Personal - Update

1. Last week my team got a replacement for the member we stand to lose in a few months. Training a newbie (the guy was literally two days out of basic training when we got him) takes years when he's not a self-trained computer geek (we weren't that lucky) and I suspect it's going to be partially my job. He spent more time reading Asimov than the C# book we gave him, but that might turn out ok too.

   "Mother," said Miles, "calls it my great gift. Tests are a gift, she says, and great tests are a great gift. Of course," he added thoughtfully, "it's widely agreed my mother is a bit strange…"

   The Warrior's Apprentice, Lois McMaster Bujold.

2. The weather is stifling. You constantly feel as if you'd just exercised hard and had not yet have the chance to catch up your breath. It gets better only after 8PM. Being cooped up in a hermetically sealed room breathing air conditioner air is not much fun either, as it appears to have a lower oxygen level than the real thing.

3. Ate a lot of really delicious food in two get-togethers on the same day. I was afraid I'd be sick I ate so much. Then I walked for more than an hour on the way home.

4. The "new" officer arranged for us to do some target practice on the laser trainer (because of bureaucracy, we're not supposed to be using it). Stationary targets feel the same since the mechanics are preserved (or rather simulated), all except for the recoil (but you barely notice it anyway), meaning the barrel moves up when you cock the trigger etc. (it can even simulate jams!), but the best part is there's moving targets mode. It's probably as close as I'll ever get to the real thing though for obvious reasons it feels more like a really cool game with the mouse replaced by what feels like standard issue firearms than actual life threatening situation (which is the only situation you're allowed to use weapons). Surprisingly, I'm better with an Uzi than with an M16A1. At least at close range, anyway.

5. While we watched the building's lobby being cleaned up after an enormous soap bubble spill (a huge ankle thick puddle of white foam, reminded me of Gred & Forge's escapades in OoTP. It looked like the stuff used to control fire but people said it was just soap) a crowd began gathering on the other side. Turns out a guy wanted to jump off the roof of the mall across the street. Police and firefighters took two hours to get him off the roof, while a huge crowd gathered to watch, impeding traffic. People are odd about other people jumping off buildings: Some watch fascinated, some cry, others offer suggestions and critique his choice of location. The various reactions are not clear cut between the sexes.
   Reminds me I wanted to post a few pics so you'll get to see my new (temporary) office…

6. Have been thinking more about FFDB. Who here wants to help gathering a bit of info on fics you like?

Evils of LJ - N.S.F.W.

So, I was scrolling down my friends page and my mother comes into the room (the door was ajar, can't blame anyone but myself). The post visible on the screen was (Don't click it!) this, by jwz. How do you explain the non-selective nature of LJ Friends Pages to your technophobic and rather Victorian mother? I think I'll email this to a guy from work who might enjoy it, though...

Cinema - "Don't judge a book by its movie"

This review of the new Hitchhiker's Guide film by Douglas Adams' biographer reminds me of Alec's raving about Peter Jackson's Orcish ancestry after watching LoTR:FoTR for the first time. Let's hope it's just that, or it will be very sad.

Hardware Shopping - NF4 and low exch. rate!

Continuing the recurring theme of shopping for PC hardware (with other people's money, of course), we take the availability of nVidia's newest chipset (actually, it's a single-chip solution for mainboard logic, but anyway) and the drop in USD to ISL exchange rate into account to produce the following budget-oriented (but fully-featured!) setup:

Hardware	Recommended Component	US Price	ISL exchange rate	US price in ISL	IL price inc. 17% VAT	ripoff rate
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 512K 1.8GHz 90nm for 939	$142	4.33	615	860	39.8%
Motherboard	MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum (s939, nForce4 Ultra)	$140		606	860	41.9%
Memory	Brand 512MB PC-3200 CL3 x2	$100		433	640	47.8%
Video Card	Pine XFX 6600GT PCIe 128MB GDDR3	$172		745	1060	42.8%
Hard Drive	Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB SATA w/ NCQ	$100		433	600	38.5%
sum:		$654		2,832	4,020	41.9%

Again, it's not a full computer, it's not necessarily the best offer in any way, the prices are from an unspecified vendor (including shipping but not assembling) and I take no responsibility for anything you do with this information I do not even guarantee is true.

