Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

Also a waste of time. My internet's been down all day, which means no coding from home, no email, no nothing. I work during the summers mostly from home, and every day without Internet has a direct impact on my quality of life during the school year. Anyways, I just got off the phone with a comcast "technician" trying to fix this minor inconvenience of not being able to make money. This is to the best of my recollection how it went, I was trying to type and talk on the phone at the same time, AND dealing with power flickering.
Read More »

So, real quick as I just got the idea to actually post this little story, I was writing a little script. This script dealt with ids I'm using for a project. Basically I knew there was a lot to begin with, but wanted a flat file, not a database because I figured "Hey, I'm dealing with a lot, why pay the overhead every id of doing a bunch of queries?" Among other things, this script couldn't list an id more than once. So I (stupidly) chose an array to store the ids and sort through them. At first, no issues, I could process a few ids in a second and get all my work done on them. Well, after I hit around 15,000 I had issues. It was now taking about 5 seconds an id. It only got worse, and worse, and worse. Around 19,000 ids I finally CTRL-C's the script, to retool it. I changed it over to throwing all the ids into a database, accepting a tad more overhead per id, but overall this becomes linear time. I stupidly forgot my Big-O notation classes, and that sorting through a large list of numbers takes longer than a very short one. *sigh*.

Bottom line: For large amounts of data accept the higher overhead per unit when it'll lessen the overall overhead. Now my script runs happily all day without decreasing my speed. I only post so you geeks out there can laugh at me, and I'll remember this handy little lesson later on.

(I feel the need, as I do freelance programming, to point out I'm normally quite smart regarding how I design my code, and I'm posting this because I can't believe I did that!)

Its been a few days since the massacre at Virginia Tech. I want to pass my condolances on to the families and friends of those students and faculty. I know I have readers in Blacksburg, I can see it from my logs, please know you guys are in my thoughts and prayers, as cliche as that sounds. To those readers that don't know, I was initially supposed to attend Tech, and I have many close friends there, so this has hit me harder than I expected, or can justify. In mourning, I've made a new theme, and will use this style for the forseeable future. Its nothing more than writing some code and clicking a button, but for my online persona, its as much as I can do. If you would like a copy of this theme to use or modify, email me at snarky(at)thesnarky.com and I'll send it to you. As for what I'm doing about this in real life, there'll be another post tomorrow.

So I was feeling kinda down a few days ago, and I turned to the thing that always cheers me up, hacking. Nothing malicious, just seeing what bugs I could turn up. Found a great one dealing with why sites should use HTTPS instead of HTTP traffic by default. Oh, I've taken the liberty of attempting at clearing out all links to my accounts. Don't worry, my account doesn't use that security question any longer. Also, because this post isn't malicious, I'm omitting the name of the site I found this on (and really, it could be any of the major sites out there, they all act a lot the same and I've yet to go check some other major ones) because they deserve anonymity as much as I do.
Read More »

Saturday I got a letter that I thought I'd share. It's really interesting to me, since I've dealt a lot with phishing emails, and this real letter set does many of the things that both phisers, and unfortunately legitimate companies, do. If companies would stop doing these things, Phishing would get harder! This is gonna be a long post, please bear with me. Without further ado, I give you: The Car Registration Scam (which later turned out to be legit).
Read More »

Now here's an interesting story I ran across today. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is asking lowly Bill Gates to "show mercy" to a Russian school teacher, Aleksandr Ponosov, who's being charged with software piracy. Now in this country you might be thinking, "Who cares?" In Mother Russia this crime carries a penalty of up to five years in prison, but a Russian prison in the Urals is a far cry from the nice warm places we've got here. Especially for white-collar criminals.

The story gets better. This poor man, literally, is charged with stealing $10,000 worth of software. There is a good chance he makes as little as $100 a month (judging by comments I've seen from people living in Russia) which shows just how ridiculous Microsoft prices are. This man works for the school, and bought a few computers assuming they were legal. In return, he might spend 5 years in the Gulag (might be an exaggeration, might now be) for trying to help his school.

