Gods, not that!

A line of dialogue I, for one, want to hear: Reboot the Kraken!

 

via utk.edu

 

Posted via web from Poor Poor Thing

The dog days of summer

This is a picture of my laptop at work when earlier today it suddenly and silently cut to grey.The two areas on either side looking sort of like shark gills were feeling a lot hotter than electronic equipment usually likes to be, and the underside of the laptop, sitting flat on my desk, was just as bad. So I'm guessing that the problem today, and the intermittent problems I have been having (occasionally when connecting to the office remotely, which I really find inconvenient) could be heat related.

Why don't they make big smokestacks for laptops to carry the heat away and put it as far away from the unit as possible? Or put radiators under the keyboard (which has lots of open space) instead of in a thin strip to the side? That way my fingers would be right where they need to be to know that the unit is feeling a little feverish and I should try to slow things down for a bit.

I have the back feet of the laptop propped up slightly to improve the air circulation somewhat, and those vents feel twenty or thirty degrees Celsius cooler presently. Let's see whether this helps, since I think a replacement is not going to be in the cards for now.

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.

Rosetta Stone,
originally uploaded by jj_mac.

Nearly a decade after Y2K recalled the antique programming language to mind, there are still crises caused by lack of COBOL knowledge:

Perhaps no state is as troubled as California, which has not met timeliness standards for nine years. As in most other states, its 30-year-old computer runs on Cobol, a language so obsolete the state must summon retirees to make changes.

Apparently there is no cadre of computer scientists interested in becoming adept in learning dead languages the same way there are philologists who devote their lives to classical and even more obscure tongues and their glyphs, and this knowledge is in danger of dying out.
I think there should be a project to take an existing COBOL program and translate it into another high-level language which can then be maintained when our retirees can no longer be counted upon to contribute. The original program would be preserved as comments to guide those who maintain the new code. Once the programs have been converted and passed through QA, the whole set of software can be migrated over, to serve as the new production system until that language, too, falls into disuse. Then the whole cycle can begin again.
Perhaps it is possible to define a Turing-complete language which is so easy to understand that its demise would be reckoned in centuries or millennia rather than decades. Ideally it would not rely on cues from any existing human language, as these undergo change and obsolescence, nor from any computer architecture beyond the most fundamental, in case there is a dark age and there is a loss of that technology. Also, it should reside on a durable medium, not on optical or magnetic storage only as those have not demonstrated the kind of longevity our descendants would be counting on. The best thing would be if it could designed to be self-generating, so that you could run it in a way to produce its own compiler from an executable image and a set of execution rules.
That way the survivors of the coming global catastrophe would only need to wait a week or two after emerging from their shelters before basic computing services could be restored, and after that the entire information processing ecosystem could be rebuilt from a source code repository somewhere.

The web of memories

CDC 7600 Core Memory,
originally uploaded by stiefkind.

We still talk about core dumps nowadays, but back when I was in grad school using the Control Data 7600 (and, before it, the 6600), they actually used these hand-woven magnetic core arrays. We would submit our batch jobs to be run on the Cyber, and some time later on we would pick up our lineprinter output (green bar paper fan folded and perforated for tractor feed) set out in cubbyholes between the computer room and the outside. Or we would run a program to show graphical output on a monochrome Tektronix terminal and capture screens to be printed on a thermal printer or onto microfiche. At the time, we didn't even realize how cumbersome it was.

It is almost as if we lived during the time of dinosaurs. Towards the end of my time in grad school the first Macintoshes came out at the student co-op, themselves also museum pieces.

Memory aid

I snapped this while in the checkout line at a supermarket, by way of perfecting my spying skills. It doesn't look to me as if that little note gets changed very frequently if at all. It is number 277 in the list of bad passwords, not even in the top ten among numeric passwords.

The mind reels. A determined band of thugs could gain access to the register and give themselves DOUBLE COUPONS with abandon.

Another crop of falling-apart rants averted

fail,
originally uploaded by Sidereal.