1. The entry-level CPU was chosen because the 5%-10% advantage offered by the next step up isn't worth the money.
2. A non-SLI motherboard was chosen because buying a second video card is not a real option (notice it's the priciest item!).
3. CAS-3 memory was chosen because of the price premium for CAS-2.5 (not to mention CAS-2!), and hearsay stating it often works in CAS-2.5 timings just as well.
4. The 6600GT is the current sweet-spot (overly drawn discussion of reasons why isn't worth typing up). Because the motherboard is of the newer PCI-Express varienty (instead of the dying-out AGP), we take the PCIe version.
5. The 7200.7 NCQ has the best performance and warranty conditions (3 years full + 2 years limited warranty). The newer 7200.8 behemoth is slower, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 and 10 have a really crappy warranty by the Israeli importer and the Western Digital is outperformed (hasn't happened in years!). Just take care to get an NCQ part - the same model exists without NCQ, which is a vital feature for heavy multitasking performance, as recently shown by Anand Lal Shimpi.

Of the 42% difference between US and IL prices, 17% goes to the government. The other 25% is for shipping and someone's kids' college.

HP Fandom - Amor Vincit Omnia?

Theowyn's "Harry Potter and the Enemy Within", Chapter 18: Hogsmeade, wherein Harry and Snape's great and t00by love has successfully overcome their first major fight, all thanks to Harry's infinite capacity to love everyone, even those who'd wronged him (aka "the power Voldemort knows not"). And on the H/G front? As usual:

he spent most of this time with Ginny, either flying or taking walks. Ron had given them a curious look one afternoon as they left the common room together, but ... Harry hadn't given it another thought.

Barely a mention, and it still seems Ginny is "one of the guys". Sigh.

Nerdery - metanerdery

As a kid, I used to browse encyclopedias and watch the local channel 8 (Science/Art/History/Culture). Now, I can easily spend a whole night on c2, E2 or wikipedia. My other time-wasting hobby obsession is Harry Potter fan fiction. I never combine the two, but seriously discussing Shipping and using metasyntactic variables when describing ship naming conventions is just so über-geeky I can't resist blogging about it! Apparently, the fandom is better documented than I guessed: Cassie is now part of history. Anyone else?

Found on the web - Virtual Tourism

Via jwz, a very cool blog with satellite photos of interesting places in North America as found in Google Maps.

Linux - I'm such a n00b

Do you have any idea how long it takes to build the Ximianized version of OpenOffice.org on a P!!!-733? I don't either (because I can't be bothered to check the logs), but it's a long time. So how did I feel when I found out after a whole night of crunching, an error message saying emerge failed because of an IO error on a copy operation? Confused. Dismayed. Angry. And finally, curios. df -h showed I had 1MB left free on the root partition. du -hx --max-depth=1 on / and then on /root showed I've been neglecting some housekeeping business since the last time I logged in as root to recover from my tinkering. A few judicious rm -r's later, I had enough room to try again. I really have to repartition...

Personal - Up & Down

The previous post was down. This is up.

I've had a perfectly good time this past weekend. Got to talk at length with a guy I had known for two years whom I've never taken the time to really talk to before. He turned out to be the kind of fellow I can pleasantly disagree with. He's a religious nationalist, a rather rare thing in military high-tech. Talking to him made me more conscious of the needs of the observant minority in service (with whom I sympathize) and of my own beliefs (which today I can formulate at best as "I'm pro separation of morality from religion"). We've agreed to continue the conversation through the mail.

The most recent batch of IT-girls, or at least the sample I got to talk to, was really sub-par. I got a very strong feeling of channeling Prof. Snape. Extreme mediocrity, incompetence and professed complete lack of interest in the subject matter is infuriating. How am I expected to work with those? Sure hope for some responsibility from the people handling their assignments.

