Divine Lunacy

Or did I ever leave? That is the question. Whenever anyone asked, I simply replied “I use KDE. Gnome’s better; Gnome’s more stable. KDE’s sexier.” The looks are all KDE really has going for it. I’ll take gnome any day. I just compiled 2.12.1. Its nice. A few rough edges, but I think I’ve done a good job getting things working. Two posts in five minutes. Frightening.

In other news, I may have accidentally started what could have potentially become world war III. Lets just hope this negotiations don’t turn out like the ones in episode one…

I was just looking through Awstats. Checkout the search terms that have led to my blog this month:

• given a triangle abc how would you use only a compass and straight edge to find a point p such that triangles abp acp and bcp have equal perimeters? assume that abc is constructed so that a solution does exist. -> 13 referals
• myspace sucks -> 7 referals
• myspace customizations -> 1 referal
• 1136102400000 gmail -> 1 referal
• funny ambitions -> 1 referal
• topnotcher -> 1 referal
• myspace crashes firefox -> 1 referal
• topnotcher in german -> 1 referal

First, I’d like you to note that I’m clearly not the only person who thinks myspace sucks. Secondly, notice that two of those are math related. Thirdy, yes, indeed, myspace does crash firefox, but are my ambitions really that funny?

I just wrote ten MySQL queries, and didn’t bother to proofread them. They ran on the first try. Perfectly, as in without error…

Many of you probably remember back in August when I said I might try to code a mafia replica. I said might because at the time, I fully realized all the work involved in such a goal. Writing a game from scratch is quite a job. As Linus Torvalds would say:

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say " hey, that _almost_ works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.

My problem is that I did start large, and I did expect it to get large, and I did overdesign, and I did give up. I was also completely alone. It isn’t that the programming was particuarly challenging. In fact, it’s quite easy. The problem is the sheer volme of work that needs to be done to get a remotely playable game out of that code. I did get quite far on the core of the game, but i never got any game play features implememted.

Just as it seemed the whole online RPG thing was going down the hole, a new, and completely different opportunity arose. The admin of hitmen is fed up with the game, and lacks the time and paitence to continue to be the admin. He has recently decided that he is going to give the code away to a deserving individual. Joe applied for this position and has been notified that he is one of the top three choices. If we’re selected, our dream of hosting a game without programming it from scratch will come true. (and we’ll love it and cherish it forever.) Adiran, the admin, is planning on making his decision on Monday.

Imagine a world with no Official languages. A world in which each village has own dialect. A world in which communications between groups of people is impossible. Official languages prevent such a world by “forcing” everyone to speak the same language, but that’s a whole different topic. I don’t want to get started on why we need to make English our official language before the Spanish people assimilate us in our own country. Anyway… If I am so inclined, I can send an email to a mac user in England (I use Linux). The mac user in England will be able to read my email because although our computers are running different operating systems, they speak a common language. This is ensured by standards such as ASCII, ANSI, and ISO. I am using ISO 8859-1; the mac probably isn’t using ISO 8859-1, but it most likely knows how to read it. The character set is specified in the email headers. I can go to a variety of websites, and my browser of choice, Firefox, will have no problem displaying them. This is also due to standards. The w3c, or world wide web consortium was formed in 1994 to oversee open standards for the internet. Without a single organization overseeing standards, different websites would be coded in different languages, and not all browsers would be able to display every website. The internet would be much like the hell described at the beginning of this paragraph.

While many websites willingly comply with w3c recommendations, some seem to go out of their way to shit all over standards. Myspace is one of these websites. Even though I believe myspace is the root of all evil, I’ve been on it a lot more lately. Each time I type myspace.com into the address bar, I loathe Tom even more than before, and fear his horrible coding will yet again crash Firefox. Any website that crashes firefox doesn’t deserve to live. I’m not trying to say Firefox is perfect. (I know it isn’t.) Firefox’s poor memory management could be used to frighten small children. (adapted that from a Linus quote). In many respects, Opera is a better browser, but this post isn’t about which browser is better—it’s about which website sucks at life. That website being none other than myspace. Anyway… Just for fun, I figured I’d run my profile through the w3c markup validator. The profile is over 1000 errors away from being flawless XHTML 1.1. Tom wouldn’t know valid [X]HTML if it challenged him to a duel.

