dsandler.org

Grrr. Some spammers have my old mbhs.edu address and are using it as the From header on their spam. This has been going on for a while, but apparently now they’ve been hit with virii, and my mbhs.edu is getting thoughtful messages from sysadmins advising me that I’ve been infected (because they’re receiving viral attachments, ostensibly from me). Bleh.

People are using iPods as portable software-theft devices, according to this Wired article. (There’s a Dallas angle, too:)

Unsure whether the kid was a thief or an out-of-uniform employee, Webb watched as he left the store. “I thought there’s no point in getting any more involved in this imbroglio,” Webb said. “Besides, this is Texas. You never know what he might have been carrying.”

(PS: The article mentions iPodlounge, which I must admit is a pretty slick site.)

I had seen a reference to the chilling effects clearinghouse recently, but Ingrid reminded me that I wanted to post it. (Word to the wise: Any mention of the DMCA in my presence will pretty much whip me up instantly into frenzy, in much the same way mention of Russell’s paradox will disorient and anger Amar like a cornered animal.

A reader writes:

I just thought you’d be disturbed to know that I had a strange dream involving you, your wife, and Jamie Oliver (aka, the Naked Chef).

Have a nice day.

Yes, disturbed!

News for the morning: (1) Ice-cold water this morning. I feel miserable. (2) 8:30 meeting again today. (3) The Internet seems to be broken today; I mean, what kind of world is it where AlterSlash is down? (4) This link is just for Chris. (5) Everyone seems to be linking to the BlogSisters today (or was this yesterday’s meme? It’s so hard to keep track).

Reaction to high-res (1600×1200) digital photography.

erin: Dude, your ice halo pictures are the largest pictures EVER! EVAR!

I’ve since gone and added a viewer that lets you choose a different resolution for the image. 400×300 isn’t as nice for printing, but it sure looks better on an iBook; try it out.

dsandlercast and marconecast are two copies of my Python winamp-track IRC bot. They get along rather well:

[11:22] * marconecast wishes dsandlercast would shut up already.
[11:22] * dsandlercast hisses softly.

THEIR COMPLETE LOWER SURFACE ARE AUDITION TO US.

I saw a new billboard on 101 today:

Sadly, the domain isn’t even owned by anyone.

ProgressQuest, the online RPG for today’s busy youth who can’t be troubled to click on every moss snake that comes by just to watch their experience progress bars go up.

From abm:

Amusing ad in a local newspaper:

“Alta Mesa Memorial Park
lot #192 1800/obo Moved!! Would like to sell”

Does anyone else find this as funny as I do?

I guess everyone really is moving out of this area.

You know, of all the people I know, only you read the burial plot classifieds.

Ice halos tonight.

More pain: the source file I’m working on is 5206 lines long. The function I’m debugging is 574 lines. (All the source files and all the functions are like this.)

Ughhhh — integer size issues. Some idiot is putting 0×0001000 into my 32-bit integer, thinking he’s writing 1 (0×0001) into a 16 bit slot.

So it seems that Dan Bernstein (author of qmail, the mail server used at dsandler.org) has developed an exponential improvement in number-factoring circuits. This has caused me to go read up on related papers of his, as well as differential cryptanalysis (more links.

(Tidbit for those unfamiliar: When IBM was developing DES a while back, the NSA stopped by and asked them to remove certain key possibilities from DES. IBM complied, and for twenty years it was generally assumed that the NSA had added a backdoor to DES — in other words, “please don’t use these keys, because we can’t crack them; use these other keys instead, which we can break at any time.” Twenty years later (early 1990s), a new kind of cryptanalysis was discovered that is particularly potent on certain regions of the DES keyspace — specifically those keys the NSA said to avoid. So it turns out that (a) the NSA was strengthening DES by disallowing use of keys that would be proven weak by later research … and (b) that the NSA had differential cryptanalysis 20 years before anyone else.)

Needless to say, this math is way beyond me. But it’s really interesting.

Mmm, mini-muffins!

My manager invoked the 90-90 rule in business communication today. Keen.

Angi: “the moral of the story is… fuckedcompany is never wrong.”

//!!!! ATTENTION

Penny-Arcade on the unending push-back of GCN titles: Nintendo is making it real hard to be a Nintendo fan right now.

Amar: it was interesting to walk around SF lifted, although i can never tell if things are truly bizarre or just seem that way cos i’m stoned. […] up to coit tower, so mysterious and beautiful and pure & bright & white. saruman style, orcs with ghetto blasters loitering thuggishly at the base.

[13:45] <dsandler> ‘(freudian lisp)

Gah. Another piece of code with the following comment:

//! ATTENTION

No other explanation is provided. Great! (This is almost as good as the large blocks of code commented out for no reason, or the other blocks which have been killed with #if 0 … except that #if 0 has itself been commented, thus re-animating that block. Joy!)

I told you this was going to be big.

And there was much rejoicing.

What the heck is the point of having a default printer in Windows 2000 if all your (Microsoft) apps simply remember the last-used printer, irrespective of the default?

Beth is grappling with a redesign.

Quick weekend recap:

Saturday: Discovered Primetime Glick. Seriously, seriously funny stuff. Art class OK; Pikmin purchased.

Sunday: Convinced Erin to make lasagna; v. tasty, as always. (Lunch on Monday!) Sopranos season 2 finale, excellent (as always).