Last week got stressed out because of some "legacy" blunder at work. Legacy systems/code/support is a terrible thing and I fully intend to do everything in my power to modernize the things and ditch the ball and chain, ASAP (meaning "in the next three years"). Thankfully, I have my CO's complete support.

Have been working on an unusual skunkworks project. This time it's educational, and most of the work-hours went into a PowerPoint presentation (a first for me). It's highly technical and is intended to get my colleagues to think about certain technicalities I believe code monkeys should be aware of, but was astonished to find out nearly none are. I tried to make it less boring by appealing to their competitive spirit. I hope to find out this week if I succeeded. The general theme is "contemporary microprocessor and compiler technologies", and full disclosure will follow presentation at work.

Personal - Jerk

I am the absolute worst person I know at keeping in touch. I do not speak with any of the people who used to be my friends at various points in time. Good, true friends too, not just friendly acquaintances.

I cannot prioritize to save my life.

I am as empathic as a doorknob.

For someone so introverted, I sure talk way too much.

Also, according to some people, my personal hygiene needs more attention and my sexual deprivation is showing. There might be some truth in that.

Finally, I'm about to spend a very depressed (and extended) April Fools weekend alone with an Uzi.

This Blog - Style Editing

I've implemented a very basic CSS editor. If you know CSS - it works (in Gecko; should also work in IE6 but never tested. Doesn't work in KHTML). Saving is in cookies and which was last chosen is not saved so on subsequent loads the same one is chosen again as if you didn't save anything. No validation is performed - write invalid CSS, get no template. If you feel you need more hand-holding with syntax, I might be persuaded to build more UI (list of valid properties, color picker, more validation) but you have to ask. Obviously, pretty designs (copy and mail me) will get added to the site for everyone to see (and the prettiest will replace the default). Bug reports are welcome. Especially from Windows and Mac users.

Web Tech - nifty

zipdecode. link via jwz.

Web Tech - "new" technologies

Opera developer Ian Hickson says the new names for old web technologies confuse the people who build those technologies, so people should please stop making up new names for HTTP, HTML, XML, CSS and MumbleScript. I agree.

Fandom - push technology meets plugs

I got this in the mail a few days ago (to my soon to be abandoned hotmail address, which is clogged with penis enlargement ads. Consider it - M$ gives you only 2MB storage while average spam item is 136K!).

Dear Friends,

My new Harry Potter fanfic has begun to be posted at the Sugar Quill. It's called "[snip]" and you can access my author page there at the address [snip].

You are on this mailing list because you made a positive comment about one of my previous stories ([snip], [snip] or [snip]). I will remove your name from the list on request.

Best regards,

[snip]

So, is this spam payback for being a good reader and leaving a signed review? Or is this a legitimate service I should be thankful for? Personally, I like to subscribe to updates myself, and many authors use Yahoo! Groups exactly for this purpose.

This Blog - Redesign

I'm doing massive re-write of the template. The site might be broken in the interim.

People who got here Googling for "A script from … was denied UniversalBrowserRead privileges": This has to do with Gecko's (the engine for Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape/etc. browsers) security policy. Scripts on webpages are prevented from doing certain things (like violating the user's privacy) unless the user concedes first to allow them. To establish this trust, the user must be sure the script is written by the author she trusts rather than for example by disreputable clients of the author's banner-ad provider. So it was decided the script's URL is not enough to establish its credentials, and the user should be guarded from trusting scripts based solely on their location. And thus the option to trust scripts was disabled by default. The only way the browser is even going to bother the user with "Do you really want to allow this bloke from perverts.de to virtually feel you up?" is if the script is electronically signed (this way you can be reasonably sure the script is written by whoever it says its author is). But my scripts aren't signed, so when they try to do something (I swear does not violate your privacy in any way, but of course I'd say that anyway) Gecko just slaps them on the wrist without consulting you and informs you as an afterthought ("that guy was so checking out your butt!").

If you want to tell Gecko you're a grownup and would like to choose your companions yourself, type "about:config" into your address bar, there filter for "signed.applets.codebase_principal_support" and change its value to "true" by double clicking it. This tells Gecko to ask you whether you let a scripts reach into your personal space or not, every time it tries.

