here.

What is worse however is the fact that the outage took down my sourcejammer server. So much for working from home tomorrow. It seems that I will need to visit the Imaging Lab tomorrow and boot that damn thing up again. Remind me to put that machine on a UPS one day. Sigh...

Oh well... I hope nothing got fried by the power spike...

Update Sat, February 18 2006, 11:46 PM

The csam server came back up. My sourcejammer box is still dead naturally. So I'm still taking a trip to school tomorrow. Maybe this is a good thing. I might get more work done in the office than here at home - less distractions and all :)

Battlestar Galactica: The Capitan's Hand

2006-02-17T23:26:00.000-05:00

How interesting. Roslin is forced to compromise her stance on abortion in order to secure support of the religious Gemini voters. This gives Baltar a chance to play the abortion card to his advantage and look like the good guy.

Does he have a chance in the election? Good question. If he plays his cards well he might have a shot. But he is barely coherent on his good days, and he tends to talk to his invisible Cylon friend in public. People notice that...

What happened to that whole "finding Earth" thing anyway? Not so long ago half of the fleet was willing to put their lives on the line and follow Roslin as their prophet. Now they are making a big fuss over abortion issue? Geez... You never know where you stand with the religious fanatics.

I wonder what will happen when they find out that her cancer was mysteriously cured using the blood of a hybrid fetus. I think there would be one hell of a shitstorm over this. Besides, if she is not dying, she can't be the prophet eh?

Of course Baltar also has skeletons in his closet. Eventually someone may remember that he was given a nuke for experimental purposes, and will want to check on it. Loosing a nuke can't be good for ones political career. And if he runs, he can be sure people will start digging for dirt on him.

Next week they resurrect Sharon. Does that mean that Galactica Sharon dies? What about the hybrid baby? Very intriguing!

Neon Genesis Evangelion

2006-02-17T21:07:00.000-05:00

When Neon Genesis Evangelion first came up on [adult-swim] I dismissed it as "yet another giant robot show". I knew it had a cult status, and huge fan following. But I figured that people generally like these mecha themed shows. I personally don't care for the big robot thing that much. I really didn't think I would ever like this show.

Boy was I wrong! I have been totally sucked in, and now I'm impatiently waiting for the new episode each week. I can honestly say that in my book, Evangelion is one of the best anime shows of all time. It is totally opposite of what I suspected. The plot is really deep and full of mystery. Characters are incredibly complex and well developed. The story is really more a reflection on human nature and the human condition. This is how you make a good Scifi show :)

The retards that write scripts for SG: Atlantis should take notes. Yes, I said it. That show sucks! SG:A fans can kiss my shiny metal arse :P

I actually managed to spoil myself a little bit while browsing wikipedia, but oh well. I'll try to stay away from any Evangelion sites until I see the rest of the series, and the movies that wrap it up.

Unfortunately both Evangelion and Fullmetal Alchemist are going to end really soon, which means I will be left without any Must Watch Anime™ shows on TV. (Ok, there is still Standalone Complex. It is good but I wouldn't say it is a Must Watch™ show though).

What is on your Must Watch Anime™ list? What show/movie should I buy/download/procure next?

Not Good With Computers

2006-02-17T12:06:00.000-05:00

Anyone who says "I'm not good with computers" on a daily basis deserves to be larted into submission with a frozen porcupine! Please stop bragging about your lack of computer skills. It is not funny, or cute. Why are you people so proud of this? Why do you glorify your own computer illiteracy, and wear it as a badge of honor? Some of the skills you proudly lack are required for your job!

It is perfectly acceptable to have little or no experience with technology. Not everyone needs to be an expert. I'm not an expert in all fields either. For example, I'm not a plumber. But when my toilet backs up I do not proudly tell the guy fixing it that I have no bathroom skills, and that he might need to come back again tomorrow cause I'll probably clog it up the minute he leaves.

But when people plop their broken laptops on my desk or when they ask me for tech support they seem to be proud as hell that they just fucked up their system. And before I even look at their computer they tell me that they will be visiting em allot in the future. They already know that they will fuck up on a regular basis and they just give me the heads up. WTF?

This is precisely the wrong attitude. It's not that you can't learn technology. It's because you don't want to learn it. All these people who brag about how they suck at computers, are simply refusing to learn even the most basic skills. You are setting yourself up for failure. "I'm not good with computers" is a self fulfilling prophecy. Didn't they teach you this is your humanity classes or whatever you were taking in college? This is in the same league as "I suck at math" and "I will never learn a foreign language". If you start with that attitude, you will most likely fail at anything you try.