In addition to using bad markup, myspace goes out of its way to promote the use thereof. The default style of a myspace profile is boring to say the least. To remedy this, users have taken to using CSS and HTML to spice things up. Unfortunately, myspace was not designed for this kind of customization. Profile customizations are hacks at best, and some effects can only be achieved by blatantly disregarding standards. Fortunately, the casual user is not at fault in this case. The myspace profile system is lacking in many areas. A system similar to the blogger template system would be quite nice.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, I do a lot of whining, but rarely do anything about it. Well, I’m not doing anything about myspace either. I would jump at the opportunity to help design an open, compliant, alternative, but I lack the resources, time, and funding to undertake such a project by myself. I just hope someone gets to it before myspace corrupts the whole world. If we’re lucky, Google will own the world before that time, and Google Groups will challenge myspace groups to a battle to the death… Robozombie Google Vs. Myspace. (Google will kick Myspace’s ass any day. {robozombie or not} Their 52 week range is roughly $116-$358. Kick ass.)

I just switched to dvorak. Thank god this post is prefabricated…

Google first started dishing out more megabytes to Gmail users in April this year. Each time I have logged into one of my Gmail accounts, I have seen the wonderful storage counter they have on the Gmail homepage. I always figured it would be nice to know how much space they’re dishing out and over what time period, but it was never very high on my to do list. I just happened to have an essay due on Wednesday, and Gmail turned out to be the perfect catalyst for procrastination. Procrastination always gets the best of me. How can a report for English be more important than random mathematical endeavors anyway? Whilst I should have been weaving a story of world conquest, I was busy pouring through the Javascript that makes that hott counter run. The first code of note I came across was a definition of the a multidimensional array:


var CP = [
[ 1122879600000, 2450 ],
[ 1125558000000, 2550 ],
[ 1136102400000, 2950 ]
];


Being a *nix user and programmer with nothing better to do, I quickly realized that the three large numbers were dates written as the number of milliseconds after the Unix epoch. (1st January, 1970). It then follows that the second number in each sub array is the number of megabytes of storage Gmail users will have by the corresponding dates. Content with my time findings for the time being, I proceeded to play around with these numbers. This is where the linear algebra comes in. To find the rate of change between any two ‘installments’ of storage, one must compute the value ‘rise over run’, or similarly, ‘change in Megabytes over Change in time’.

Before continuing it is important to note that the first date is July 1st, 2005, the second is August 1st, 2005, and the third is January 1st 2006. We are currently in between the second and third installments. The rate of expansion between the second and third installments is given as:

Rate = (1136102400000-1125558000000)/(2950-2550) = (1 MB)/(26361000 ms)

Let t be the time, in seconds, since the Unix Epoch. The space available to Gmail users on any given date is then given as:

S=((t-1125558000000 ms))*((1 MB)/(26361000 ms)) + 2550

To be sure of this result and because I had nothing more exciting to do, I decied to write a PHP script to test the theory, which was of course correct. Writing that in PHP failed to waste a sufficient amount of time, so I decided a C++ version was in store… Let’s not go into that. ( C++ version )

Curious to see how Google approached the problem, I continued reading deeper into the source code. They used an equally effective part over whole method.

S=(t-1125558000000)/(1136102400000)*(2950-2550) + 2550

The real question here is: How much space will I have on October 4th, 2005 at 1533:27 EDT? ( Unix time: 1128454527)

S=(1128454527000-1125558000000 ms)*((1 MB)/(26361000 ms))+ 2550 = 2659.879253...MB

We shall see if I am right. In the meantime, it looks like I have quite a lucrative careerer in the field of insanity.

Surely we’ve all watched the sixth sense… Either way, you’ll surely understand this pop culture reference… I see pseudo-geeks. Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re not geeks. This technical era in which we live has brought about it’s own kind of fake—the pseudo-geek. They’re everywhere, and much like in the Sixth Sense, not just anyone can see them. Only Cole is able to see dead people, and in our real life geek parallel, only geeks can spot pseudo geeks. This is what makes them dangerous and annoying.

I know few people who lack the intelligence to browse an acronym finder. 4ny0n3 c4/\/ 5p34k 1337, 8u7 f3\/\/ 4r3 7ru1y 31337. I can go around talking about KDE, and how it’s a GUI, but I prefer my good ol’ bash shell. I could give a speech about how much I love cd’ing through my ~, and rm’ing all the junk. (this reminds me… I’m still running a 2.6.10 Kernel with SELinux. Time to update…) If I select * from readers where clue > 0;, only true geeks will be returned. Unfortunately, only a true geek will get a correct return on that query. All of the non-geeks who read this blog probably think that query is enough to make me sound like an ubergeek. So you’ve seen that I can talk the talk, but can I walk the walk? Do I actually know anything about something?(say yes or feel my wrath.) This is how we distinguish the Geeks from the pseudo-geeks. Pseudo-geeks are often able to compose nice sentences full of meaningless technical jargon. Here’s an example: I fsck’ed my main partition today because I had a bunch of orphaned GUI’s. To someone who doesn’t know that GUI stands for Graphical User Interface, that sentence probably makes perfect sense. (orphaned Inodes would be correct.) Only us true geeks can see through their facades. Only a true geek can expatiate about the benefits of *nix over winblows…

In the past, I have tried to avoid writing about idiots on this weblog. Perhaps because I don’t want to deal with their stupidity-ridden comments, or perhaps because I’m just too lazy to rant. There are few idiots who have been lucky enough to be featured on this Blog, and this person happens to be a returning moron. Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, Spiders, Googlebot, Feedster users, and Technorati users, I give you Rambacher. [Crowd cheers as Greg introduces the guest with a hint of disdain in his voice.]

