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By
anders pearson
25 Jul 2000
uranium for sale online! get it while it’s hot!
all right, that was a bad joke, i admit. this is really pretty cool though; they have auctions just like eBay. i tried to register a new user but got a microsoft SQL server error. at any rate it looks like they don’t run any sort of background check before they let you bid on the uranium. i want to get an account so i can maybe scoop up a few rods for cheap and rub them together. it looks like you can get reactor grade uranium for about $9/lb. how many pounds does it take to reach critical mass?
By
anders pearson
23 Jul 2000
having lived in maine for about 20 years, i would like to point out that this sort of thing isn’t terribly uncommon. the only surprising part is that the guy actually survived a crash with a moose. most of the time, when you run into a moose, you merely take the legs out and the entire body slides across the hood and comes through your windshield into your lap. moose are big. getting one on your lap isn’t safe at any speed.
and i’m not really sure what to make of where the article says “when a moose ran into his car”. i think they probably meant the other way around, although once, within the space of a month, my mother had 2 deer run into her car and dent the door panel (the car was even parked once, IIRC).
and hey, tad was from linneus.
By
anders pearson
22 Jul 2000
as an exercise in html abuse, i’ve written a program that bitmaps a font with html tables. it’s based on powazek’s bitbet font.
guaranteed not to work in lynx.
yes, it’s utterly useless. that’s what made it fun to write. of course i could probably patent it and sell it to some stupid startup company as a copyright protection scheme (if you are paranoid that someone might <gasp> copy and paste text off your site, you can just do it this way). in that case, if anyone wrote a program that parsed the html code and got the text back from it, they would be violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and could go to jail. laws are stupid.
By
anders pearson
20 Jul 2000
i finally taught myself to shave in the shower.
another victory in my war against inefficiency.
By
anders pearson
20 Jul 2000
i went to Macworld Expo yesterday. overall, quite disappointing. just a lot of companies all competing for your attention so they could try to sell you something. most of the booths were running product demos that all felt like infomercials to me. i spent most of the day biting my tongue when salespeople were trying hand the audience a bunch of shit. it was so hard to not just politely ask the filemaker pro people to kindly stop referring to their product as a ‘database’ (if you’ve ever used filemaker pro, and you’ve used a real database, you know what i’m talking about). i just stayed away from the microsoft booth altogether, lest they call security on me. i also had to put forth a great effort to keep from laughing out loud at the startups with completely idiotic business plans (i won’t even name names here. that’s just too cruel). and as a Free Software bigot, whenever i saw the companies selling programs that merely duplicated the functionality of various GNU utilities, or features that have been in emacs for a decade, i could only chuckle.
i also discovered that if you were a 2600 shirt to a computer conference, you get the weirdest people coming up to you and just starting to talk to you about the strangest shit. this one wacko just walked up to me and asked about the plausibility and legality of hiring a “hacker” to steal the backend of some online gambling site so he could put it up on a server in costa rica with a different interface so no one would know the difference. i informed him that he was an idiot and suggested that he should go fuck himself (in the politest possible way, of course).
but seriously, as far as computer conferences go, h2k kicked macworld’s ass all over the place.
By
anders pearson
17 Jul 2000
here’s a pretty scary theory about those Carnivore boxes that the FBI wants to install at every ISP in the country (as if they weren’t a scary enough thought already). packet radio networks are looking better by the minute.
By
anders pearson
16 Jul 2000
By
anders pearson
14 Jul 2000
why do i love linux today?
with the simple magic incantation:
mogrify -geometry 600×600 -format jpg -rotate ’90<’ -contrast *.tif
i converted a directory full of 30 enormous tif files (16 megs each) to jpgs, resized them, rotated them 90 degrees and upped the contrast by a notch. just that one command. and it executed in under 2 minutes. for comparison, i tried to do the equivalent to just one of them in photoshop on windows 2000 running on exactly the same hardware. it took nearly a minute just to load the single image, let alone do the conversions, and the whole operation required about 15 mouseclicks.
the mogrify command is part of the imagemagick library which comes installed on most modern linux distributions for free. photoshop costs many hundreds of dollars. hmmm….
By
anders pearson
12 Jul 2000
anyone who has discussed programming with me at length has probably heard me rant about the lack of emphasis on reading good source code in most CS programs. this is something that i firmly believe in; reading code written by clever experienced programmers and trying to understand exactly why they did things the way they did is an excellent way to improve your own programming. you’ll gain insight into how an experienced programmer approaches a problem as well as learning a thousand little tricks that they picked up along the way that are so simple and obvious that you’ll be ashamed you didn’t think of them yourself but which you know would probably have just never occurred to you in a million years.
with that in mind, i’d like to point out jamie zawinski’s implementation of message threading for Grendel as well as his thorough explanation of the algorithm and the reasoning behind it.
say what you will about the relative merits and disadvantages of open-source software, but without it, we’d never have the opportunity to read and learn from each others’ code. you may not use linux or emacs or mozilla. god knows 99% of the people that do use them never actually read the source code; i rarely do. but some people do and anyone can. that advances the art of programming. that alone makes the open-source movement entirely worthwhile as far as i’m concerned.
By
anders pearson
12 Jul 2000
brilliant.
when kamden and i were in china together, we discovered that if you looked obviously foreign and could act nonchalant, you could get away with a lot. far from home and you need to go to the bathroom but don’t want to deal with the toxic stench of chinese public bathrooms? no problem. just find the nearest 5 star hotel, walk in like you own the place and use their bathrooms. the doormen will either assume that you are staying there and they just hadn’t seen you before or they are just too afraid of offending a foreigner to tell you to get lost.