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04:55 pm
[Link] |
another "oh for fuck's sake" installment
Linux dump/restore don't complain about failing to recognize ext4 filesystems. Instead they happily read them in and write them back out. But what they read/write is garbage because they don't actually know how to deal with extent-based inodes.
And of course, the maintainers don't know if it will ever support the new format; they are not actively working on it. Not that they've bothered to make those programs check the kind of filesystem they're operating on in the meantime or anything.
Always remember to verify your backups, people.
Current Mood:  annoyed
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04:50 pm
[Link] | Dear lazyweb,
Can any of you identify the author and title of this track?
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11:07 am
[Link] |
and now for something completely difference
I also got to play
spacewar
on a working
PDP-1,
supervised by one of the original authors of the game (Steve Russell). I
really appreciate the fact that even the people volunteering there at the
museum are a part of history.
I brought my
Curta Type II
mechanical calculator with me to show off to my friends who came with me.
I was going to hold it up next to the Babbage engine, but never got a
chance to. It turns out they had a couple of them in a display cabinet,
including some that had the case cut away so you could see the insides.
A couple of the visitors did seem to get a kick out of my demonstrating
my curta, since you couldn't play with the ones on display.
Anyway, there are more pictures of the exhibits.
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04:25 pm
[Link] |
fractal food
Carrie made this for dinner about a month ago. MMmm, I can still TASTE the RECURSION!
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02:44 pm
[Link] |
xkcd cartoon idea
stick-figure jesus says "you all misunderstood. The raptor is coming."
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08:17 am
[Link] |
oh hai, i mad u a lulz
This molecule exists! Synthesis of Anthropomorphic Molecules: The NanoPutians, by Stephanie H. Chanteau and James M. Tour. (The PDF is better-formatted.)
Most entertaining synthesis paper I've ever read!
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10:46 am
[Link] |
Not fail. Win!
I, myself, have enjoyed many a hannukah ham. Mmm, sacrilicious.
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11:34 pm
[Link] | There was once a young piece of glass named Florence, but because she was only 750mL everyone called her Loliter.
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03:14 pm
[Link] | 14:34 <emu#emacs> s-exps on a frame
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12:00 pm
[Link] | oh ikea, when I think about you I touch my shelf.
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11:58 am
[Link] | I have no mouse. And I must screen.
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09:28 am
[Link] |
birthday drinkage for aviva
Frobridden Island, Alameda.
8pm Thurs 8/17
Celebrate Aviva's nth 35th birthday.
Be there, be slightly inebriated.
Forbidden Island (map)
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09:26 am
[Link] | cabal service provider
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07:32 pm
[Link] | I can't gitmo satisfaction.
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06:40 pm
[Link] |
everyone's got something to schnell these days
06:15 <db> I'm not very familiar with modern german
06:15 <db> As far as Israelis are concerned this is the language of holocaust films and of porn...
06:15 <db> both involve excessive usage of the word "schnell"
06:17 <db> I don't know why it is that all imported porn in 70s and 80s was German
06:17 <db> maybe it was part of the compensation package
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10:08 am
[Link] | There are times I find myself suspecting that there is some cruel cosmic deception being perpetrated against me by descartes' evil genius, or something.
But then I remind myself that that would be putting descartes before the hoax.
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12:35 pm
[Link] |
0666
Happy umask of the beast day, or something.
Tags: lethal nerd humor, unix
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03:24 pm
[Link] |
I'll be here all week
Q: What's jewish seduction?
A: Would you like to come upstairs and hear my kvetchings?
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03:57 am
[Link] | tai chi
chai tea
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03:56 am
[Link] | artifiction
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12:28 pm
[Link] |
klein bottle for sale, apply within
Ok, so I was nerding about on myspace and tried clicking on one of my own interests just to see who else was as hopeless as I am.
Nevermind the person results, what I liked were the ad impressions.
Now, having worked for a search engine in the past I know that these advertisers pay some miniscule fraction of a penny for each impression (and usually somewhat more for actual clickthroughs) and while the occasional false match like my query is lost in the noise... suppose we cranked up the volume?
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a program which will produce nonsense phrases incorporating typical brand names or commodity goods, and send them with random frequency to your favorite website's search forms. Chances are they will figure out some pattern to this and learn how to ignore them, but you'll be wasting their time, the advertisers' money, and just generally causing the system to go higgledy piggledy.
You know you want to.
PS: Yes, I know about kleinbottle.com. I even bought one. Best thing Cliff Stoll has ever done.
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11:19 am
[Link] |
Wheee!
