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Somebody give me a shotgun or a chainsaw and the name & address of the freaking asshole that keyed my car whilst I was parked in front of the hospital yesterday afternoon :-(
("that keyed..." was not a typo. "who" and "whom" are only used for human beings in the English grammar.)
(and yes I blame myself for allowing this to happen. I forgot I shouldn't trust people. I really feel like I've been violated or something, this kind of emotional level and I just can't deal with this right now.)
Recently I've been busy playing the the Betamax VCR I bought on eBay last month. I finally received the one tape my parents sent me and it plays OK, well as good as you could expect a 18-years old NTSC ΒIII tape to look like.
Anyway, the whole deal is that my parents have a handful of Beta tapes they created during vacations in Venezuela and we finally decided to convert them to something usable, say a DVD.
Outch. That thing is huge. It's like driving a boat.
[to be continued... insert picture here]
[to be continued... insert pictures here]
Saturday was the day off. Disconnect brain, don't do much and get to relax. Still I found some time to vacuum and play with VS.Net 2005. Both activities give me geek creds since I was playing with the Roomba and leaving nice crop circles motifs on the carpet.
Sunday was spent mostly in a non-geeky way: getting the yard trash out, adjusting the washing machine so that it doesn't walk across the kitchen every time we use it. Fortunately upgrading Seven seriously rebalanced that geekiness level.
Most important we got two car baby seats. Combined with the dresser and changing table we ordered the day before, that means we're pretty much done for that part. The only piece missing is the stroller but we already know what we want and where to buy it.
OK I admit the really last piece missing will be me cleaning the room where all this is going to be installed where I'm actually squatting.
As Benoit would have said, "je me suis sorti les doigts du @$%" and consequently Seven is now powered by an AMD Sempron 64 3000+, an ABIT NF8-V Pro motherboard and one gigabyte of RAM. Oh and a spiffy XClio-450BL -- it's so silent sometimes I wonder if it's running ;-)
Given that before it was sufficiently powered by a dual Pentium-III @ 450 MHz, I think this upgrade will be enough for another 5 years or so.
At first I was going to pick an Athlon 64 when I noticed this "Sempron" thing (as in oh no, yet another marketing name and I have no clue if this is an Athlon or not.) Eventually although I couldn't find a straight answer to my question on the AMD web site I finally figured out a Sempron is simply a cheaper Athlon. Less cache, baby! If I compare with the Athlon 64 3000+ on my desktop, the Sempron 64 3000+ has 128 KB of L2 instead of 512 KB. On the other hand it's a 90nm instead of 130nm and the marketed power consumption goes down 1/3 (from about 90 W to 60) and this is something I care about. So overall the Sempron is ideal for what I need.
Overall that's one more "silent" hardware upgrade for Linux on that server (cf. Linux vs. Windows). I merely upgraded to a 2.4.27 by recompiling with the AMD choice and had the joy of finally removing everything related to ISA from the kernel config :)
The ABIT NF8-V Pro motherboard seems pretty smooth (not like the broken Epox EP-8KDA3J I have in my desktop.) The sad thing is that the V-Pro with extra optical SPDIF i/o and gigabyte integrated LAN (I use neither) was the cheapest choice on Newegg. It would have cost more to not have these options.
The only surprise I had when installing is that at first the PC wouldn't boot. I had the oh-so-annoying long-beep/two-short-beeps sequence, meaning the video card was not recognized. I used an old ATI Rage Pro 128 in PCI and apparently that didn't cut it. So I tried the previous card I was using, a Diamond Viper V770U (a.k.a. TNT) in AGP and still I got the no-video beeps. Oh well I ended up using a spare Inno3D GeForce4 MX 440 that I was saving for a future cheap PC. I know nowadays a GeForce4 MX is worth almost nothing, yet it bugs me to use something that was once pretty good just to be able to boot a server which video output will be always in 80x25 text mode and that I'll look at only once in a blue moon. Monochrome Hercules card in AGP 1.5 V, anyone?
I hear GWA is back. This is cool :-)
And back with it is the polemic. The two usual sides are represented:
If you don't want to read 4 posts, just read the one that has all the arguments dissected and gives the most logical view: Hey, I'm back.
It's hard not to smile when you read that. Both the tone and the content of 37signals are actually pretty sad. It's ironic the site advertises itself as being about design and customer experience.
What if some malware, say whatever virus or trojan around, was purposely crawling the web to find these stupid non-idempotent GET links? Wouldn't they become security issues then and get fixed ASAP? Sure they would. And as a user, I would complain the web app has security flaws and expect it to be fixed. I wouldn't blame it on the malware but really on the lame designer of the web app.
