the body of a very slow loop
Why is it that every machine I touch instantly loses the ability to resolve names? There must be some giant DNS-deflecting energy field surrounding me. It doesn’t matter what machine or network I am on, all of a sudden it’s “couldn’t resolve www.google.com” I mean seriously, google.com? Are you kidding me? Those bastards have so many web servers you could randomly guess an IP address.
Feeling lucky?
I had a blast after work today at Champs Karting in Redmond. I’ve ridden go-karts before, but this was totally different. These are fast little electric karts (45 mph) on an indoor track with multiple hairpin corners. Because they have motors and not engines, they are really quick to accelerate.
I think I took 5 or 6 runs around the track, and I kept getting better each time. The real trick is to take the corners without losing momentum. Generally I entered them too fast, skidded through, and scrubbed off most of my speed in the process.
The only dissapointing thing was that some cars were faster than others. You pretty much had to get car 13 if you wanted to run a 19-second lap.
Last Saturday, Ryan and I climbed Mt. Pilchuck. We were woefully underprepared for the 4 hour trek. Ideally we’d have had snowshoes, or at least boots. Instead we had frozen wet sneakers. However, it was worth it: the view was amazing.
Imagine you’re in a restaurant enjoying dinner. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” Your conversation is suddenly interrupted by a chorus of half-hearted voices, and poorly coordinated claps. You don’t recognize the song they are singing, but it sucks. Sound familiar?
At the moment, I can’t think of a more depressing spectacle than the alternate birthday song.
Why do restaurants do this? Blame the US government. The real “Happy Birthday” song, which was copywritten in 1935, might have entered the public domain in 1991. However, before that tragedy could occur Congress extended copyright terms twice. Retroactively. By the current standard, you’ll be suffering through crappy faux-birthday songs until at least 2030.
Apparently an author’s right to milk their creation for all it’s worth trumps your right to develop any semblence of a culture. Or eat in peace.
Cornell University hosts some great discussion panels as a part of their University Computer Policy & Law program. Most of these are available as streaming video.
Thursday’s panel was entitled, “The Download Debate Strikes Back,” and featured an all-star cast of panelists:
If you want to watch the video, point your crappy spyware-laden RealPlayer here.
Or for GNU/Linux dorks like me:
mplayer rtsp://specevents.video.cornell.edu/ucpl/Final41405.rm
The stream is almost 3 hours long, but it’s worth it. Truly entertaining and informative. By the way, Fred von Lohmann is a god. I think it’s time to donate to the EFF again.
One of my pet peeves is when people try to objectify something subjective. One good example is employee ranking.
I know about a large software company that hires both “developers” and “testers”. The developers are graded primarily on how fast they can code. The testers are graded primarily on how many bugs they find. It sounds pretty innocuous, but there are some major problems.
As far as I can tell, if Joe Developer writes X lines of code per hour with Y defects per line, he’s not penalized for Y in any real sense. Maybe he’ll get a reputation for producing sloppy code, but that’s nothing compared to the wrath he’ll face if he’s late on a deliverable.
If Bill Tester finds 10 different ways to exhibit the same bug, he gets credit for them all. He has no incentive to understand the product such that he could identify these as duplicate bugs. In fact, he has no real incentive to open good bugs, because management just uses the raw number.
The end result is a system organized around bug generation.
Instead of fostering practices that create defect-free code (pair programming, test-driven-development, etc), the company is actually encouraging the creation of defects.
And that’s exactly what they get.
Its been months since I last yelled “shotgun” to claim the front passenger seat. I just realized this, and it depresses me. I virtually never travel with more than one other adult.
I’m bitter.
When I was a kid, and people found out I was a computer whiz, they would say “you’re going to make a lot of money when you grow up”.
By the time I showed up the party was over. If only I was born in ‘73 instead of ‘78, I’d be retired today. Oh well. Money isn’t everything… Right?
Ever since MPlayer came around, video playback on Linux has been a dream. To put it simply, the thing can play freaking anything. MPEG, DVD…check. WMV, AVI, ASX…check. QuickTime? RealVideo? Believe it or not, check. It leverages avifile so it can actually use Windows codecs.
Oh, and if you can watch a streaming video with MPlayer, you can always save it. Just add --dumpstream to your command line.
Sometimes, it requires a teensy bit of manual labor to get things going. MPlayer doesn’t understand complex HTML pages with JavaScript and ActiveX controls (well, technically Linux doesn’t understand ActiveX controls, but that’s a feature).
For example, today I wanted to watch Herb Sutter’s OOPSLA ‘04 keynote on C++/CLI. Check it out here.
This is one of those annoying pages that tries to embed WMP in your browser window. Screw that. All one needs to do is find the actual link to the video. First, I wget’ed (wgot?) the url, using the --user-agent= switch to masquerade as Internet Explorer. Buried in the output was a link to the ASX file. After wget’ing that, I had a nice link to the WMV itself.
mplayer mms://foo.com/bar.wmv
It’s moments like this when I remember why I use Linux for fun and Windows to pay the mortgage.
The hair on my head is getting thinner by the clock cycle. For fun, here is my age in various radicies:
(Apologies for the title. I prefer <iostream> but it’s not half as dorky looking.)
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