post 170

By anders pearson 31 Oct 2000

new yorkers can be so rude. today, when i was in the grocery store stocking up on apples, razor blades, and syringes, i kept getting the nastiest looks from people.

post 169

By jp 31 Oct 2000

god damn. spuds were just the beginning.

now this.

check out the pix of some of those launchers. makes peacetime a little more edgy.

post 167

By anders pearson 29 Oct 2000

my bookmarks were starting to get out of hand, so i figured i’d put them into a little database to try to keep them under control. then i figured that since i have to be online to use them, i might as well put a web interface on the bookmarks. i realized that that also solved the problem of having different sets of bookmarks on my computer at work and my home computer. it also means i can access them when i’m on a lab machine or a friend’s computer. anyway, there’s no reason to keep them to myself. so here’s the rough version of my bookmarks database. it’s even got a simple search feature. not too sophisticated yet and a bit rough around the edges (the search isn’t yet case-insensitive for example) but it seems to work pretty well. the listing on the default page is the 20 most recent bookmarks. once i polish it up a little, i may let other people add bookmarks and i may even integrate it with /dev/random.

post 165

By anders pearson 28 Oct 2000

if i actually watched TV or listened to the radio or otherwise had any sort of contact with humanity on a regular basis, daylight savings time probably would have come as much less of a surprise to me tonight. it didn’t help that i was trying to debug a program that depended somewhat on time to order things. “Why the fsck is it not putting the newest one at the top anymore?!? it was working fine 2 minutes ago and i didn’t change anything!”

i seem to remember there being some big debate over whether daylight savings was relevant to modern society and whether we should just do away with the whole thing. i don’t really remember how the arguments on either side went, but right now i’m siding with those midwestern states who don’t bother with it because it confuses the cows. make that cows and exhausted programmers.

post 164

By anders pearson 28 Oct 2000

a quick lesson in recursion: try this link to see what happens when your Page Not Found script is set up to include a file that doesn’t exist, resulting in another call to the page not found script and so on and so on.

post 163

By anders pearson 28 Oct 2000

ran out of stuff from my classnotes so now i’m dipping into my old sketchbooks for stuff. i mentioned before that i spent a long time obsessed with Froud. now you get to see for yourselves…

sketch #21

post 162

By anders pearson 27 Oct 2000

hacking the election: voteswap is an interesting idea. the idea is to get around the unfortunate situation in which a vote for Nader helps Bush out. it works by exploiting the flaws in the electoral college system. if you live in a swing state where your vote for Nader has a much greater chance of accidently getting Bush elected, you can arrange to swap your vote with someone in a state that is overwhelmingly Democratic or Republican with someone who would ordinarily vote for Gore. that way, both of you win. Gore has a better chance of winning the election and the Green party has a better chance of getting the 5% of the vote necessary to get matching funding in the next election. i’m ineligable to participate since i’m registered in Maine, which is one of only two states (the other being nebraska) which doesn’t give all of its electoral votes to the majority winner.