Monday: Erin had to go in at 7ish (as spring-quarter registration starts today), so we traded schedules (I was to get up at 7). Predictably, I overslept:

Dan: Ahh, 7:00. I’ll get up in just a second.
Clock: 7:30.
Dan: What? You’ve got to be kidding me!
Clock: 7:35.
Dan: All right, all right!

Bad UI Clinic   Session 73

Always use mnemonics when choosing the shortcut-keys for your commonly used menu items. For instance, in the following example, N means “Old (read) message”, and O means “New (unread) message”. The principle of least astonishment hard at work!

Mailbag.

Dear Sir,

As a TiVo enthusiast, I must take issue with your 2/22 7:38am diary entry.

The beauty of TiVo lies in its ability to manipulate the arbitrary, rigid network program schedules to make them confirm to the user’s personal viewing habits. If Friends is on at 8 but I don’t want to watch it until 10, I no longer risk missing the episode where Joey tells Ross that he loves him. In the realm of live events, or even scheduled events of historical significance, the user is the one that chooses between live or Memorex. In the Olympics/Oscars case, this decision is made upstream at the network level…the user has no choice but to watch the tape delay.

This is a crucial distinction, and one that bears noting.

Thank you for your time,
-Anonymous

Inevitably, the sour grapes are pressed into drink once more.

I think I’m experiencing foo-like symptoms.

Use Perforce? Do you use the reviews feature? Use Outlook? Here are some custom fields for p4 review messages.

I was so excited to watch Sarah Hughes’ outstanding program and very-emotional victory … until I remembered that the bastards at NBC are tape-delaying the whole thing, and it had all happened two and a half hours earlier. (Fun game: Look away from the “LIVE” in the top-left corner of your screen, and instead search for clocks in the camera shots; then, do the math to figure out your time zone’s Olympic tape delay!)

There’s something thrilling about experiencing something extraordinary along with everyone else in the world. There’s something depressing about experiencing something extraordinary along with the rest of the West Coast, in our usual Law & Order time-slot.

I can just barely remember when the events were televised whenever they were occurring, and — like so many of life’s great moments — you were either there or you weren’t. You could catch it on the highlight reel, or on your VCR, but nobody ever claimed it was live. TV was just a little more honest.

Now, however, it’s a TiVo world.

PS - something that Chris recently explained to me: the US military saves concealable bad news (missing soldiers, etc.) for times when unconcealable bad news will overshadow it. Case in point: the front page of CNN right now contains the large headline: “Daniel Pearl, 1963-2002″ … but also contains the smaller headline, “A U.S. Army MH-47 helicopter went down at sea in the Phillipines on Thursday.”

The State Department has an accurate transcript of Bush’s speech in Japan Monday. “… for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times.” Embarrassing as this gaffe is (wasn’t Bush’s father shot down flying missions over Japan?), it pales in comparison to the deeply unsettling revisionist history from the White House Press Secretary’s Office. (“…for half a century now…”)

I’m telling Erin about the transparent aluminum thing.

Dan: … and it’s three times as strong as steel.
Erin: So we could have transparent cars?
Dan: Like Wonder Woman’s plane, yeah.
Erin: (quizzical look)
Dan: Yeah, it was invisible. You sometimes saw Wonder Woman, visible, sitting in her invisible plane, zooming around. That’s how I imagine transparent cars.
Erin: Ah. (beat) How did she find it?
Dan: What?
Erin: Her plane. If it’s invisible, you know? How did she find it to get into it? These are the questions that nobody asks for fifty years!

AP: Pearl is dead.

In other AP headline news, apparently we’re going steady with China. “Bush indicated that the two nations would begin holding hands at the mall soon, following a successful outing at the movies.”

I know it was on slashdot not too long ago, but this transparent aluminum thing is cool. “Eine Platte … [ist] dreimal härter als gehärteter Stahl.” Spass!

Dedicated to c&a: I thought it was over but she wants me back.

I know she’s two-timing me with like 20 million other people, and I’d leave her if I knew how, but she’s inside of me, under my skin. I want to be rid of her, but I can’t find a moment’s peace until she tires of me, or I build up an immunity to her.

Angi is bringing back bad memories from my previous job at that company.

Kevin Fox has a really clever weblog setup — visual cues for age of posts (like my white-means-today, grey-means-older thing, but at a finer granularity), by-topic indexing, classy layout. (And he’s a Buffy fan.)

For sale at the Encarta shop: a Mozilla blow-up, and a PalmOS smartphone. (screenshot)

v. foggy this morning.

A thoughtful reader writes:

I completely reject Dogma 2000. :-)

But then, I’m one of those freaks who actually proofreads his emails before hitting “Send”. Not that I catch every mistake, but trying to use correct spelling and grammar has always been important to me.

The notion that “Orthographic rules are not made for the net” is pure bunk. “The net” is about communication, and communication, by definition, requires rules. Sure, you can afford to bend the rules a bit and still have your message understood. You can drop or resend a few packets; you can misspell a word or use the wrong tense here and there, but as a message becomes less and less compliant with the standard, its audience has to work harder and harder to decode its meaning, until some point where they give up trying and perhaps reject even that which they have gleaned.

I’m a hopeless pedant myself, as is my (linguistics-major) wife.

The part about D2K that I was interested in is the focus on the message. There are people who are worried that their lack of style (or grammar) will prevent them from being allowed to express their ideas at ALL, and to them I say, “it’s more important that you express yourself. Dot the i’s later.”

But I reject the notion (of course) that the style and correctness are valueless. Hey, that’s why it’s called “dogma” — it’s supposed to be overbearing and narrowminded!