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Saturday, November 21st, 2009
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1:20 am - Dream: Glider Pants
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This dream was extremely fun, but extremely bizarre and I can only image it to be scientifically impossible to travel in this manner. But let us start with the bizarre stuff. I'm sure you'll find this story of tacky interior design, elephants and some very impressive pants to be quite interesting. What it says about my state of mind? I'd certainly like to know.
I first find myself in a building that appears to only have a single floor. I can only imagine this to represent the fact that I work on one specific floor at work and really never travel to any of the other floors. Since I actually ride the elevator to my work floor, this makes the illusion even more true because I never actually feel like I traverse floors between leaving home and arriving on my floor at work.
( The hallways were all royal blue... )
current mood:  amused
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| Thursday, November 12th, 2009
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10:53 pm - Animal Handlers
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Now, I was working at home today and as I was working I caught some of the morning news, particularly that of The Early Show. I really don't have a favorite-It's mostly whatever show has anything of interest on. I was glad to actually hear and see Craig Horner from The Legend of the Seeker and to see what he's really like. I'd say he does come off as a bit of a pretty boy, but he does a good job in his role. But that's not what I'm emphasizing here.
They had a segment with an animal handler showing the audience some "exotic" animals and I couldn't get past how much of a fast talker he was. I've seen this in every animal handler on television whether on a morning show or late show. They come on stage and they fly through about 20 animals in a 3 minute span and about a million words spew out of their mouth as they literally throw these animals onto the table and then off of it to some back-stage handlers. Maybe they do this crazy display every time because they have a limited timespan while all their animals are behaving nicely, but I feel like the animals are completely terrified the entire time. In fact, the beaver he had on stage actually peed itself.
Now I don't think it's just coincidence that these handlers get stage fright and terrorize these creatures only for our captive audience. I'm pretty sure these people are use to handling animals all the time and probably terrorize them on a regular basis for all sorts of crowds. If that's true, there's no surprise that these animals go crazy and rip peoples faces off, etc. They should really consider slowing down and reading the animals instead of hoping that dazzling them in spotlights is going to knock them silly until they're back in cages.
current mood:  nervous
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| Friday, November 6th, 2009
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8:11 am - Life is Like a Lego Set.
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Perhaps I'm talking a lot about xkcd as of late, but they have been rather profound. Today's comic, in my opinion, is a great analogy of the separation of body and spirit.
I'm not sure what I think of organ donning, but this is a good argument for the practice. If our body is just made up of a bunch of pieces, taking is apart would render us as simply parts and not actually us. Our spirit would be like the instruction manual explaining how to build a Steven or a John or whoever. After it was built and disassembled, we'd still know what it looked like and if we shipped the pieces off somewhere it wouldn't make us any less of who we were. Our spirit, our original construction, is left in the minds and thoughts of those who knew and loved us when we were still pieced together.
I've always pondered this idea as what the afterlife really is. Eternal life is in the minds of those who put weight to the life of someone who came and left before them. In this, Jesus Christ laid claim to being the spirit of The Word that existed in the beginning along with God, and his many followers today continue to put weight in that belief and so Christ is considered to have lived eternally before all time began.
In a similar way, we put weight to the lives of famous individuals from all different devotions. Their lives have been written down for the generations to come and they, in a sense, would live forever as a memory. But this is just a theory and there is nothing to prove it true or false, so life after death continues to be the mystery that it is. After all, it doesn't explain ghost business.
current mood:  curious
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| Thursday, November 5th, 2009
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9:54 pm - Trying out MSSE.
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Not long ago, Microsoft announced and released their own free antivirus/security utility for Windows XP/Vista/7. I'm quite happy they decided to make this move because, after all, Microsoft should be responsible for their own mistakes and creating their own antivirus program will likely entice them to fix their problems. Why? Because I've been in the service industry long enough to know that if you write software with bugs/exploits in it and you're in charge of supporting it you will get so frustrated with it that you will fix the problem to get rid of the annoyance.
( I'm making a switch to Microsoft antivirus. )
I'm trusting entirely in the statement "Microsoft will not use this information to identify you or to contact you" as their word that anything they might potentially use against me in a court of law will be thrown out if it was collected as part of this program.
