Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

GEEK ALERT, THIS WILL ONLY APPEAL TO YOU IF YOU LIKE ELEGANT CODING. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

So, a friend two nights ago presented me with an interesting problem. How can one perform logical not (anything besides zero is true, zero is false) on a 32 bit int, without any tests, or control structures. I thought a minute and said, “I have the answer.”

*Warning, I dislike c… it’s been ages since I coded in it, and I gave answers in pseudo-code. I’ve been using Lua all day, so forgive mistakes. If you like, leave a comment, and I’ll fix it.*
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I hate those new Mac commercials. "Hi I'm a PC, hi I'm a Mac"... ring a bell? I found out (via slashdot) that there's new ones for Britain. I watched 'em, and sure enough its the same stupid argument. PCs are only used for work... too virus ridden, etc. Why is that such a stupid argument? Here goes...
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Well, I finally got around to redesigning my blog theme, after much nagging by Allaryin and Malap. I'm calling the theme Fall Mood because I've been stuck in one for the past 6 or so months. This is supposed to be a somber mix of red and yellow, based around the colors found in the header picture (I love that car's red). It's designed for one-column blogs (obviously), and I'm trying to acheive good readability. I expect to be hacking on it a little more in the next few days as my test server doesn't have all my plugins enabled, and hey, I'm only happy if I'm fixing something.

I do intend to submit this theme to the Wordpress theme sites, but first I want to make sure I've got all the kinks worked out, and that I have the original author's blessing.

Original Author? Who's that you ask? This theme is based on Falling Leaves 1.5 by Shawn Grimes. I almost just used his theme, because that header picture is gorgeous, but I really like personalizing things. I've changed his greens to yellow, and blue to red so that the colors match my header.

I have two sets of readers. One that is quite technically competant and I'm learning from, the other that's not as into computers, that just gloss through for my more life applicable posts. This is aimed at those that are in, or would like to be in the first group (not saying only they can read it, but this is gonna be a decently geeky post).

So, I love my desktop. She's a gorgeous machine that is awesome for games, and even better for coding. I've got the better part of a Terabyte of disk space in her, and I've made an investment in keeping all my work and backups connected to her. When I'm home, this is amazing. I've got a frickin huge display for having tons of windows open. If I need to relax I can use Cedega to crank out my favorite games (assuming they don't have native Linux builds). But, big question, what if I'm not home? Traveling? Or... god forbid... on campus for classes? Therein lies SSH!
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Well, I've noticed some interesting things regarding my World of Warcraft addon, Profession Helper.

First off it seems more Germans use my addon than Americans (or at least, English speakers). I note this because checking the logs of referrals to my site, more people come from the German section of Curse-gaming than the English one.

Also, I can tell what guilds are using my addon. You may think that's absurd, but its quite easy. The good guilds (from my standpoint) are one who link to the developers site from a downloads page. I've found a few that don't in fact link back to me, but most do. So, once a guild lists my addon, I'll get about 5-10 hits over a few days from that guild's downloads section. Really cool, actually.

Just started working again on that bug that really killed my production a few weeks ago. Lets hope I can solve it...

Well, everyone else's doing it... I refer of course, to social networking goodness. So, since a friend of mine is maintaining a Wordpress addon (Sociable) that makes social sharing of my posts oh so easy, I just installed it. The install was so easy and idiot proof I'm not gonna type it up, merely link to another friend's blog about it. If you click on one of my posts, down at the bottom you'll see links to easily send it to various social networking sites! That easy!

I'm installing this to see if it affects my hit counter at all (aka if anyone submits stories, and if that actually bring readers). Lets see what happens.

So there I was.... sitting in "Popular Religion and Cyberspace" minding my own darn business when BAM, professor assigns a paper! Uncool... What did the paper have to be on? A form of folk, popular, or vernacular religion that we'd experienced. That was the entire assignment description. Right quick I'll tell you that these are folklore terms for religions that: differ from a formal religion slightly; are of a repressed group; or the personal beliefs of people and how they perceive religion, respectively.

Now I had an initial idea to write about the religion found in Walraven, but after talking with the creater for a bit, decided this wasn't gonna work. So, the other guys on the IRC channel (developers of walraven / friends of them) started throwing out other ideas related to coding, and I took them and ran with it. Here's what I came up with:
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Sorry, that was the best title I could think of for this post, and sorry, this'll be one of my more personal posts (though relevant to society as a whole). This isn't a dig at relationships, though it would make a good title for that as well, but a post about friendship, what it means to me, to society, and what it SHOULD mean.

To start with, I'll identify the problem. The issue here is that the word "friend" has lost all meaning in our society. Look at a few common applications.

• AIM - "Buddy" or "Friend" list... these get huge, especially those of college freshman girls (I shudder to remember the days of cleaning their systems... curse the dorms!) and are typically people you seldom talk to, sometimes go out of your way to avoid.
• Online games (Think MMOs) - These all have "Friends" lists, which are almost always people you haven't met, and will never meet online.
• Social Communities (MySpace, Facebook... etc) - Through personal studies I can tell you random friend invitations get about a 50% acceptance. Especially among college freshmen. Even the school you go to barely affects this.
• Blogs - Most blogs let you have a "friends" list which will typically have more real-life friends than not, but it is still easy to find random groups and people in friends lists.

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Well, I've decided to show you my ugly desktop, mainly because I don't want to muck around in my xorg.conf any more. You'll note the top and bottom bars on the left side aren't on the top and bottom of the screen, this is because TwinView makes the height of the whole screen the largest height, and just tells the smaller monitor it's using a smaller bit. So, yea, I lose about 400 pixels off my left monitor, but I'll survive. Also, I'm being really lazy right now, so the big screen is my distractions, while only the small one is work. When I'm actually coding seriously those flop so i can get more lines on one screen.

Something about my recent time up in Chicago lit a fire under my butt to get coding a lot more, and a lot better. Some may debate, but I am not happy with where my coding style, and quality is at this point in my life. I'll concede that I might have better habits than others my age, but I rarely compare myself to anyone my age. A large amount of my friends are between 6 and 10 years older than me, and I've realized its them I compare myself to. So, in my mind the fact that I'm worse than someone with 6 more years of experience is an issue, and one I aim to fix.

Like any skill, this will take work. I don't expect to wake up tomorrow and churn out gorgeous exploits that'll win me some nice bounties. No, I know I'm going to have to consistantly work towards improving my style, and taking concious note of my mistakes. I don't mean I'll kill myself over every bug, for every coder has bugs. If you know one that doesn't, he's lieing to you. However, I'd like to learn the most common bugs I make (typing too fast and screwing up var names, for instance) so that I can remove those bugs from my code (perhaps forcing myself to check over my code again before compiling and checking var names).
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