Author Archives: joestump

Blogger Code

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I suppose you could call this site a “blog.” I don’t refer to it as a “blog”, but I’m sure others do. I recently was doing something I often do when I’m bored – select a random link from Camworld and read a few blogs. It’s hit or miss, but today was a hit – Blogger Code, which is a modification of the infamous Geek Code. The Geek Code is much more specific and in depth, but Blogger Code is still pretty funny. If you’re interested mine is “B9 d++ t++ k++ s u f i o x- e+ l- c”. I used to have my Geek Code stored somewhere, but I’ve lost it. I could possibly look through the 200MB+ of email I have archived, but that sounds like work.

Outer Mongolia here I come

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I was sifting through the hundred or so cron messages, spam, etc. that I get everyday only to find an article about the federal government wanting to use the military for law enforcement, which is CLEARLY against our founding principles. Our founding fathers are rolling over in their graves. This news coupled with the recent talks of internment camps for Arab Americans really gets my blood boiling. Not only have they taken away my fair use, they track me via face scanning software, and now they want to pull me over with F18’s. Like the title suggests – a move to another country sounds more and more appealing.

OSX Here I come

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Whether it was the recent switch campaign or Paul’s recent ravings of his titanium I don’t know. What I do know is that I just bought quite a beefy iBook. 40GB hdd, airport card, 384MB of RAM, and the DVD-CDRW combo drive. It should run OSX and the upcoming Jaguar (OSX 10.2) without problems. I’m super pumped. This means that I will be leaving my beloved Debian behind, but at least OSX has apt-get.

With no one in second who's first?

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People who have college degrees earn more over a lifetime than those who don’t (over $1 million more). The article says the researchers would like to use this tidbit to get more students to go to college. My question is this: if everyone went to college who would be left over to do menial labor? In recent years we’ve seen a surge in college enrollement, while the job market has declined. Who’s the first to be laid off? High paid consultants usually. This reminds me of one of my sayings “If there weren’t losers we wouldn’t be winners.” Think about it – who’d clean up the bathrooms? I sure as hell wouldn’t if I was sitting on a degree. Does this mean colleges will offer “Janitors 101”? It’s really dumb. Some people aren’t meant for college – everyone should just let them be.

Concert Season

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It’s that time of the year again. Before dating Lauren I really didn’t go to concerts, however, since meeting her I’ve been to two. Both have been a lot of fun. The first was to see Default (Lauren’s favorite band) at the House of Blues in Chicago. The second time I happened accross tickets to see Dashboard Confessional and Weezer. Default was amazing (as was their warmup Injected) as was Dashboard Confessional. However, Weezer completely stole the show. Having not been a huge follower I was plesantly surprised to find them to be an outstanding band. They blew both Lauren and I away.

I've lost my $HOME

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Hardware problems cause a person to lose three of the things they treasure: their time, their money, and their sanity. Today I got a double dose. The first dose came in the form of my company issued IBM Thinkpad. I bought a shiny new 18GB hard drive (quite the upgrade from 6.4GB) only to find that it didn’t fit (despite the company telling me it would). The second dose cam in the form of a VERY dead hard drive which went up in a ball of flames (actually crc errors during boot). I’ve installed a shiny new copy of Debian on a spare drive. I’ve yet to try mounting my old $HOME, but I doubt I’ll recover anything (like the 2 years of work stored on it).

Do coders think of endusers?

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I’m a coder. I have endusers – roughly 2 million of them. Do I think about them when I code? No, we pay an outstanding and invaluable person to do that – I incorporate her changes as I go along. I usually don’t question her changes because she’s the expert when it comes to UI and enduser experience. I just ran accross this thread from a KDE developer responding to this article from an endusers point of view.

Here’s a few choice quotes: “She raises many interesting points although I don’t think all recommendations
are that great. (Auto-disapearing menu-options? *yuck*) On the bright side,
we can pick the ones we do like :-)” and “I really wonder whether we should
waste CPU cycles on making the zooming more smooth.” The first one is just dumb – if enough users want it to justify coding it then do it and put it in the control panel for people to turn on/off as they please. The second one isn’t something I deal with often because I code applications for the web (therefore everything should be blazingly fast and we can’t program stuff that will bork our servers). On the desktop side of things it should be up to the user if they want to waste CPU cycles (afterall it’s the enduser’s CPU cycles not the developer’s that get wasted). This is another thing, if justified by enduser’s desires, should be added as an option to be turned off/on at will. This topic is a HUGE beef I have with OSS developers and one I’m guilt of as well.

Linux as an enduser

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As you know I recently switched to GNOME because I wanted something easier to use. Well I’m back to Enlightenment, which is no surprise. Gnome was horrifically buggy (the last straw came when apps started closing on their own mysteriously). I might take a look at KDE 3.0, but no garantees. On the same note here is a list of things that are supposedly fixed and the same author’s list of things that are yet to be fixed can be found here . I agree with most of his arguments. One thing I think that would be cool is an initiative something he talks about – categorizing all Linux apps into a “How do I …” (browse the web, chat on aim/irc/icq, etc.).

Easter Eggs

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As many of you know programmers sometimes get bored and program little nuggets of fun into their programs to amuse themselves. Recently, I stumbled upon this site that aims to be an online archive of easter eggs. Not only does it have computer ones (ie. BeOS’s kernel has functions called “is_computer_on()” and “is_computer_on_fire()”), but also movies, tv shows, etc.