More details from the horse's mouth are available here.

EDIT: A later template edit removed the client-side AJAX-based feedreader. It was a pioneering work, but it caused firefox to crash too much.

Found On The Web - Teh Funnay!

Just when the show finally got better (or even "good", some say), Enterprise has been canceled. Angry Trekkers worldwide, who dissed if for years now suddenly fight to keep it alive (even funding it themselves!).
Anyway, this cartoon is just funny. "Australian cartoonist John Cook" draws Sev-Space "a parody of the sci-fi/fantasy genres including Star Trek & Lord of the Rings" (and lots more, though the HP ones are not as good). I loved this one for Alias. Notice the names.

ETA: bandwidth costs drove him to a subscription program. A pity, but inevitable when you think about it.

Personal - Fashion

Sometimes I stumble upon a fic with… character. One such mentioned t-shirts with cool slogans and a link to a real shop you can buy similar items from. I especially liked this one, but they have many more inconsiderate designs for all occasions. I can totally picture a guy from work wearing many of those.

Personal - TODO

So, there are a number of things I would've liked to do had I been less lazy. I'll list them here.

1. Design and implement a pessimistic soft locking thingy for work.
2. Redesign the blog with a side panel, redoing the bookmarks/feedreader. Add calendar, memories, more easily maintainable code.
3. Talk to a doctor about my RSI before it gets much worse. Make necessary alterations to work environment at work and at home.
4. Refactor the hell out of the HTML grid widget experiment to make it usable. It was really neat, and really ugly too…
   1. Before XForms (or whatever the replaces XHTML) makes it obsolete…
5. Profile a major MFC app at work to at least find the performance bottleneck(s). It's suspiciously slow, even on state of the art hardware. I bet it's the UI, but it could be anything (dynamic memory allocation, too much copying, not using parallelism, etc.)
6. Compile list of hackers I admire for inspiration at work (and to use as excuse for not shaving).
7. Write the self-challenging short-story plot bunny I had.
8. Design a prototype eXtensible Fanfic Description Format.
   1. with strong validation and performance oriented characteristics, but language and fandom independent.
   2. With diff's embeddable in Atom feeds.
9. Design a normalized ERD to store XFDF documents.
   1. In as much an implementation-independent way as possible, leaning to postgresql (there are good reasons, but not personal experience yet).
10. Implement two-way conversion between data represented in the two previous forms.
    1. mod_python for Apache2. I speak out of hype, not experience, here.
11. Design XSLT (or something) to represent XFDF documents on the web, search for them in a database etc.
    1. As in, a site.
12. exercize.
13. read less fic.
14. Consider writing my own fractal thingy.
    1. Probably playing with a real one will satisfy me.
15. Build the 3D project I fantasize about.
    1. Well, it's a portable OpenGL Rubik's Cube. With "scramble" and "solve" buttons, of course. Google turned up a few projects, but none of which I'm entirely happy with.

This is roughly in order of most likely to be completed first. Note: Everything is subject to change.

Fandom - demographics

A bold statement by Kokopelli. At the risk of being strung up on the next lamppost, I agree. BTW here's a link to his collaboration work with Mr. Intel - a (gasp!) H/Hr story titled "The Phoenix Reborn".

Personal - Scriptures

Today, my unit was merged (well, it was more of a hostile takeover) with another one, changing my boss'-boss'-boss'-boss' boss (I counted twice). It does not influence me even slightly, but we had to stand on parade for an hour and listen to boring speeches. I understand similar things happen in the real world, but this was with attention! and at-ease! each time the speaker changed. Urgh. Anyway, what the merger did change is the unit's name. Now instead of a cryptic acronym we have an appropriately biblical name (it all has to do with the brass' political views). It's a gemstone that appears on the high priest's breastplate. I have tried to identify it, but failed. This is what I have turned up (using links from a wikipedia article). Any suggestions? Edit: This and this reach the same conclusion: nobody knows what it was, but it was probably sparkly.