So quite frankly pointing fingers at GWA when the same damage could be done by any search engine or even malware is clearly just a dismissal of responsibility from the part of web designers.
I had quite a peaceful week-end, thanks for asking :-)
It was actually pretty good. We finished cleaning the baby toys, I played a bit more with DV Video, started having a look at x264 (although I haven't managed to get FFmpeg compile with x264 yet -- not to mention it's not clear which decoder over than VLC can decode it.)
Most important I finally started having a look at Java 5.0 and the latest Eclipse 3.1.1 which totally rocks imho. It helps that installing Java 5.0 on Debian is quite a piece of cake.
Speaking of Java, I think it's time Sun stops the marketing insanity with version numbers. "Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition" with Java 1.4 or "Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5.0" with Java 1.5. This is so freaking annoying. Can't they do version 1 and then version 2 like everyone else? OK maybe with a version 1.1 thrown in the middle like our friends in Redmond. Would it hurt them to match the platform revision number with the language revision number since they are so much tied? Yeah, surely, people might start understanding what Java is all about. Hopefully developers will get brain damage first whilst trying to get a grasp of the acronyms in use: J2SE, J2EE, J2ME, SWT, JAXP, Struts, Swing, etc.
Anyway, it's unfair to make fun of Sun as it's too easy. Kinda like Apple and their horde of brain damaged fans that will now go berserk explaining to the rest of the world how hype it is to watch a webcam-quality movie on a screen smaller than my watch for $2 a piece. They probably need that now that they can't credibly explain any more why one-button mice are vastly superior.
Anyway Java 5.0 is pretty cool. Annotations and templatized types are always good to have. I still can't quite find the syntax for closures, although I'm being told there's an incoming Groovy patch for that.
Speaking of closures, I had the unfortunate "luck" to discover what probably
everybody else found with closures in Javascript: closures created in a for-loop
are not bound as one would think they should be.
This post explains it perfectly so I don't have to:
A huge gotcha with Javascript closures and loops.
Really I think this sucks and smells as a "bug in the spec".
A good semantic would be "var f = new function() { ... }".
I'm not sure why one can't do that if functions are first-class citizen objects?
I had another cool thing to blog about yet I forgot it. Oh well. I feel like the Bear with Very Little Brain, namely Winnie the Pooh which original book I have been reading lately (along with Applied Cryptography.) Somehow the former is easier to read, although Schneier is quite interesting to read too.
Oh yeah so that cool thing to blog about. Well it's not much but it goes this way: I've been having a look at the various dev projects listed on Izumi and most especially the plans with dates which are all listed indirectly via the Project List. My point was that if you look at the project pages, my projects barely advance. They literally stagnate. And sure they actually do. Not that I'm quite lazy (well I am lazy but that's not my point), it's more like I have only a limited amount of free time and recently coding hasn't been the priority (getting a life was.) Plus it doesn't really matter. I keep my creativity and energy for work (I mean it like the real work place, where they pay me to do exactly that) and I home I can relax and spend time on whatever or with whom is fun (such as significant others.) Coding is still a lot of fun. One day it's PHP, the next day it's Java and some other day it would be planning and thinking about stuff rather than actually implement it.
Such it's life and I'm having quite a good time :-)
By the way, there's one more project plan page for rig2j.
Outch. I actually ate too much chocolate cake tonight.
The first computer I had access to was an Apple II E (they also add Apple II at the school but heck those were already obsolete and had lost all their mojo.)
Programming on the Apple II was easy: fire the integrate Basic runtime and start typing. And when thing went wrong, as well always do with computer programs, the easiest debugging utility was printing variables on the console.
That means somewhere the Basic runtime was interpreting a print instruction, getting a string and giving it to a system routine that would copy it at the adequate location in the video memory then a character line generator would translate that to a video signal for the monitor.
Years have passed, computing power has literally exploded and we have state of the art visual debugging tools.
Yet most of the time my main debugging tool hasn't changed: I print lines on a console output.
The workflow is a bit more involved though:
So in nearly two decades, the main way we program and debug hasn't advanced that much and most of the time the "best" solution to debug is just to clutter my code with ugly printfs.
It's interesting how the more clueless people are, the more they try to give meaning to well... they don't know what so they can speak with authority, can't they? 5-3 10-4
I'm starting to see that this applies to almost everything on the web.
That realization came from some news coverage: Google
Like anybody could guess. Like anybody actually knows. The sad truth is that nobody knows nothin' (and I'm speaking generally.) And those who speak with authority are just suspicious of having a master in B.S.
As the saying goes, the more you know the more you understand what you ignore.
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