I can't stop watching this.
 http://www.firefoxflicks.com/flick/?id=19542
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03:38 pm
[Link] | You can't prove a thing. ―Gödel's Incompetence Theorem
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02:08 pm
[Link] | The word is drawling to an end.
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05:57 am
[Link] |
Hard Drive Disk Dying Dance
Hitachi provided some samples of the noises that defective hard drives make, apparently to help customers confirm that yes, they are shit out of luck.
Then a couple of months ago, Gizmodo sponsored a contest to use those samples to create music.
Some of the submitted entries are interesting, but I couldn't listen to most of them.
Hitachi Hard-Drive Project - Noriko Version, though, was my favorite by a wide margin.
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05:26 am
[Link] |
lisp nerd joke
XML always seemed useful to me in purpose but totally egregious (not to mention tedious) in the amount of syntactic verbosity it has. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to offer any more flexibility in representation than s-expressions in lisp, which have been around for decades. The fact that some variants of XML, like XSL or (from what I can tell) ANT implement procedural expressions, indicate that what they really wanted all along was lisp: one of lisp's most powerful features is that program and data are represented exactly the same way because the former is just a special case of the latter anyway; e.g. source code is just data to a compiler. But people have an irrational fear of lisp.
While explaining this to someone I ended by summarizing: "xml is just the sexp urge sublimated".
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05:25 am
[Link] |
recent misreadings
Every so often (ok, really really often) my eyes will play tricks on me and I'll see something different from what's actually printed. Some of the more amusing computer-related ones recently:
107.0.0.10.in-addr.sherpa.
Process existed unexpectedly
Fatal error in progress
"Natalie Portmap" (actually, I mistyped that one; I'd meant to type "Natalie Porkman")
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05:23 am
[Link] |
rumors of my death
I haven't been posting much lately. I have a couple of meaningful things to say about significant recent events in my life but they are difficult to write about and I don't have much time to focus on that task right now. Someday.
On the other hand, I have lots of short frivolous things to get off my chest, so I'll be posting those instead. Cheers.
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06:46 am
[Link] |
why I love comics
For kermit*
A short-lived career
*Well ok, it's really for sam too.
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08:00 pm
[Link] |
because you can never have too much of that sort of thing...
Happy birthday, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mzsa.
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07:50 pm
[Link] |
evolvolution
n. a theory explaining the origin and historical development of automobiles, particularly those of swedish nationality. Alternative to the intelligent car design hypothesis.
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07:43 pm
[Link] |
How saturday afternoons should be spent
Brunch, consisting of coffee and a waffle in a diner (breakfast served all day, naturally), then sitting and chatting with a friend for about 3 hours.
Current Mood:  content
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07:35 am
[Link] | Happy birthday, emmiepie
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07:39 am
[Link] |
this is what precaffeination and lack of sleep will do
denihilism, n.
1. refusing to acknowledge that nothing can be known and reality cannot be verified.
2. constructing and obeying a crackpot political regime for its own sake.
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09:57 am
[Link] |
alanis moist-towelette
When I was a kid I read a book by Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish. In it was a character who built an asylum for the world after reading the instructions on a package of toothpicks. He reasoned that any world which had gone so soft as to require instructions for how to use a toothpick was no longer a world that was sane.
I figured Adams had taken a bit of creative license. But a few years ago I discovered that either someone had taken the joke and run with it, or that it was never a joke to begin with. In 2000 my dentist gave me a package of stim-u-dent(tm) toothpicks. The instructions read:- Moisten thoroughly in mouth.
- Insert pointed end between teeth with flat side next to gums as shown.
- Use gentle in-and-out motion to clean between teeth. Do not force into tight spaces between teeth.
Which was almost verbatim what Adams had put in the book in 1984.
It would be difficult to describe the mixture of amusement, incredulity, and disappointment that I experienced as I thought about it. But that was nothing compared to what happened next. The following day I went to a restaurant and, after the meal, was given one of those little sealed moist towelette packages. On the back read the following:Directions: Tear open packet and use. I wasn't sure what was worse: the fact that someone actually went to the trouble to print this in the first place, or that the instructions were ambiguous! Use what, the torn packet?
Flash forward another 5 years. Last week we had a bbq luncheon at work and of course there were moist towelettes for cleanup. A morbid curiosity compelled me to look at the back, and lo and behold I received an even greater shock than before. The instructions now read:Directions: Tear open packet, unfold towelette and use. Civilization may still be in steep decline, but at least they fixed the syntactic ambiguity. That's progress.
