|
http://www.ominous-valve.com/vtsc.html
hilarious.
[ 4 Comments... ]
http://www.mosnews.com/commentary/2005/07/26/spamassassin.shtml
A little drastic, but hopefully it'll scare other spammers into not spamming. :)
[ 1 Comment... ]
so i was just looking at my site logs. specifically, the last-300-visitors log. Since the log only goes back 24 hours, my log had only 106 unique visitors. Of these:
Googlebot/2.1 : 7
Yahoo! Slurp : 65
msnbot/1.0 : 4
AskJeeves/Teoma : 1
I also tallied up the total page hits from each of those bots:
Googlebot/2.1 : 12
Yahoo! Slurp : 81
msnbot/1.0 : 12
AskJeeves/Teoma : 4
Despite this, google's index has a lot more pages from stakface.com indexed than yahoo! does (although yahoo!'s is better sorted by priority). blah.
[ 0 Comments... ]
just got back from student life 101. being an intelligent road sign was a blast, as usual. they still had the same error on the maps from last year, where the ALH arrow was pointing to ML instead. at least i wasn't directing people around there so i didn't have to explain said error to people countless times like i did last year.
dropped in on the SE presentation/student-panel-thingy but didn't stay too long as the person i was paired with wanted to go to lunch. from the questions i was there for, the frosh seemed less gung-ho than last year. then again, there were fewer people there than last year (for SL 101 in general as well as the SE session), and i only stayed for the first few (and therefore most boring) questions, so i could be completely wrong. i shoulda asked gwteathe about functional programming languages before i left :)
[ 3 Comments... ]
.. it's google earth. the latest google thingamabob. and it's cooler than ever. a coworker downloaded it at work today and we all spent a good half hour standing around and gawking at the earth at various different locations, angles, resolution, and such. i admit it doesn't really seem to have all that many practical applications, but the coolness factor just overcomes everything else.
i wonder if there's a special category for this kind of app.. not useful, but addictively cool. i wonder how long it'll be before google has an SDK for it and people start programming conquer-the-world games on earth. risk, 3D.
also, it's too damn hot. my computer is starting to crash with an alarming frequency, as is its usual behavior when it's too hot. i should probably pop the case panels off.
[ 2 Comments... ]
as i'm working on an HTML rendering engine right now, i often have to dig through the source code of pages that don't render right and try to figure out why. and i never cease to be amazed at how crappy some of this HTML code is. even on really big-name professional websites (cnn, the globe and mail, bbc, to name a few), there is some really broken HTML.
what amazes me even more is that despite such bad HTML, most browsers render the page without any problem. it's like the total opposite of strict type-checked languages. you can slap together some random tags, which may or may not be well-formed, and the major browsers can crunch it out into a decent-looking page.
the bad part about all this is that every new browser that is written must support all these broken pages in order to have a hope at being used by anybody (the problem i'm currently facing). this really raises the bar for browser developers, and allows the existing browsers to become even more entrenched. in the not-too distant future, i believe that it will be practically impossible to develop a new browser simply because of all this other crap that must be dealt with. only browsers that have evolved along with the languages and internet will be able to keep up.
as of right now, i can only think of a handful of HTML engines that are actually used.. there's IE, mozilla, opera, and safari/KHTML. that's it. there's a few others out there, but none that do a decent enough job to be used seriously. i was really amused when i found out netscape 8's main feature is that allows you to switch between the IE and mozilla rendering engines. they seem to have the right idea - screw making your own rendering engine, just grab a handful of existing ones and hope the page renders ok with one of them.
anyway, IE already threw in the towel with respect to innovation (IE 6 was supposed to be last IE ever), and now are only adding features in order to break even with others. i guess that leaves mozilla, opera, and safari as the future of internet browsing.
hm.. this post kind of rambled away from my rant, but whatever.