• Social bookmarking site ma.gnolia had a catastrophic failure that claimed not only the production database, which would not be unusual, but also apparently all their backups. What, no offsite database dumps? Fortunately, I have been posting my bookmarks also to delicious for the most part, so nothing much lost.
• My laptop at home froze up, then refused to boot, even in Safe Mode. Off I went to my wife's computer to download and burn the latest Knoppix which allowed me to verify that the hard disk was still readable. I brought it in to work the next morning prepared to copy my data files off to an external drive, but somehow the Windows XP installation healed itself, so the retrieval operation changed to one of backup. Gee, and I was all set to install Ubuntu 8.10 on it.
• The new furnace has been working a bit over-well, causing the radiator in the downstairs bathroom to spit out a lot of brown water all over the floor through its vent. We consulted with the plumbing company and it seems as if it's likely not a problem with that expensive unit, but either a problem with the old vents or with some kind of crud in the pipes. So I'll take a shot at saving a couple of hundred bucks by replacing some air vents on my own and seeing what happens.
• The "auxiliary" (12V) battery in our Prius lost nearly all its charge today while we were at church, and was recovering only very slowly over the next half hour, so we called a service station to come and give us a jump start. The verdict is still out on this one, but it seems not to have re-manifested in a handful of starts since, so we'll hope for the best until we can get it in to the dealer's.

Now any one of these can turn back up again (except for the Magnolia one), so this is possibly only a full-blown rant deferred, not avoided. Watch this space.

Would that it were so

I was frightfully disappointed to discover that the Victorian Internet Exchange is not in fact a time-travel facilitated means of commerce between the present time and that of 150 years ago which we could use to bring wealth from their time into ours. It would have made some things so very simple.

1891 image from Project Gutenberg

Regular expressions of marriage

marriage?,
originally uploaded by Rootytootoot.

Opponents of gay marriage favor the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, forming the basis of a traditional family. Using the language of regular expressions, we can formalize the allowed configurations of families under different assumptions.

Let us represent a family grouping by a character string including various numbers of children, men, and women in that order (alphabetical).

Extended monogamy

^(child)*(man(man|woman)?|woman(woman)?)$

Traditional monogamy

^(child)*(man(woman)?|woman)$

Childfree

^(man(man|woman)?|woman(woman)?)$

Polygyny

^(child)*(man(woman)*)$

Polyandry

^(child)*((man)*woman)$

Polygamy

^(child)*((man)+(woman)*|(man)*(woman)+)$

Anti-spinster

^(child)*(man(woman)?)$

Anti-bachelor

^(child)*((man)?woman)$

Nuclear family

^(man|woman|(child)*manwoman)$

I wrote a little Ruby program to test a number of configurations against these regular expressions to give you an idea of what is allowed and what is not under those models.

Family grouping	Allowed?
Anti-spinster (hetero, no single women, single fathers okay)
man	true
woman	false
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	true
childwoman	false
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Childfree (extended monogamy without children)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	true
womanwoman	true
manmanwoman	false
childman	false
childwoman	false
childmanwoman	false
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Open family (any configuration allowed)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	true
womanwoman	true
manmanwoman	true
childman	true
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	true
childchildmanman	true
childmanmanman	true
manmanwoman	true
child	true
Nuclear family (hetero, no single parents)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	false
childwoman	false
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Anti-bachelor (hetero, no single men, single mothers okay)
man	false
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	false
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Polygyny (1 man + n women)
man	true
woman	false
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	true
childwoman	false
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Traditional monogamy (1+1 of opposite sexes, single parents okay)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	false
childman	true
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Polyandry (n men + 1 woman)
man	false
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	false
womanwoman	false
manmanwoman	true
childman	false
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	false
childchildmanman	false
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	true
child	false
Extended monogamy (1+1 of either sex, single parents okay)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	true
womanwoman	true
manmanwoman	false
childman	true
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	true
childchildmanman	true
childmanmanman	false
manmanwoman	false
child	false
Polygamy (n men + n women)
man	true
woman	true
manwoman	true
manman	true
womanwoman	true
manmanwoman	true
childman	true
childwoman	true
childmanwoman	true
childwomanwoman	true
childchildmanman	true
childmanmanman	true
manmanwoman	true
child	false

