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I hereby declare tomorrow (the 20th of December) Flat Earth Day.
The premise behind Flat Earth Day is simple: you're not allowed to take something as fact simply because you trust the person telling it to you. In other words, you should only believe things that you would still believe if everybody else in the world turned out to be compulsive liars with a knack for not getting caught in their own web of lies, all colluding in one huge conspiracy to fool you.
(For those of you who understand what I'm trying to get at, I welcome a more suitable definition for Flat Earth Day).
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BranchTester is a testing library I wrote earlier this year, and did a little cleaning up on recently. I decided to make it public domain, so anybody is free to grab it and hack it up for whatever they want. The description page has a couple of code samples that illustrate where it's useful, and how to use it, and also has the link to the .jar file.
I didn't bother to Javadoc the code, since I hate documenting. It was originally meant to be used in conjunction with other unit testing frameworks, but I never actually used it with JUnit, so using it is probably not a plug-and-play deal. However, there's not that much code (455 lines total), a bunch of which is framework stuff / syntactic sugar, so it's easy to modify and integrate with any existing frameworks you may be using.
Those of you who proofread my last work term report may remember this, since that's what my WTR was on. :)
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the google phone. looks like everybody wants a piece of the mobile market. i wonder who'll make it to market first. my money's on the iphone first, the gphone second, and the msphone dead last.
that being said, i wonder how much of the gphone software is being written in waterloo - their reqwireless acquisition is probably involved in some way. considering google's affinity for open standards, i'm guessing the phone is going to be java-based, with an API for developers to write custom apps. most phones these days have that, though - the real question is how far can they push orange (or other carriers). getting the carriers to loosen their stupid restrictions on cellphone activity will probably lead to a boost in mobile multimedia.
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so recently (by recently, i mean over a month ago) i decided to go through my list of online accounts and close as many of them as i possibly could. i have accounts on all sorts of random things like the Intel Developer Network (from a random TopCoder SRM where they were giving away free laptops to randomly selected members) and E-fax (from back in the day when you could get a free one with a Yahoo! mail account).
anyway, so i went through my list, and decided to close down/deactivate anything i wasn't using. for some of the sites, there was an easy-to-find link somewhere in the account options or FAQ to close down the account, but for most of them, no such luck. in those cases, i dug around for a support form or e-mail address and requested my account to be deleted. a randomly selected sample of the more interesting ones:
- E-fax had some sort of complicated support website with frames and java and javascript that didn't work properly in any of the 4 browsers I tried (including firefox), so I'm not sure if my request actually got through.
- the Lockergnome.com forum flatly refused to delete the account. the best i could do was was empty all the "personal info" fields, and change the email address to one i use for spam (i still had to verify the email change).
- Lycos/Tripod processed the request, but then created a new "support" account (independent of the original account) which i could use to monitor the original request. of course, they didn't bother telling me the username/password of the support account, so there's no way i can actually monitor the request.
- the Intel Developer Network redirected me to a different support department, which then redirected me to a third support department, which finally did close my account. the thing that annoyed me about this one was in their reply, they just gave me the email address of the next department to contact, instead of just forwarding my request on themselves. basically all i did was hit the forward button on the reply i got and enter the new email address.
- and finally, (and this is the one that prompted me to blog this), i just heard back from collegeboard.com. they claim that you'll receive a reply in two (2) business days, but they took twenty-two (22) business days to get back to me. their reply? "We are unable to cancel your account, however we will close the account if it is not being used for a period of time." almost amusing, considering i haven't used the account for at least 4 years.
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Solution to spam?
I think not. Heck, I'll just create 100 of those email accounts, and just sign up for all the spam I want. I won't use them for real email, of course. The good thing about it is that the startup still makes money, so they don't go out of business. The only losers are the spammers. Give 'em a taste of their own medicine, I say.
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there's been a spate of articles recently that have gotten me thinking about assumptions again. more specifically, the assumptions we make everyday and which we build our life on, but that may or may not be true. assumptions like these are all over the place, and every once in a while they get revoked, making us realize how we've been doing things wrong for so long. i thought it would be an interesting experiment to try to formulate a set of facts that are based on no assumptions (or as few assumptions as possible, which would have to be explicitly stated). kind of like the Principia Mathematica, but for general truth, rather than math. so, here goes..