And for God's sake, do not sign up for Computer Science major with that attitude. You will be miserable, and you will make everyone around you want to repeatedly hit you with blunt objects. I recommend dropping out of college altogether, and finding a cozy blue collar job that will not require you to interact with any kind of electronic equipment.

Do you know what is the difference between an A and a D student? An A student gets the work done, while the D student keeps rambling on about how he is not good at computers, math and etc...

The Internet is for Porn

2006-02-15T23:51:00.000-05:00

I just found out that the music in that old WOW video The Internet is for Porn was actually taken off the soundtrack to a broadway musical Avenue Q. If you never saw that vid (because you live under a rock), here it is:

Amazon is selling Avenue Q soundtrack, and offers samples of the songs for download. Here is the direct link to the porn song so that you can compare.

Essentially what the WOW guys did was to animate the characers and sync them up with the lyrics. Still, hell of a job :)

To get Hi-Def DVD you must buy OEM

2006-02-13T22:54:00.000-05:00

It seems that the new Blu-Ray and HD-DVD media protected by the HDCP technology will only play in full resolution on computers offered by big PC manufacturers. You must buy one of their stock systems, or forget about watching High-Def movies. Boxen built from scratch, or sold by small "mom and pop" hardware shops will be locked out.

HDCP compatibility is controlled by an inter-industry consortium of giant CE companies and Hollywood studios, and these companies have ruled that merely buying a HDCP-compatible graphics card is insufficient for gaining access to HDCP-locked video. Only systems designed from the ground up by OEMs (such as themselves) will be able to gain access to these videos.

This means that "Joe's Neighborhood PC Shack" is going out of business soon, and you might have wasted allot of money buying that HDCP compliant graphics card. Surprise - it wont work.

But that's ok... You can always grab a un-crippled hi-def torrent :)

This will spur unauthorized P2P systems into developing the capability of sharing high-definition video more reliably. After all, you may not be able to play Matrix Impossible 2000 at high rez on your PC if you buy the DVD, but you'll sure be able to do so if you download it instead.

Nuff said.

Vice Presidential Hunting Cheat-Sheet

2006-02-13T22:46:00.000-05:00

To prevent future accidents, vice presidents should be given this:

Stolen from needlenose, found via boingboing.

Dawn of War

2006-02-12T02:12:00.000-05:00

My brother convinced me to play Dawn of War. I'm not a big fan of RTS games but I do love Warhammer 40k so I agreed to play a multiplayer skirmish. I haven't tried playing missions yet, and I think I'll leave that for later due to ton of schoolwork :P

The last RTS game I played was Homeworld 2 and I was totally sucked in by the storyline . I essentially just wanted to get the boring gather/destroy missions out of the way to find out what happens next :P I also cheated a great deal by writing in more ships into the savegame config filwes. I would essentially just plow through enemies and don't worry about resources. But I got bored and never finished it. RTS games are just not for me. If you played original starcraft/warcraft/cc you played them all. Dawn of War was no different. You build shit, and you gather resources by capturing points on the map. Same old thing. Eh...

I played as Eldar, and I expected to get my ass kicked because this was my first time even seeing this game. Thus we agreed on a truce. Neither me or my brother would engage each other until we exterminated the two computer players, and agreed to fight.

The game is pretty close to the tabletop version. Some units were absent. Dire Avengers, Swooping Hawks, Striking Scorpions and wraightguard were the most notable roster holes. I do not use any of those units in my Ulthwe army so I was not really upset, but I could see how this would completely piss of a Biel-Tan or Inyaden player.

It was kinda fun to build my units, including the Avatar which died around 7 times in this game. And I kept building him over and over because he is a monster! The only thing that would actually stop him was an en masse drednought attack.

On the other hand, D-cannons were disappointing. For weapons that actually rip open a hole in the fabric of the universe they were really underpowered. Marines barely noticed the blasts as they were cutting through my guardians.

I'll play it again on multiplayer, but Warhammer 40k as an RTS just feels a little wrong. Oh well... My brother seems to like it, and he is an RTS guy so I'll take his word for it. I don't see anything special in this game. If it wasn't for the 40k background I wouldn't even touch it.

The Island

2006-02-12T01:22:00.000-05:00

Scarlet Johanson is hot.

I finally saw The Island. Essentially, my only reason for watching this was of course seeing Scarlett Johanson. Sigh... And to think we could have seen her boobies if Michael Bay was not gay. :P We shall never forgive you Michael - you depraved us of boobage scene, and you will burn in hell for that!