A few minutes' inspection of the results reveals how the regular expression in this model encodes the assumptions as to who is allowed to mate and who is allowed to raise children in a powerful and concise manner. Specifically, each of the regexs is short enough to fit on the front of a T-shirt, with room to spare, so that no geekish onlooker would need to wonder what your family philosophy consisted of.

SQL nerd alert

Drop,
originally uploaded by mag3737.

It's Mr. DROP TABLE;

Design notes

We were talking at work today in the context of telephone tech support and I came up with the idea of a best practices document entitled The Seven Words You Can't Use in a User Interface. I was thinking of a scenario where the support person would have to tell the user "Now click on the button whose name begins with C. No, the other one."

Not those Seven Words.

Well, maybe.

Thinking of Windows 7

I am certain I'm not the only one to have come up with this meme, but I may be the first one to have hacked up a promotional poster for Microsoft's next OS.

Source images here and here.

Again with the book covers

Debra Galant has noticed the prevalence of a certain body part on books meant to appeal to women:

Look at almost any representative of woman’s literature these days and you’ll see the female body beheaded and hacked into discrete parts. Sometimes the heads are hacked off at the neckline, sometimes lower. Sometimes, as with Alex Witchel’s book, you just get the legs.

In fact, you always get at least the legs. And unlike my children, who always lost the Barbie doll shoes, the art directors never lose the shoes. Oh no. High-heeled shoes are a must for this particular art form.

Here's a recent example:


In contrast, the O'Reilly line of reference books for software engineering has featured animals for many years:

Now, there is much hand-wringing about the difficulty of attracting bright young women into the field of computers and technology, and it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, it might have something to do with the choice of cover art that prevails. By golly, if they want legs, why on Earth don't they just go ahead and give them legs to look at? Of course, to match the existing style, we would want vintage engravings, not just any illustrations. So, I did some searching and devised this mock-up.



I even covered the bare foot with an engraving of a shoe with a bit of a heel.

Now I will be the first to admit the idea might need a bit of fine-tuning, but I maintain that the reasoning is absolutely sound.

Image credits: Bartleby, Vintage Victorian

The robots! ah they are cruel

Robot Attack!,
originally uploaded by Dan Coulter.

Day 2 of the lockout by Blogger's spam-prevention robots.

Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in

I know I have been scarce lately, but I swear it is all for a good reason.

It's hard to see when it's all moving so fast,
originally uploaded by milkfish.

In the middle of April, I received an email out of the blue from a former colleague of mine from when I was working software tech support/quality assurance. It had been at least a year since we'd had contact, and he was checking to see whether he had my correct email address. I wrote back telling him that he'd found me, and that things were still pretty much going the same for me since the last time we'd met.

Turns out that the same was not true for my friend - he'd left the old company to work for a computer startup nearby, and was wondering whether I might want to get together sometime. One thing led to another and when stopped by to visit I found that there was a grand total of three engineers from the old company who, along with an experienced financial expert, had set up the new venture to produce something new in the field of computer datacenter virtualization. They were looking for people who they were comfortable working with and willing to entertain the idea of a little risk to join their startup.

It turns out that although I had been fully planning to keep the franchise running for the remaining two years of my contract, the idea of jumping on board a tech startup was just the kind of chance I was positioned to take right now. Everybody there already wears more than one hat: the roles I was considering in the company include setting up the in-house virtual datacenter, technical documentation, and product release management. There would be some travel, too, plus a few more bucks headed out our way than I have seen for the last three years.