Ok, and now for the part that really blew my mind. A former world leader begging Bill Gates not to punish this man. How sad is that when a software company gets pleas like this from such (former) powerful men? To this Microsoft supporters who say its not too powerful, please think again. Gorbachev didn't think to go inside his own country to the prosecutors involved, no he went to where the real threat was, Redmond, Washington. Of course Microsoft ducked this plea for help by saying they didn't file civil charges, and this was all Russia's doing. Right, and I'm sure this had nothing to do with it? Filing a bunch of law suits worldwide... and then when one guy wasn't specifically charged you claim you didn't do it. Also, when there's surveys claiming Russia to be the second worst offender of piracy, I find it hard to believe Microsoft wouldn't want in on that.

Hey, I just thought of a solution... everyone chip in, and lets mail a box of Linux distros (some are specifically geared towards education) to Russia, and let them decide which way to go. Spend more than a teachers yearly salary on software, or take this free route and avoid dealing with the evil that is Microsoft.

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...
Read More »

No, before you ask, I don't know the laws on online gambling, so before you take this too literally, there is NO money at stake (that I'll mention, of course). However, we have a unique situation in front of us. As such, I think I might start a wee bit of a betting pool, official prize being "props".

What is this unique situation that would get me so excited? Well, this semester I have four classes, back to back (to back to back) on Tuesday / Thursday. These are my only classes (yes, you heard me, 4 day weekends the entire semester... I could do such crazy things as drive 530 miles to visit people every weekend if they so desired) and all that are busy work require attendance. The other one is Compilers which I won't be missing for the world. To get the full implications as it dawns on you, I've never really attended class. My first semester of college just the classes I skipped on a regular basis added up to over 220 hours of class time. My estimate was I missed over 250. My grades? Two A+'s, two A's and one A-. That was by far my worst semester, but even after I got better a 50% attendance is darn good for me. (GPA to date: 3.7ish).

So, this unique opportunity is that I might ATTEND EVERY CLASS THIS SEMESTER. It is not THAT far from possible. To that end, I'm starting a betting pool. I'll offer 2:1 odds that I skip at least one class. Meaning, while I'm betting I'll have my butt in the seat every day of every class, I realize it seems far fetched, therefore if you bet two "props" that I'll be there, and I don't skip, you win two more in addition to your bet. I'm betting props because if I do this, I'm giving myself mad props for being a "good student" for a semester.

So, leave a comment with your bet!

So... I can run this laptop (Dell Inspiron 9100 with ALLLLLL the trappings) under Windows up at 1900x1200. Gorgeous display, really. Well, I've never actually had a hack session on my xorg.conf to get it going at that resolution (its only at 1280x768.... abysmal). Well... I think I found my problem...

Yup, according to that my screen is updating -15596 times a second. Huh... guess that explains why i get headaches from coding on MountainDont all the time. Hopefully I'll throw up a fixed version as soon as I restart the X server.

EDIT: Yup, with just a little tweaking the laptop now shows at 1280x800 and 60 Hz refresh. Much better place to start.

What is maturity anyhow? You always hear people saying "Oh grow up", or "Real mature (sarcastically)", but what do they mean? Quite honestly, the past year I've thought I was too immature for some things, and it was something I was striving to fix. But, the entire year I was trying to figure out HOW one became more mature, without knowing what I'd consider mature!

I'll admit it, I've got very, very diverse personalities depending on who I'm with. Not that I'm two-faced, just that I fit in with just about any group of people, which is quite a blessing for someone who's studying a foriegn language (Arabic), pursuing a scientific degree (CS), and doing research as a grad student might while an undergrad. So, labeling them all as immature might be a bit much, however judging my actions as a whole, and how I treated certain situations and specifically relationships, I judged myself immature.
Read More »