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post 85

By anders pearson 31 Aug 2000

i don’t know what i did, but i somehow made the comments disappear. the database is still there, so i don’t think they’re permanently lost, just some bug in the script. please stand by.

post 83

By anders pearson 30 Aug 2000

6 new images in the portfolio. all larger works that my sister photographed for me while i was home (they were much too large to just slap on the scanner). the new ones are the six left-most.

wreck
a painting i did of my sister’s old car after my first and last time driving a manual transmission.
pipes
i had a fairly serious obsession with the aesthetics of plumbing for a while…
foundling
i gave this one to my sister because it gave me the creeps
knotwork
i’m not so happy with the quality of the scan on this one but it was the best i could do. the original is very large (100cm x 60cm or so) and very detailed, so it was hard to capture. i spent enormous amounts of time in high school working on these sorts of celtic knotwork patterns; they would hypnotize me for weeks at a time.
chainlink dreams
the painting from the sketch which has been in the portfolio for a while
storm hill
a painting i did waaay back my sophomore year of high school

post 79

By anders pearson 18 Aug 2000

going back to maine for a week to see my friends and my parents. since my parents tend to lag a few decades behind the rest of the world as far as technology is concerned, i probably won’t read or answer much in the way of email till i get back.

post 73

By anders pearson 15 Aug 2000

i’ve gotten really nauseous on the subway to work the last two days. it must be morning sickness. maybe i’m pregnant…

post 72

By anders pearson 14 Aug 2000

lost about a day’s worth of work because of microsoft today.

microsoft’s operating theory seems to be that people are really stupid. (i can’t really blame them for having this theory because i’m sure they formed it after extensive research and surveying of their own user-base.) unfortunately, they write their software under this assumption and leave no room for the slight possibility that someone might actually know what they’re doing.

one of the guys at work and i had this interesting idea that since most image formats have a field for textual comments, we could simply embed the relevant meta-data for the image into this comment field in an xml format. that would allow us to store meta-data in a way that it would never get seperated from the image and would allow us to more freely move and rename images without having to worry about updating databases or keeping seperate files of meta-data with them. so i threw together a few perl scripts that would embed the metadata such as:

<image>
<title>lousewarts in the dimehaunts</title>
<artist>anders</artist>
<medium>crayon on construction paper</medium>
<date>2000-08-10</date>
<description>thee gauls simper at his tyrant power. he is ghoon with this seven week booths and his mickeyed mausers march into mistory<
</image>

and extract and parse it and do all sorts of cool stuff with it. unfortunately, although everything was working fine in netscape, IE would just refuse to render certain images after the metadata had been added. eventually we tracked it down to the <title> tag. then it was obvious to me what the problem was. IE has this habit of completely ignoring the headers that the webserver sends along with a file telling the browser what kind of data it is dealing with (text/html, text/plain, image/gif, image/jpg, etc). it just assumes across the board that whoever set up the server wasn’t smart enough to configure it to send the proper header or even name the file with the proper extension (a fairly reasonable assumption with microsoft’s own server which is designed to be set up by people who don’t know what they’re doing, but not quite fair to real sysadmins who actually have IQ’s in the triple digit range) so it just looks through the file and tries to figure out what it is. unfortunately, it’s algorithm for identifying file types is less than perfect.

i’ve run into this many times before when trying to set up a demo where people can see the source code for a given webpage or xml document. i create a text file called foo.txt that contains “<h1>IE sucks</h1>” and the webserver sends it out with a text/plain header. netscape shows you the file as text, like it should, IE goes ahead and renders the page like an idiot.

so it sees the <title> tag and tries to render the jpg as an html document. unsurprisingly, that doesn’t work very well. argh.

microsoft’s attitude seems to be something like “no one is allowed to write with words that have more than five letters because the retarded kid might get confused.” an understandable policy for microsoft to make when the retarded kid is the one that pays their salaries but not exactly conducive to producing great works of literature.

post 70

By anders pearson 11 Aug 2000

lawyers obviously have too much time on their hands. Cobalt is suing apple for copying the design of the Qube. this is really getting ridiculous.

  1. one of the simplest geometric shapes is copyrightable? you’ve got to be kidding me. i suppose i should mention that i currently have designs for pyramid and spherical computers; so if anyone makes computers with that shape in the future, i want a lot of money from them.
  2. does anyone remember the NeXT cube? i seem to recall cube shaped computers being around in… the 80’s. i don’t recall hearing about any lawsuits brought against cobalt for copying their design. and wasn’t Wozniak (or maybe it was Jobbs, i can never keep them straight) in charge of NeXT at the time anyway?

post 69

By anders pearson 10 Aug 2000

i must say that jwz’s redesign is currently rocking my world. i guess i’m not the only one who appreciates the abstract beauty of a hexdump. i’m tempted to try reassembling it just to see if it does anything. i certainly wouldn’t put it past him. unfortunately i don’t think i have a hex editor installed right now and i’m too lazy to go download one. i’m sure there’s a way to reconstruct a binary from a hex file on the commandline, but i’m not quite clever enough to figure it out right now.

post 68

By anders pearson 10 Aug 2000

if i get bored sometime, perhaps i’ll write a program that monitors things and keeps track of how often i screw up when typing in my passwords or passphrases. i bet it would be a pretty good indicator of my overall stress level — higher the percentage of mistyped passwords, the more stressed out i must be. i could put it as a little meter on /dev/random and people could tell by looking at it that they should just leave me alone for a while.

i don’t think i typed in a single password right the first time all day today…