Sure, there's a possibility that things are going to come crashing down in a way reminiscent of the last tech bust six years ago, but in my reckoning it is not far out of line as compared with the chance I would be taking by not changing jobs. Although I am just about certain that I could make a go of my current business, it seems to me that with all things considered, it's better to take heart in hand and to switch. How's that for an idea?

So, I've decided to close down my onsite furniture repair business and am closing out my ongoing commitments to customers. I have already started working part-time at the new place while everything gets sorted out, but hope to begin working full-time by the end of next month. I have been really channeling a large share of my excitement over there the last month or so and I kind of hope to be able to spread some of that around before too long.

Other tubes

Every one of them claimed already:

• itube (whois)


• thoutube (whois)


• yetube (redirect) (whois)


• hetube (redirect) (whois)


• hetube (redirect) (whois)


• shetube (whois)


• onetube (whois)

But wetube, everyonetube.com, noonetube.com, someonetube.com, and pronountube.com are currently ripe for the picking, domain name fans!

Things I've said recently which would have been incomprehensible 25 years ago

• "Where did I leave my computer?" I was rushing off to an appointment and had mislaid my laptop temporarily. Back in the old days, we did have personal computers, though only luggable in the most generous sense of the term.


• "They left their two Bobcats in our driveway."
  The neighbors are putting an addition on the back of their house and we have agreed to let them use part of our property to bring their equipment through. Because of the recent rain, we have about 15 yards of mud that gets tracked through the kitchen now.
  The Bobcat(tm) line of small earthmoving equipment does not quite go back that far.


• "It keeps doing that whenever I'm not wearing the Bluetooth." Because of the hands-free cell phone laws here, I spend a good part of the day with a headset stuck in my ear, which mostly works fine. But when I do take the thing out and my wife calls, we often seem to get into this thing where the phone thinks it should be picking up from the headset instead of the built-in speaker, and she can't hear me, even though I can hear her. Twenty-five years ago a good many phones I used still had dials on them.


• "I was thinking it might be a good time to buy some more Chinese stock." I was at my doctor's office and the subject of the recent market downturns came up, and I mentioned the possibility of an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. The only Chinese stock we knew about back in the old days was usually made with chicken and ginger.


• "I haven't had T'ang-T'ang noodles in years." We were at a restaurant at the tail end of the Lunar New Year celebration, having the traditional noodle dishes. I'd have this dish at the old Joyce Chen's Small Eating Place in Cambridge regularly, though they were called dan-dan noodles.

www.PromHairstylesaccess.com has your name written all over it!

I updated my random domain script tool to take in the top 50 search terms for 2006 as reported by Lycos. (Previously)

Updated: Changed the links to my other site.

Evil minds at the keyboard

BigString (broken link) offers a free email service which enhances the email you send in the following ways:

• Self-destructing email (the screen image of your email burns up or fades away after being served up to the recipient).


• Non-printing, non-forwardable email.


• Messages which were sent from one email account which appear to come from another email account.


• Email which can be edited or deleted after it has been sent.


• Email which can be viewed only one time.

All of this is fine when used by responsible and morally upright folks, but if it falls into the wrong hands? Consider the possibilities:

• Man woos heiress and emails a proposal of marriage. Asks her for the combination of safe deposit box. Once he has the contents, edits his email to delete any mention of wanting to be wed.


• A person with a grudge email-bombs their target with a huge amount of disturbing and graphic images, maybe illegal, by way of harassment. When the victim calls in the authorities, they find only some innocuous vacation pictures.


• A spy could send pictures they took of secret documents to their handler (perhaps encrypted) and have them self-destruct.


• Same as preceeding, only substitute "unfaithful spouse" for "spy."


• The email-masquerading feature seems like a good way to provoke someone into doing something unwise that they might avoid if they knew who the solicitation was really coming from.

I'm sure that a security maven at the company could come up with some good countermeasures for each of these and others I could dream up (though I do not see them addressed in their FAQ - broken link), but it seems like it might be pretty messy. Until then, let all the hack mystery writers be on notice that this is the birth of a brand-new cheesy plot device to use!