- I think, therefore I am. i'm pretty sure descartes was right on this one. i'm thinking right now, so there must be some sort of entity doing that thinking, even if the entity is just a thought. define "I" to be that entity. also, define "universe" to be the set of all existing entities. since the universe contains "I", we know it is non-empty.
- My thoughts are changing, so the universe is not static. i think different things. even if all these thoughts happen to co-exist in the universe, there must be some sort of "pointer" to the active thought, which is moving from thought to thought. or it could be that one thought is being replaced by another. either way, there is some sort of change happening, so the universe is not static. Note that this does not imply that I am changing, only that the universe is changing, since it could be some other thing in the universe combined with myself which gives the change.
- Time exists. change is nothing but variability over time. therefore, if change exists, some concept of time must exist. time is therefore the first dimension of the universe.
that's as far as i've gotten. i think change might also imply the existence of "moving parts" in the universe, and therefore at least one other dimension, but i'm not fully convinced of that yet.
of course, this entire exercise might be moot, since i'm not using formal logic in my deductions, but i'm not sure of how to express this stuff in formal logic. it should be possible with the appropriate definitions, since formal logic systems are sound and complete. oh, and either way, there's some sort of assumption here that logic is not flawed and can, in fact, give you more facts from pre-existing facts.
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i try not quote stuff that's already been slashdotted, nor link to youtube, but after listening to this guy go on and on with the stupid verizon reps, i couldn't help it. dollars and cents. the gist of it is that a guy was quoted a rate of .002 cents/kb, and he ended up getting charged .002 dollars/kb. the service reps (all 4 or 5 of them) could not distinguish the difference between the two. this led to a frustrating 22-minute phone call (linked above) in which nothing was resolved, except to establish that verizon's service reps are incapable of doing basic math. it's quite amusing in a i-want-to-pound-my-head-against-a-wall kind of way, and i gotta say i would never have had the patience to do that for 22 minutes. i probably would have asked for the accounting department about .22 minutes into the call.
this incident brings up a whole range of questions. why are they unable to do basic math? how do you argue against stupid people who insist they are right? the service reps kept pulling out their calculator, punching in the right numbers, interpreting the answers incorrectly, and asserting they were right. is this technology's fault? should we make calculators with built-in support for units? (google knows the correct answer). thankfully, the situation will also be resolved by technology (blog, youtube, and slashdot).
the answer to the first question is pretty obvious: the education system is.. well, lacking, to put it mildly. there's actually a parallel between this situation and the evolution vs. creationism debate. for the record, while i think creationism is incorrect scientifically, i do not think it should be banned from schools. i don't think it should be taught as a science, but i do think that students should know what it is and be allowed to decide for themselves what they believe in. not teaching creationist theory is like.. wait for it.. not teaching math! for anybody who argues with this: the only difference between the two is that you (probably) believe math is factually correct, but creationism is factually incorrect. and that may be the case, but it also may not be. and regardless of whether or not it is the case, it's not a reason for censorship.
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link of the day: mind the gap. this one is even worthy of spawning a whole new class of quotes on the home page.
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at appleinsider, via osnews: apple's other phone project.
if true, pretty awesome. the coolest thing i find about the blackberry is the mobile IM capability. sure, there's email, but when email is instant, it's the same as instant messaging (not entirely true, but close enough). web browsing is also good, but most sites are sorely lacking in support for mobile browsers, and the experience just isn't the same. if this device can do mobile IM well, it'll probably take off. not at first, since people are, by and large, not used to mobile IM, but once they use it, it'll catch on quick.
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from slashdot: meteorite has globules of organic matter. mmmm, globules.
as always, things like this remind me of the world's stupidest equation, not only because every single factor in it is entirely made up, but because the probability itself is meaningless. i seem to remember ranting about this before somewhere, so i'll assume it was a blog entry that i can't find. no point in duplicating this stuff.
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