The movie was ok. Definitely a summer flick, with allot of explosions, action sequences and not much depth. The plot had obvious holes. For example, why did they need to "re-scan" whatshisname to clone him a new body? They already had all the data in the system. Can you say "plot device"?

Eldar Vyper Model

Of course the sweetest part was the jetbike, which was a fucking Eldar Vyper! A vyper is essentially a large two-man jetbike with a heavy weapon attachment in the back. The pilot's seat is closed, but the gun placement is exactly the same. Hehe!

Genetic memory thing was lame. I tolerated genetic memory in Frank Herbert's books because the man is a genius. He actually spent allot of time analyzing the potential, the benefits and dangers unlocking such memories would bring. But just saying, "oops, our clones suddenly got genetic memories" just so that the main character can fly a jetbike and drive a car is silly. But then again, it was a summer flick.

Sigh... I still can't forgive Michael Bay!

CS Dept should set up a Version Control Repository

2006-02-08T16:22:00.000-05:00

Most computer science classes these days require you to work in groups these days. This means that at some point you will have agree on the interfaces, and merge the code. At MSU this is usually done by sending out angry emails, knocking your group members on the head with dull objects, and rewriting large portions of the code because some idiot does not read his email.

But it doesn't have to be this way. All we need is to set up some nice source code repository and make it available to students. This would not only make our life easier, but it would also teach students important skills for the future. These few hours wasted fighting with cvs, subversion or even sourcejammer could really pay off once the students get out there and start working in the industry.

And of course, the instructors could monitor the progress of their students. All version control tools keep track of the history of revisions. All you need to do is peek at the project history and you would know which student did the most work, when was the project started, and who contributed which part. There would be no more need to force student to keep a work log, or to expect them to fairly evaluate their team mates at the end of the semester.

A cvs does not lie, and it does not need to uphold the unspoken student honor code. It would truthfully log everything. The logs would easily identify all the lazy slackers without forcing moral dilemmas on poor students

Of course someone would have to maintain that software. And this is where my little dream falls over and dies. No one would take on this responsibility. OIT would wash their hands - we do not have enough students for them to even think about this. The CSAM support crew would be the next choice... But they wouldn't do it either. They are to busy removing spyware and trying to keep the network in RI from falling apart. They would need to be dragged kicking and screaming into this - and even then, we would only get a half assed support.

The only hope would be to do this in house. Put a graduate assistant on this, and delegate some faculty member to mentor the whole project. Unfortunately GA's come and go, and faculty is overloaded as it is. No one is going to take on this responsibility.

So it's never going to happen. But it would be a really cool thing to have!

Update Thu, February 09 2006, 10:41 PM

Uh! Some people do read this blog after all. I got quoted at Gigant Robots so I better clarify this stuff here.

I guess I did not elaborate enough in my complaints about lack of support. This is what happens when you post in a hurry. “Removing spyware” was oversimplification. They don’t clean student computers - that’s helpdesk’s job. From what I know they do maintain the two labs in RI and at least one of them gets ravaged by 109 students who like to download and install crap. These are CSAM funded I think, so they are out of scope for IT.

They also maintain faculty and staff desktops/laptops, the classroom computers, research machines, the smartboard systems and bunch of other things. They also maintain pegasus/freddie and assorted machines which host mailservers, login servers, and bunch of other services. Most cs users have shell accounts on pegassus/freddie they can use for development and other course related work. I bet they do some more important stuff on top of that. So it is a bundle and a half right there :) I guess my main complain was - their turnaround time is really slow most of the time. Most of the faculty complains about them all the time.

CS decided to maintain their own webserver (cs.montclair.edu). It was fully maintained by Dr. Koeller and grad assistants, who designed the page and wrote all the assorted apps from scratch. One woud think that stuff like that would be something that could be delegated to the CSAM IT staff. But for one reason or another they were not able to provide the department with a the level of support, and speed of response they needed. I'm not saying that there were no other reasons behind it, but I guess this just illustrates how CS dept does not like to completely "rely" on CSAM in critical matters.

I guess now you know why this blog has "incoherent" in the name. I tend to ramble without much thinking sometimes :P

All of that said, I will mention it to the faculty. Of course I will have to explain to most of them what a version control system is (sad, I know). Seriously, I get blank stairs most of the time when I mention the little sourcejammer server I use for my research stuff. But maybe if I could reach some of the more cluefull people...

