A significant part of my Firefox bookmarks has been added to the sidebar in a hopefully manageable way. It should be noted the bookmarks are a mess. Please report problems with navigation, validation, dead links, uselessness, etc. here.
The hefty (30k) thing was not compressed so it would be accessible from non-typical UAs such as lynx (verified!).
A variation of the thing from Rebecca:
Why are you on my referrer logs?
Comment and tell me. Then post this in your blog/journal.
No, this is not about the process of digitizing an analog signal (though it is well worth your while to find out what "digital" actually means, even of you're not a technophile like me, at least so you know when advertisers clearly lie).
"Sampling" as in tasting a little bit of everything in a buffet or listening to a bit of various unfamiliar musical styles/performers to find out if you're missing out on something good. Like radio is supposed to be. Unfortunately, since all I get at work is commercial (remember payola?) brainwashing courtesy of local recording companies / RIAA franchises, I steal music from the net to find out what I like (Schoolgirl will be glad to hear I don't listen to much Yanni any more...).
So, if, perhaps by accident, you've discovered a large file with a "rar" extension and perhaps the words "ape" or "cue" in its name on your computer and decided you're not afraid of communism and would like to give it a try, here's some advice.
First of all, congrats on choosing the cd image instead of the mp3s. It means you value the quality of your music, and won't let some ripper's poor choice of encoding software to alter your perception and possible appreciation of the artist's work. Having an actual CD image, possibly compressed by some lossless compression method, enables you to recreate a bit-identical copy of the audio CD, so you'll know what you get when you buy it (well, that and the inlay, but that too is often provided as high resolution scans).
What you need to do then is extract the archive using unrar (free from rarlabs.com):
$unrar x foo.rar
Now you can either play it, if your player supports cuesheets and decodes Monkey's Audio (plugins are available for popular media players), burn it to CD (again, plugins are available for popular burning software), or convert it to mp3s (for use in portable players or some such). For that, you need the proper decoder (in this case, mac), cuetools, shntool and of course lame (all free software). When you have the latest versions installed, just:
$cuebreakpoints CDImage.cue | shnsplit -n "band-album-" -o cust ext=mp3 { lame --preset standard - %f } CDImage.ape
and (after a while) - voila!
I have yet to find a way to specify certain tracks to split so you'd be able to do less work to get a single track or even fork off multiple instances to use that SMP machine you might have properly. But at least you don't need to create temporary files.
Shell out for albums you like - the artists do get a little of that money!
So I've just finished the book. It took me three evenings (I'm a very slow reader). Yesterday I thought Orson Scott Card was just publishing more stuff to make money, the way I feel about what has been done to Dune, but today I've changed my mind.
No, it doesn't say anything new, per se, and it was kind of tying up loose ends, exactly as he promised two years ago (he left just a small bit for developing into plots of future books, if he ever needs the money, but then, the afterword in the acknowledgments section feels like it's the last book of the series...). The psychology was a bit simplistic, though it might be just realistic, but the geo-politics sounds about right (again, I don't know what I'm talking about). The last chapter was very touching. Actually, most of his ending are very good (contrast with Neal Stephenson for example). It really is a good book. I don't know about the non-preaching moralism, and how all that stuff gets along with the author's personal beliefs, and when (if at all) are characters speaking for him, but the whole settle-down-and-have-kids as the proper goal for sane people's ambition resonates very well with me.
BTW, the whole marrying the best female of the generation who is not your sister reminded me of themes in HP fandom. I think I read too much fanfic. (go Capt. Obvious!)
I've known for a while there are some hard-core comp-sci geeks on LJ, not just liberal arts and poli-sci _______, but somehow I've never read anything of Brad's before. Anyway, he has a lot of cool stuff, among which I've found the funniest link 3v4r: So Much Drama in the PhD, by Monzi.
ETA: Apparently, there is a genre for this stuff.
I recently loaned a friend a bunch of CDs I had lying around the office for a weekend. He said the music is depressive but it does appear to be conductive to a programmer's productivity. My music, depressive? It's not like I listen to Air's Virgin Suicides soundtrack on repeat or something! (A decent one if that's what you like, though I'd advise a visit to a therapist).
Here's the list. What do you think?
The 5th was the Israeli Day of The Holocaust, the 9th was 60 years since the end of The Great Patriotic War (my grandparents are veterans), today is the Israeli Memorial Day and tomorrow Israel will celebrate its 57th birthday. Personally I think it's too close together. It's symbolic of course, but you have to separate the days a bit more to let it sink in.
This time it was a bit more personal for me, a bit less abstract. I wish future years won't add more specific faces to the image I have in my mind's eye during the minute of silence.
So, as I said earlier, I've installed the latest release of windows for home users in qemu (also latest release, 0.7.0) to test my dhtml (not ajax) in m$ie. It works, but:
I've browsed the developers' mailing list archives and they do have many good ideas, so I believe the future is bright for emulation (running OS X on an Athlon 64 is in the roadmap, and that is close to the holy grail for me). Basically, computer-savvy users only for now, unless you wan to pay for Virtual PC or VMWare (and that can't run an architecture different from the host's).
It turned out my blog's CSS editing doesn't work in m$ie. Have not debugged it yet, but it being deployed for a while now and nobody saying anything is kind of depressing (since I know for a fact not all of my hits are made with Firefox).
Obligatory pic.
I went with my parents to a family friend's 50th birthday party. Despite being a classic civil engineer (exasperatingly pedantic) working for the national telco he's a good guy. I was prepared for a rather dull evening, but party games for tispy 45 to 55 y/o ex-Soviet engineers and their wives turned out to be funnier to observe than I'd imagined (and I didn't even know anyone present!).
I got cornered by the birthday-boy's elderly uncle (who I later found out was a physics professor or something) with the "I've been told you're good with computers, could you please help me out with this small problem I have" line I know so well (I briefly regretted not wearing this shirt). He introduced himself as a total dummy, but as he was explaining his problem in bits and pieces, it turned out he wasn't clueless at all - he was editing his registry and he'd switched to Firefox etc. I honestly believe he was proving himself or something by "testing" me. Way more cool than my grandparents, anyway.
I've done some extremely unscientific and informal comparison of Firefox 1.0.3, Opera 8.0 and Konqueror 3.4 running my dynamic table script on 100K of data and I have to say I'm very impressed with Opera. It feels like the code is JIT-compiled while KHTML feels like it's running in an emulator (I'm talking about being 50 times(!) slower while crawling DOM etc.). There are things where Konq. actually does better than dear old Gecko, though compatibility is definitely not one of them (I had to code around many KHTML issues). Opera's choice of when to actually reflow the DOM changes is a bit weird, but it might be doing the right thing performance-wise.
I'm working on getting the browser from Redmond to work in QEMU, will update here when I have more info.
ETA: It's working, but I can't really do any performance comparisons.
ETA #2: KHTML 3.4.1 bugfixes should allow me to remove a few lines of code. It's my policy to only support the (near) latest version of each browser engine. There's no good reason to still use IE 5.5, pre-1.0 Mozilla (or even pre-1.0 Firefox, which is Mozilla 1.7), Opera 6, etc. I expect the UA to either have full support of the W3C DOM and CSS DOM and things like Array.push (so no IE 5.0) or be treated like Lynx, but I won't use Mozilla 1.8b2's proprietary Array.ForEach (although it's brilliant!). For the people stuck with the version of KDE/Mozilla they have on their binary distro: too bad, you probably don't use Konq as your primary web browser anyway. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Have been thinking more about FFDB. Who here wants to help gathering a bit of info on fics you like?
| 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% |