The winds of entropy blow strong

The following items have broken or gone bad in the last couple of weeks:

1. I was working on someone's furniture, sitting on the floor as usual, when I looked down and saw that the sole of my left shoe, maybe two years old, was completely split crosswise. The thing was being held together by just the upper and insole. So now I'm down to one pair of work shoes in brown.


2. At my latest routine dental appointment, they brought out a new instrument that uses a laser to spot decay in its early stages. For most of my life, I have been pretty fortunate in having pretty good teeth, so I don't think I've ever been diagnosed with two cavities at one time before, in the crowns of my left side molars 18 and 20. I guess the placement was fortunate, as the dentist could install both fillings with a single shot of anesthetic.


3. My Treo 650 has been having fits of madness lately, sometimes spontaneously rebooting (and turning off the phone in the process, which is annoying), and then corrupting the Memos database. When you enter a new memo into it, the first line of the memo becomes the name of the memo. Occasionally, however, this name gets wiped out or altered somehow, so when you pull up the list of memos there's a great big gap where the item should be. It always seems to be the item which I was just working on, so I'm wondering whether it might have been caused by stray keypresses adding onto that important first line, maybe pushing it past its limit.
   
   Anyway, when this happens, what I typed into the body of the memo becomes inaccessible from the handheld, and when I sync it up to my desktop that becomes corrupted so that the Palm Desktop software crashes when I try to bring it up. I tried a bunch of different tricks to try to get it to heal over the damage, even reinstalling the desktop software, but it didn't work.
   
   So, currently everything that I've been entering on the tiny keypad on my Treo, over 200 memos, is stranded there. What I would like to do is to copy all of them over to plain text files, do a hard reset on the Treo to clear the memory, then restore all the ones I want. For some reason, even though the handheld accepts SD memory cards, they did not provide a way to copy memos over. And now that my old laptop died, I can't use the IR link to beam them, since my replacement laptop does not have an IR receiver. So I've picked up a USB Bluetooth adapter at eBay and hope to be able to transfer them that way soon.


4. I brought my work van in for scheduled maintenance with some dread, since the last time I did this the bill came to something like $900+. I mentioned to them the strange grinding sound that would come from the vehicle, especially first thing in the morning. It turned out that the power steering pump had died at around 55000 miles, a $430 part and $250 worth of labor to replace.

I've often noticed that certain kinds of misfortune tend to cluster. I'll lose something, then soon find that all sorts of things are starting to go missing. Some days I am attacked by a case of the "drops" when I'll notice an unusual number of unrelated items falling to the ground all around me. And there are times when directions go crazy and I can't find my way anywhere, even familiar places (a distinct disadvantage in my line of work). This feels like the same kind of thing, in which a spate of things all decide to wear out and die on me.

I think I'll wait a couple of months before booking my routine eye appointment.

4309200 domain names for profit

[Changing the title because of a change in my script: formerly it was just 4237500 domain names...]

Daily Blog Tips posted a list of some 200 prefixes and suffixes for domain names.

One of the most effective ways to find a free domain name that is relevant to your site is to grab a keyword and add prefixes or suffixes to it, until you find something unique. Suppose you want to launch a blog about marketing, all you have to do is pick the word marketing and start adding prefixes like “emarketing.com”, “promarketing.com”, “polimarketing.com” or suffixes like “marketingspot.com”, “marketingvox.com” or “marketingpulse.com”.

So I took these lists, mixed them with the top 50 searches at Lycos, threw in a few popular TLDs, and spiced it with some simple JavaScript to produce this tool [new window] for your consideration. I also threw in a domain lookup so you can see whether someone's already reserved your creation.

I look forward to reading about your winners in the comments. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to register hyperLindsayLohandata.info and make millions.

Update: Now the script lets you choose whether you want prefix, suffix, or both. Thanks Daniel!

Another update: Corrected the links to my other site, which has changed hosts.