(more…)

I’ve spent some time researching third party router firmwares lately. I was reading about OpenWrt, and learned that it supports a variety of routers, including Motorola’s WR850G, which I happen to have (not in use.). I decied it would be nice to ‘evaluate’ the firmware on this router, so I downloaded the latest source for OpenWrt, compiled it and loaded it on the router, which has since become a brick. My problem is pretty much described by this post on the OpenWrt forumns. I’ve tried talking the router out of the coma, but it has decided not to listen to me. Surgery is imminent. I’ve quite literally made the cuts and opened the router, which has support for serial(two interfaces) and JTAG. I plan on making a JTAG connector as soon as I can get to RadioShack to pick up some resistors. Tune in next time…

I’ve decided to write one more post before I leave for Philmont. ( cause I’m too lazy to write my Bon Voyage post. ). I guess I’ll start with last night, as it set the scene for today. I was up until about 0030 today, talking to Kayla ( XFN hehe. ). As a result, I was too tired to do anything today. Instead of really accomplishing anything, I spent the day refreshing RSS feeds. Instead of writing much more, I think I”ll just throw in a bunch of links and allow you to delve infinitely deep into the Blogosphere.

I began my day by refreshing my aggregator. This brought me up to date on the London Situation. After reading all about that, and still not having a clear idea as to the death toll ( I saw several different numbers. ), I checked out the Latest Developments at Google Blog. Then having math on my mind, I read about the latest changes to mathworld. It was around 10:00 that I decided to head on over to IE Blog, where I read about Browser Security and Long Horn’s RSS support, before reading an ‘essay’ by Peter Torr. Finally, after all that, I got around to reading the latest post on Google Blog. Yeah, so about summarizes my day. ( and Kayla didn’t email me… Grr. )

I’m a water Junkie at heart: I love boating, swimming, fishing, and even floating around mindlessly. For longer than I can remember, my Grandmother, who practically lives on a lake has hosted a fourth of July ‘bash’. The fourth of July is by far my favorite Holiday. ( yes, even above Christmas. ) As my mom is in charge of preparing most of the food, we arrived early enough for my brother and I to fit a game of badminton in before lunch. Although we don’t bother keeping score, I most likely won that game. After lunch, I played badminton against my cousing Matt. Matt and I have been playing for several years. He always challenges me to a game, always loses, and always denies losing, or ‘alters’ the score. I ‘beat’ him this time. He actually gave up and told me I won! ( Victory, alas! ). After a quick game of badminton with Eric, IKayaked mindlessly for a while, before jumping in several times. ( Jumping in is half the fun. ). When I had completed my mindless kayaking, I indulged in assorted [homemade] ice creams ranging from chocolate chocolate chip cookie dough to coffee nut chip. ( Can’t forget the smushin… ). Following my gluttonous ice cream spree, I once again partook in a game of badminton, which I lost horribly. ( Due to the ice cream. ) All the badminton aside, the highlight of my day was probably a kayak war with my sister. ( she started it!!! { and ended up in the water. } ) Luckily there wasn’t a scary lifeguard to yell at me this time. ( That post sucks to much to link to. ). My brother probably won our final badminton game yesterday. He improved a lot over the course of the day, and among other things, learned to take advantage of me when playing without boundries. ( He plays dirty! )

When I got home and checked my gmail, there was an AdSense email confirmation awaiting me. I never signed up for AdSense, but I guess It can’t hurt to try, can it? ( I doubt my pagerank is high enough. { I don’t even know if they consider that. [ I’m double nesting again. ] } )

The latest revision of wordpress seems to have broken pages. I’ll try to look into that later, and perhaps post to the mailing list. Meanwhile, about and contact are down. Aggregator is finally up, though in need of much work. ( including adding more feeds. ) I still haven’t made the “Archives”, “Elsewhere” and “Other” pages. ( Other is actually going to be code. I’m just trying to think of a slightly more interesting name for it. ) Edit: Wordpress plugins also seem to be broken. I’ll look into that too, but until it is fixed, this will not post to my livejournal. ( not that I really care… )
Edit(2): Pages work again. The permalinks were messed up. Plugins are also working again.( don’t remember what I did… )