I will try this out. I have no worries anyway because I have not been infected for many years. Since I don't traverse shady websites, I don't run into the problems everyone else often runs into. We will see how Microsoft can defend when I do per-chance run across malicious information.
current mood:  cynical
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| Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
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2:18 pm - The nonsensical 32-bits
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I must make note of this, however unlikely, in the case that I might stupidly put more than 4GB of memory into a 32-bit version of windows. An interesting issue at work arose where a 32-bit server with 8GB of memory was reporting 'out of memory' errors in applications even when there was at least 5GB of remaining free memory. As it turns out, even if you put in that much memory, applications are, by default, only allowed to make use of a combined 2GB of memory without tweaking boot options.
While we have yet to test a solution to this problem, I didn't want to lose track of these important gems in the sand-pit that is MSDN.
1. Kernel address space consequences of the /3GB switch.
2. Driver may not be loaded with the /3GB switch (Also talks of the /USERVA switch).
3. How PAE x86 Works. Especially make note of "Application Windowing Extensions (AWE)" in this article.
The current theory is that we can adjust the system to allocate more than the standard 2GB of application address space by using these special kernel switches. This is yet to be confirmed, but seems plausible. The major concern is how much the allocation can expand. This could mean we still limited to a maximum of 4GB total combined application and kernel space, meaning that any more than 4GB in a 32-bit Windows computer becomes totally useless. These documents all appear to imagine that the computer user is setting up a system with 4GB of memory and the technical aspects are worded as if the 4GB limit was the only thing of concern, nothing more. I'd be curious to know if I were to set the /3GB flag and one of /USERVA=6000 (6GB addressing space, leaving 3GB for kernel) if the system would still operate.
current mood: curious
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| Friday, October 30th, 2009
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8:55 am - Best. Halloween. Comic. Ever.
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I don't believe it would ever be possible to out-do this halloween xkcd comic.
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| Friday, October 23rd, 2009
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10:12 pm - Zen Wii
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I can't say I would normally be into the whole Zen thing, but somehow it comes naturally to some Wii games. Endless Ocean is one game I didn't think I'd personally enjoy very long, but in actuality I was surprised how interesting and intelligent that game turned out. Plus, when you're totally exhausted or frustrated or sick, but don't want to go to bed, it is surprisingly relaxing to potato up and go scuba diving, endlessly. That's just one example of Zen appearing in the modern hands-on gaming experience.
My latest curiosity has been the Lost Winds saga. I purchased the first $10 chapter of it, and while it's a short 4-hour game, it's Zen like a bottle of vodka. It is also on of the only games I could actually get my niece and nephew to comprehend enough that they weren't totally frustrated. If you want a game that's action-packed thrills, Lost Winds is certainly not worth your time, but if your mind is in the mood to zone out for several hours trying to solve puzzles that most children could figure out in five minutes, this game is perfect. If you know me well enough, this game would probably remind you of me instantly.
I don't know if I've told you before about Lost Winds, but I'm reminded of it now primarily because I learned tonight that Frontier has released the second installment of the saga, Lost Winds: Winter of the Melodias. A continuation of the fable from where you left off previously.
Normally I wouldn't go for a game that costs $10 and only plays for 4-6 hours, but to play this game is like dreaming about feathers drifting down a small brook flowing through a quaint village of tiki people. You could complete the goals in 4 hours, but you could spend days just observing the trees rustle at your command. In fact, you'll probably find yourself making those quick left-and-right hand motions like you were casting spells with a magic wand. And you'll just assume have the little boy Toku roam the foothills looking for wisps rather than listening to his babysitter, Deo.
So, while I don't normally find any of the WiiWare being worth the download, let alone the price, Lost Winds comes highly recommended from me.
current mood:  excited
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| Monday, October 19th, 2009
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3:28 pm - Higgs Bosons, From the Future
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I don't know if any of you have been reading the news lately on the Large Hadron Collider, but I have to say it's an amusing theory to suggest that the future is destroying the collider.
If the future is collapsing on itself to destroy this repulsive particle, then there are a lot of outlandish theories we could deduce on what will happen. I doubt time travel is an energy efficient mode of travel, so Newton's third law would suggest a pretty catastrophic action would cause time to collapse in on itself and destroy the generation point of the Higgs particle.
If we suggest that the sabotage was planned, then we'd know that the Higgs was created at some point and there would be time-traveling agents here trying to steer people away from making these particles. But this theory would be debunked because a true time traveler would not be so short-sighted as to think that destroying something at the tail end of its creation would stop science from pursuing these 'god particles'. Then again, it can't be easy to convince Peter Higgs and Robert Brout that their theories are wrong. You can either tell them to pursue their theory and poison their research, or you can laugh them off. Either way they will just pursue it from every direction until they see the proof for themselves. Maybe sabotaging the LHC several times would send a signal to scientists that we shouldn't create Higgs particles. Obviously, total destruction would only interest scientists more.