Cheating Rapidshare

2006-02-08T02:57:00.000-05:00

If you have ever needed to download some very obscure stuff, you are probably familiar with sites such as rapidshare.de. These sites usually allow anyone to upload and instantly publish large files (50-100MB). Thus are perfect for sharing stuff such as video clips, picture archives, scanned books, all kinds of semi-legal game roms, abandonware and etc.

Rapidshare has a draconian download policy which (I guess) helps them to save bandwidth. They log your IP, and allow you to download only a single 20MB+ file, or several files that will add up to that much. That is, unless you buy their premium service.

I hardly ever use that site, so I refuse to pay their price. But sometimes I want to grab stuff that was uploaded there. If it is just one file everything is great. However, sometimes you need to grab a multi part rar archive. And that's where the fun starts. It will take you days to get the whole thing.

However, I noticed a little loophole. If you use Tor you can cheat rapidshare into letting you download more than one big file a day. Simply restart tor and privoxy after each downloaded file. Usually you will end up with a different IP every time, and thus rapidshare will let you through.

And on the upside, you are onion-routing your packets. So if you are downloading pr0n or something illegal it is exponentially harder to track you down!

IT Crowd is LAME

2006-02-07T23:02:00.000-05:00

I have no clue what people see in IT Crowd. I saw the first episode when the news was first posted on digg and I hated it. Since digg does not allow linking to individual comments here is what I said in the comments thread that day:

Incredibly lame. I was disappointed. I didn't laugh once during the whole thing. The stereotyping is just stupid, comedy is weak and characters are not very interesting or likable.

Where is the jargon, the in jokes and usual tech banter? Where is the IT lingo? Why is no one making jokes about lusers, lamers and pointy hair? Where is the sense of superiority that most geeks feel with respect to the tech neophytes?

This is how total technophobes who never worked a day in IT imagine our industry. Pathetic. Obviously the writers did not do any kind of research, and did not consult a specialist to at least get the jargon and technical stuff right.

How do you take a formula that is almost guaranteed to work (come on, how many times we have seen the "idiot manager a tech department" thing) and messed it up horribly.

Now Cory Doctorow is singing praises for that show at Boingboing. But I guess he can't slam it because he is partly responsible for it, as he admitted last Sunday:

I was lucky enough to do some small consulting on the show and EFF was even invited to provide stickers to decorate the set with.

I think Doctorow is a good writer, I respect him for his work at EFF, and I usually like his journalistic forages at Boinboing. But he crossed the line when he said:

I'm so glad that this show exists. I've waited all my life for a truly geeky comedy, and I think that this is it.

Urgh! Come on Cory! Did we watch the same show? IT crowd is hardly a comedy, and certainly not geeky. I would call it boring, office sitcom rehashing the stereotypical nerd archetype. Not a truly geeky comedy.

SSHD Brings down my system once again

2006-02-07T00:06:00.000-05:00

Once again my Winbox has been totally hosed by sshd. I forgot to disable it after a reboot and when I came home the machine was barely working at all.

It appears that some lamer asswipe was trying to bruteforce me, but poor fool was looking for root password. Heh... This is a windows machine, and I have no user called root so he is never going to find it :)

Unfortunately, all these requests put strain on my poor little machine to the point where it keels over and dies. My EventViewer is overflowing with sshd events, and errors. I think the sshd service forks so many children that it runs out of working memory. And if some of the login attempts hang for the 2 minute login grace period, it is likely that the system simply cannot allocate space for other services, including registry lookups and such.

Again, I don't think I was pwn3d. My registry is intact, and I don't see any other signs of tampering with my system. Just the consistent brute force pounding every other day. I tweeked the sshd_config to limit the grace period to 20 sec, lowered the number of max concurrent auth attempts and to drop any excessive traffic. This should help conserving the resources...

However, considering the fact that cygwin is not rock solid, I no longer feel completely safe running this service on my machine. I don't want some silly cygwin based buffer overflow to compromise my machine. So I'm taking sshd off again for a while. I might need to find another solution to access my desktop remotely :P

Analysis of The Toilet Seat Problem

2006-02-05T21:29:00.000-05:00

A Game Theoretic Approach to the Toilet Seat Problem must be the best analysis of the problem I have ever seen.

This article shows an in depth approach complete with probability calculations and cost measures. The verdict:

In the morning John leaves the seat up after performing #1.
In the evening he puts it down.

This rule may not be precise but it is simple and approximately equitable; moreover the use of a definite rule sets expectations. The seat is put down in the evening to avoid the notorious “middle of the night surprise”.

I still think the best approach is "look before you sit down". I have no clue how can women find this methodology so difficult to implement.