[ 2 Comments... ]
i don't think it's dropped below 25 degrees for the last week. even yesterday night at 4 in the morning it was 25 degrees. and my computer is starting to exhibit random crashes due to overheating. i need to figure out a better way of cooling my computer's innards.
[ 1 Comment... ]
cringely's latest post (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html) seems a little far-fetched, but if it happens.. wow! with the ahem.. diversity.. of microsoft's product lines, this probably won't kill them, but should at least hurt.
what i'm most excited about is the fine polish of MacOS finally coming together with 64-bit goodness on (relatively) cheap Intel hardware. that sounds like something i want.
[ 0 Comments... ]
aah.. did a full reformat of my machine this weekend. everything is so sparkling clean now.. :) well, almost.
i was going for a triple-boot setup of win2k, mandriva LE 2005 (aka mandrake 10.2), and freebsd 5.4. so first i installed win2k on the first 15-gig primary partition, seeing as how it always clobbers my MBR. got it all setup, ran windows update, set up a firewall, etc. took a while but i was in no hurry.. i had a book handy to keep me company. after i was done, i realized i was only using about 3 gigs of the partition, so i shrunk the partition down to 10 gigs. no problems there.
after that was done, i moved on to extended partition #1, onto which i installed mandriva. the extended partition was about 45 gigs, leaving some room for freebsd and some more space for any other random OS that i might want to try out. set it all up.. there were a couple of minor hitches.
one was with the sound.. mandriva seemed to get confused with the sound cards i have (one is onboard, the other is separate) and although everything seemed to configured properly, no sound was coming out. i ran alsaconfig, which did it's thing and set up the onboard card as the primary one. that was fine.
the other issue was when i set up the network to use DHCP, it would set the search domain to "no-domain-set.bellcanada", which seems to be some misconfiguration on the sympatico dhcp server. regardless, it cost me a 10-second penalty every time it resolved a DNS hostname, which was REALLY annoying. so i ended up just using static IP with the DHCP settings and manually hacking out the search domain. problem solved.
after setting up everything, i decided to boot back into windows and use partition magic to clear out the remaining left-over partitions on my hard drive so i wouldn't have to muck around with FreeBSD's fdisk. problem was, when i tried to boot win2K, it spit out an error message saying it couldn't find ntoskrnl.exe and therefore couldn't boot. so i switched back to linux and mounted the ntfs partition to take a look. guess what? the entire \\WINNT folder had disappeared. poof! i have no idea how this happened.. i hadn't done any repartitioning since the last time i ran it, and it seems unlikely that any changes would have ONLY removed the WINNT folder and nothing else (since everything else was, in fact, still there).
that was annoying, but it was still early on saturday morning, so i decided to go ahead and reinstall windows. that took a few hours.. had to download the updates all over again. i wish microsoft allowed you to download the updates separately (as .msi files or whatever) and keep them around. but meh.
so after that was all done, i got around to installing freebsd. that went pretty smoothly, but it didn't configure X (and I haven't done it yet, either) so right now it's strictly CLI. once i had a basic system up and running, i switched back to linux since i wanted to install other apps and such.
so then at some point on sunday evening, i tried to boot back into windows. guess what? no, really, guess.. yeah, ntoskrnl.exe not found. this time the WINNT folder is still there, but ntoskrnl.exe is nowhere to be found. i suspect it's some sort of virus that's hitting my system before i can get the firewall up. (both times i installed it, i downloaded system updates before the firewall, which probably kept my machine online, unsecured, for at least a couple of hours - enough time to get it infected). i haven't really looked into it too much, and i don't plan to either.. i'm just giving up on that for now. probably use the space for gentoo or something.
[ 2 Comments... ]
reason #(n+1) i love opera: it is possible (and i just did a proof by example) to carry out an entire browsing session using only the keyboard, and with a negligible loss in speed.
also note: algol135.math.uwaterloo.ca's mouse is busted.
[ 0 Comments... ]
|