We can only ponder, but at least we can rest easy with this very useful micro-site.
current mood: curious
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| Thursday, September 24th, 2009
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2:44 pm - The Web is about to get VERY interesting...
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Google has just stepped up the game to a whole new level by announcing Sidewiki. Essentially, you can add a "wiki" to the side of any website and post comments and information about any website into this "wiki" and the rest of the world that uses Sidewiki will be able to go to that website and see the comments and notes.
This sounds like an awesome idea, right? I think it's pretty cool, but even above that, I think it's the scariest thing I've ever seen. Google's playing on the notion that the world is inherently good, but we all know that there are plenty of competitive minds out there. While Google wants people to contribute useful information to every website, I can only see people using Sidewiki to bash a lot of web content. If someone doesn't like your product, there doesn't seem to be anything stopping them from adding hateful comments to your website and thus turning away customers.
For malware websites, this is awesome because we can finally warn people by saying "Hey, this website will infect your computer." But for regular mom and pop shops, this could be devastating if someone says "Hey, I bought this product and it wasn't up to my expectations."
I also wonder about how Sidewiki interacts with login pages. What's to prevent some malicious users from infecting Sidewiki content with some bad code and so everyone who tries to log into their bank page gets infected with a keylogger.
current mood:  worried
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| Sunday, September 20th, 2009
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4:19 pm - I've been thinking about games.
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I've never been a fan of continuously paying money to play a game like World of Warcraft or Everquest. The reason being that it is a mix of addiction and expense. I know for a fact that I would enjoy playing any of these games, and I know these games are written to be addictive. If I started playing the game, I'd never stop and I'd burn a lot of money each year just to continue the addiction. At the onset of "WoW", I vowed never to join in the game because I knew from seeing it that I'd be hooked and spending $15 every month to play.
Only an idiot would argue that money makes a barrier to addiction. Drug addicts don't stop doing drugs when they realize how much they spend, and game addicts are no different. If anything, a poor game addict might be encouraged to steal money to continue playing their game. Hey, youths in Bihar, India are stealing and selling bananas to pay for their cell phone plans, so who is to say they don't do the same for their game addiction?
Allow me to dig into my age-long search for a fun ( online game. )
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| Friday, September 4th, 2009
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1:16 pm - Italian is not American, but I'll eat it anyway.
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This is the second time in a row that the alternate sandwich lady at my favorite sub shop has mistakenly made me an American sub instead of an Italian sub. To make it even worse, I asked for an Italian mix with Russian, Swiss, Lettuce and Tomato -- The same order as I did last time -- and she asked me if it was an American mix I wanted. I corrected her with a loud, strong, "Italian." I get back to my desk and what do I find? She made me another American mix with the toppings I asked for. It's understandable to forget the order the first time and ask again. It makes some sense if the toppings ended up incorrect in the end, but to miss the type of sub after relaying it twice? The next time she's in charge of making my sub I'm going to have to beat it into her that I don't want an American sub. When I want one, I will say so. If she screws up next time, I will have to differ her to the next person in line from then on. "Italian" does not sound anything like "American", nor does it look like it when spoken. And an Italian mix does not have roast beef or turkey.
( blah, blah philosophy, blah blah... )
After today's case, I will have to let her know of her mistake and ask that she get it right next time. If she gets it wrong again, I will not let her make my sandwich again. It's unfortunate because she's very good with presentation, but she keeps forgetting the order. The other lady gets it right every time, but she's not as good with presentation. But this also gives her a chance to get familiar with me as a certain customer. I'll come in and she'll know about her past mistake and she will remember to get it right for me each time I come in again.
On top of all this, it also shows my fate of twos or whatever it is. This is now two times in a row I asked her to make me a sub, an Italian mix sub, and she made me an American mix instead. I have been there other times in between, but most of the time she wasn't taking my order and the one time she did, it was not for a sub. So now this is two distinct sub making mistake incidents of the same kind.
It baffles me why I keep running into pairs of unusual things. A couple weeks ago I saw two of these double-front motorized tricycles going through the roundabouts on Exit 12 on the same day but once while I was returning home and once while I was leaving for a second time. Different color, but all the same. It would not be unusual except that I've never seen them before or after that day.