PS: Yes, I know there are many web sites out there with amusing product warnings in varying degrees of silliness, but I actually witnessed these first hand.
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10:08 am
[Link] |
new word coined at breakfast
snacktivities
Current Mood:  hungry
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03:02 am
[Link] |
"this will not be another vietnam"
(vietnam memorial, Salt Lake City, July 2003)
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05:46 am
[Link] |
Dammit Jim I'm a doctor, not a short order cook
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11:28 am
[Link] |
I am so hired
I got a new job at Perforce, doing build/release engineering and maybe other things as time permits. I start the 2nd week of June.
So many winning things about this company. Aside from the fact that I already liked their products and the people there seem smart, interesting, and pleasant; it's not a public or VC-funded company which means that the principals are involved in the daily operation. That means they can do what they think is right rather than kowtowing to Wall Street's quarterly expectations (which doesn't mean they aren't interested in making money; they are, after all, a business. But it means that they have more flexibility in the choices they make). I really wanted to get away from that kind of environment.
Also, they are in Alameda. I can't believe my good fortune, because now I basically have no commute. In fact, it's the shortest commute I've had since I lived within walking distance of the Free Softwar Foundation in Boston. I can bike there in 15 minutes or drive there in 10. I might actually have a life again outside of work that isn't just sleeping or spending time in traffic on I880!
It is to w00t.
Current Mood: elated
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10:00 pm
[Link] |
Universal Life Computer
I was writing a followup to a comment I made in someone else's journal, but I was so entertained by the subject matter I thought I'd just write down some thoughts I had about it while I was motivated, so I can find them later. You probably want to skip this.
( turing machines, cellular automata, and other assorted tomfoolery )
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09:09 pm
[Link] |
well, this explains a thing or two
( another annoying meme, ignore this entry )
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01:28 pm
[Link] |
Seder of Darkness
"The maror, the maror"
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08:03 pm
[Link] | http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000114.php
( the devil made me do it )
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01:55 pm
[Link] |
A New Pope
All the controversy surrounding the possibility that a jew might become pope (again) amuses me. After all, a jew already managed to become god.
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09:22 pm
[Link] |
Today's recipe
Add 1tbl Torani vanilla syrup to a double shot of espresso.
I dub this concoction Illy Vanilli.
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11:48 am
[Link] | 
I think I will need to buy some of these.
[edit: removed reference to what turned out to be a protected entry of someone else's; sorry folks]
Current Mood: PIGLETS!
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02:40 pm
[Link] |
J. Random Pseudonym
fairyarmadillo's recent post inspired me to look through my own spam folders and see what interesting names have been appearing. There were quite a few obviously contrived names; some of the choicest ones were:( Read more... )
I think "Copulae I. Luridness" and "Hottentot D. Smokestacks" are my favorites.
These names remind me a little of the shopping list generator for Emacs. It has a small dictionary of nouns and adjectives and puts them together in random combinations. One of the things about the program that I didn't mention on the source page is that it's always had a "middle name" generator. For example:( Read more... )
And so on. Is this an example of memetic drift?
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01:11 pm
[Link] |
nanotech dream logic
Unusual dream in that usually they are populated by entirely fictional characters; usually nobody I actually know are in them.
I dreamt that I was taking a class where drangnon was teaching about a nanotech NAND logic gate which she had invented. It turned out that one incidental and unrelated feature of the design was that its composition and geometry gave it an affinity to hemoglobin in a way that would block CO2 binding. Exposure to these could effectively suffocate someone.
At some point the idea of using them as a way to prevent prison inmate escape came up. The problem was, how to (a) make the substance lethal to the convicts without killing everyone; and (b) how to keep the substance from killing the convicts unless they actually escaped.
What we came up with was a two-part process: In the first part, the nanotech material would be contained in a bacteriophage capsule. Now, normally these only attack bacteria, but in the second part we would inject antibodies into the convicts that matched receptor proteins on the surface of bacteria membranes so as to cause the aforementioned viruses to attack them if they were exposed. They would ignore anyone else since they lacked the right "signature". The "virus" just needed to be kept out of the prison itself.
At that point I started trying to work out the implementation details, and I woke up.
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11:39 am
[Link] |
it's questions like this that get me in trouble
Suppose a genie granted you a wish, and you wished for that wish not to be granted?
Current Mood: deadlock
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09:13 am
[Link] |
a little pillow talk you'd like?
me: I guess I'll go make coffee. Do you want soy milk or regular milk?
aviva: Soy, I guess.
me: It occurs to me that if we subscribed to that mail-order coffee place, I could make soy gevalia.
aviva: Go away.
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