Yesterday I saw two instances where a motorcycle was being closely tailgated by an SUV while making maneuvers on the roads. It was weird in the fact that they were traveling very slowly and it wasn't just a case of closeness as result of deceleration. It was as if the motorcycles were leading the SUVs around.
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| Friday, August 21st, 2009
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4:19 pm - IE7: It Magically Makes Problems Disappear
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So I have to make note of this headache. I feel like Richard Cypher having a headache every time the underworld comes beckoning with trouble. Seriously, I've had a headache and dizziness all day today and suddenly I feel better after having discovered this problem.
We're testing things uses IE7, but our other environments are using IE6. When we switched over to HTTPS (secure ssl on IIS) it all tested perfectly well. Then we delivered the change to our other environments with IE6. The program wouldn't work at all. It turns out that IE6 and IE7 interpret spaces in XML fields differently. Particularly in URL fields.
When we tried to access the SSL site with our embedded Internet Explorer, it came back with an error saying navigation canceled and the url started with "http://https://". We searched all over for a configuration file that might accidentally been typed out wrong. We didn't fine one. The XML files looked fine, but one file was peculiar.
One XML file has a <url> tag that contained a url on a separate line like this:
<url>
https://someurl.com/whatever.asp
</url>
It turns out that IE7 magically makes the spaces (in our case, new-lines and tabs) and new lines before and after the url disappear. IE6 does not. If you look at the XML file in IE6 you won't see this problem. However, IE6 still interprets it as part of the url. Apparently IE6 replaces the spaces with "http://" instead of realizing that the protocol is already listed. So we end up with "http://https://someurl.com/whatever.asp".
The solution is to always test with the same version of IE that you are delivering to, and don't leave spaces in XML fields like those of URLs. Thank you, Microsoft, for making it really really hard for us to track down the bane of our existence.
current mood:  annoyed
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| Thursday, August 20th, 2009
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4:54 pm - That CARS Bill won't help.
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You all know about "cash for clunkers". The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act is one way to get rid of old cars, but it's also a terrible way to destroy the future economy. Opening up the discount to consumers was the worst way to do this. On top of that, the $3500 - $4500 incentive is very unreasonable. That reaches to 30% of the value of some of these new cars.
The way it was presented to the House was as a green policy. We're going to save our environment by giving people money to trade in their old cars. They did not evaluate the environmental impact of creating these new cars or the disposal of the old cars. And they did not bring up the gold rush effect that it has created.
( The money will obviously run out... )
current mood:  disappointed
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| Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
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1:34 pm - Over-prepared to Die
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You know today's typical theory: If you bring an umbrella with you it will ward off the rain and you'll not get the chance to use it. Or if you decide to hang a teru teru bozu at your window sill the rains will not be quick to leave. It's like those email chain letters that everyone sends around: If you mail this to 10 people, a million dollars will suddenly show up on your doorstep within 13 hours. Nobody believes that.
If you ask me, this is a new side to superstition. If you follow the instructions, your expectation will be ruined. If you expected rain and bring an umbrella the rain will not come. The whole idea is that your action will lead to a failure on your own part.
( Let me explain... )
current mood: amused
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| Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
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3:52 pm - Cool Perl Hackery: Formatted Output without a File
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I really loved this little hack I made, so I want to share. Sorry if this is 1337 speak, but do understand that I write code for a living.
So Perl has this feature called FORMAT and WRITE as part of their "English" module (don't ask me why it's called that). It, among other things, allows you to define text formatting templates and subsequently write text to a file based on those templates. This is great for fixed-width text files of various types. My problem was that I didn't want to be writing a file to the system just to display some formatted text. So I found a trick which allows you to write formatted text to a variable as if it were a file.
use strict;
use vars qw($recordval $variable_output);
use English;
format HEADER =
This is a header with a page number: @>>>>>>>>>>>
$FORMAT_PAGE_NUMBER
.
format RECORD =
A record with a value of: @||||||||||||
$recordval
.
# Open and select the variable handle.
$variable_output = '';
open VARH, ">", \$variable_output or die ("Fail");
select (VARH);
# Adjust the formatting of the variable handle.
$FORMAT_PAGE_NUMBER = 0;
$FORMAT_TOP_NAME = 'HEADER';
$FORMAT_LINES_PER_PAGE = 53;
$FORMAT_LINES_LEFT = 0;
select (STDOUT);
print "Generating report... ";
# Write the formatted header
select (VARH);
$FORMAT_NAME = 'RECORD';
# Write 200 lines of records that count from 2 to 53
# ( The number of lines per page besides the header )
for (my $i=0; $i < 200; $i++) {
$recordval = $i % 52 + 2;
$FORMAT_NAME = 'RECORD';
write;
}
select (STDOUT);
close (VARH);
print "Done. Here is the report:\n\n";
print $variable_output;
It's very simple, but makes screen output very nice if you need to format your screen output with precise left/right/middle text alignment and whatnot.
current mood: accomplished
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| Monday, August 10th, 2009
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8:03 am - The story of my life?
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I have to say I was a bit taken by the latest XKCD comic that came out today. It really does sound a lot like myself. I have dreams all the time, I used to speak Spanish, some years I rarely post in this journal/blog, and sometimes I do feel like the least interesting person in the world because I'm always so quiet in a group setting. I have never really been interested in small talk, which everyone else apparently enjoys while I feel it rather pointless.
Always have blamed it on my broad skill set. My hypothesis has always been that a jack of all trades makes one appear to be a genius, but in truth they are an expert at nothing.
current mood: curious
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| Monday, August 3rd, 2009
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11:38 pm - Endless Anime
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There really is no end to the amount of anime that is pumped onto the Internet every day. Much of what's out there is not worth watching, but there's a bit of it that I find interesting. Unfortunately, even that list is large enough to make me look like a regular couch potato, so I don't exactly highlight everything I decide to check out.
In addition to that fact, I have a tendency of keeping the files around of anime that I enjoyed. This is mostly so that, if I did feel compelled to buy anime (which I must say is pricy compared to other imported goods), I might have a record of what I might concider buying. This has made my hard drive rather full, so I've decided to change my approach and actually delete video that I didn't find absolutely amazing. So I'm going to start digesting a list of stuff and possibly point out the highlights and disappointments of all these shows I randomly try out.
Let me give you the ( bad news first. )
So those are some of the lesser enjoyable items in my browsing. I'll try to make another list of what has kept me interested.
current mood: blah
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| Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
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12:32 pm
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| Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
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11:55 pm - Zombie Mouse (II)
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Okay, so Zombie Mouse I was actually a real mouse I discovered in our house several years ago which was missing part of the skin over its skull and wasn't actually bleeding but smelled horrible, so I wasn't sure how it was still alive. I deemed it the zombie mouse and restored it to a life in the woods.
Now I have a new mouse to call zombie. My computer mouse. I put fresh batteries in it this evening. It ran fine and I watched an episode of some anime (with some zombie-like crazies in it) and then the episode finished. I went to run Fruity Loops because I had a music idea in my head, but a new version of FL Studio Beta is out so my software would not start until I upgraded (this is a beta thing, not a full-version thing), and then I almost burnt my hand on my mouse.
I took the fresh batteries out, and they were very very hot. Then I put another pair of recharged batteries in. The mouse didn't respond. So I went looking for my receipt. God must have wanted me to sort out my receipts because I sorted out most of my 07-09 receipts without finding the one I would need to warrant the mouse. I come back down, try the batteries again, but they still don't work. I then decide that maybe these fresh batteries are dead. Sure enough they were. Put a new set in and now my mouse is fine.
Thus, I thought my mouse was surely dead due to some kind of electrical surge in the bad batteries, but now it is alive. So I'm calling it a zombie mouse.
Now I just have to reverse my frustrations so I can get some sleep.
current mood:  frustrated
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| Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
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3:18 pm - Static Cling
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So I was watching a show about the Apollo moon missions the other day, and they discussed a lot about the new lunar mission. One thing they discussed was the dust problem. Apparently moon dust is very electrically charged and has the consistency of powdered glass. Part of building a moon base involves adding a static discharge unit in order to keep the dust out of the interior quarters. This leads me to wonder.
It's probably just my own outlandish concern, but what happens when you gradually discharge the moon? Does it stick around the Earth after you've explored it to the point that it doesn't stick any more? What in space would cause the particles to re-charge? Is there insane amounts of undetectable friction between the Earth and the moon, or do asteroids cause static charges when they crash into the moon?
So if we discharge large portions of moon dust, I wonder if we'll accidentally cause the moon to drift off on its own. The pros of this is that the lunar team gets to take a life-long trip into the solar system. The cons is that the Earth loses all tide cycles and probably the complete destruction of our ecosystem. Imagine if the moon was the most important piece of maintaining live on Earth, and moving it to another planet, say Mars, would result in a new ecosystem there instead.
current mood: curious
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