Clarification

Here are some answers to questions that nobody's asked yet:

1: In Virtual Reality the real world is replaced with an artificial one. In Augmented Reality, the real world is enhanced with extra information. I thought it was one way of thinking about the relationship between blogs and the real world, hence the name.

2: As for the umlauts over the vowels, that's because we were watching This is Spinal Tap on TV the day before I was thinking up the name, which got me thinking about Heavy Metal Umlauts a la Blue Öyster Cult, Motörhead, Mötley Crüe etc. Spinal Tap has an umlaut over the "n"; I wanted to put mine over the "g" but there isn't a character code for that. Spinal Tap's album was named "Smell the Glove" hence the line in the "About" section.

3: I reformat all posts to keep the font sizes and spacing consistent. Hope you don't mind. I wouldn't edit the actual content, though.

Invitation and Revocation

Thank you for the invitation. I thought I would share this with you.

Bah Humbug

What is it about Christmas?, the one day of the year when there is 'good will and peace to all men', what about the other 364.25 days of the year?. If it can be managed for one day, why not all the others?.

Then there's the commercial side, from november, the shops, TV and magazines are advertising to sell their products and services for Christmas. To me, Christmas has become one big marketing ploy and the real meaning has been or is being lost in a mess of commercial cr*p.

(Boy, I'm glad I'm a Pagan).

The Rules of Cricket

Kate wanted to know the rules of cricket. And so...

The Rules of Cricket
as Explained to a foreign visitor

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.

Each man that's in the side that's in, goes out, and when he's out, he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out.

When they are all out the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.

Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When both sides have been in and out including the not-outs, that's the end of the game.

Howzat?
Also, check out this page.

Ok, ok. The real rules can be found here.

We don't need no edukashun

I bought my pocket memory thing (it's properly called USB Flash Memory) at the weekend. Rather than the 128Mb one Val mentioned I found a 512Mb for $50. It's already saved me a lot of messing about - I need the latest Java SDK for my Linux box at home and it's about 34Mb, which until now meant either downloading at home, hogging the phone line for three or four hours, or downloading it at work and burning it onto CD. The trouble is that Kevin, the only guy on my team with a CD burner on his machine, is out of the office until next week so that isn't an option. USB Flash Memory to the rescue... I downloaded it this morning and copied it to the memory, and I was all done in about 2 minutes. I took a look at the memory manufacturer's website because I wanted to see if there are any useful programs to go with it (mostly because I have an idea for a program of my own, of which no more will be said at this time, and I wanted to make sure they didn't have anything similar already). What I found instead was yet another symptom of the rot that's got into the education system. The web page, which is in all other respects a professional-looking page, says about their product, "...put it in your backpack or briefcase and your good to go". "Your good to go"? My good to go what? There was a time when you would never, ever see such a stupid error in print, but now it's getting to be commonplace. Education in this country (and others) is going down the toilet. Schools spend too much time teaching "cool" stuff like webmastering (I'm not kidding) and not enough on basic skills like English spelling, grammar and punctuation, arithmetic and basic science. Kids are leaving school illiterate, innumerate and with crazy ideas about getting full-time jobs as professional psychics. These people will be leaders of industry, politics and much else a few years from now, and they're not going to be up to the job. I fear for the future.

Kate's little python, Sierra, shed her skin again yesterday which got me thinking: how is she growing so fast? I mean, she eats maybe half an ounce a week, and most of that comes back out in the form of snake number-twos. Most of what she gets to keep she burns as energy - she's quite an active little wiggler. And yet somehow she's still able to grow at a rate that implies she's putting on more weight than she actually eats. Maybe Einstein's conservation of mass-energy simply doesn't apply to her. But that can't be right, so in line with Einstein there is only one possible, logical, scientific explanation, and that is that she's absorbing energy and turning it into mass. I did some calculations (what Kate calls, "Cypherin'"). Let's assume she's putting on about half an ounce a week. Of that, as shown by my earlier number-two observation, let's say that half of that actually comes from the food. That leaves a quarter of an ounce, or about 7 grams, unaccounted for. According to E=mc² that's equivalent to 630 million million Joules of energy, which is quite a bit. There's only one place she can be absorbing energy from, and that's the lighting over her house. No wonder our electric bill is so high. There's just one more question niggling away at the back of my mind: where do snake number-ones go?

Office moral and cricket rules.

I see that things have moved on at work with Kumar playing cricket in the hallway. That's pretty funny actually. It's nice to know that at least one of the top guys has a good sense of humor or at least a sense of fun.

You may want to equip yourself with your own cricket bat so you can defend the goal. The goal being the filing cabinet in your cubicle. That is if cricket has goals. I am in dire need of a cricket tutorial. Deek! Help me here. lol...

Maybe they could make office cricket a new thing to boost employee moral and establish trust with upper management. After all, nothing says "I'm your friend" like giving someone a good whack on the nut with a cricket ball. Even if it does happen to be a tennis ball. Safer for in-office games I expect.

Plus getting sacked by the boss whilst he chases you from the office wielding a cricket bat millimeters from your skull wouldn't be a very pleasant way to end a working relationship.

Drivers, phones, little green windows and pseudo-cricket

For two days this week I drove into work through rain, which usually causes the dimwits who drive around here to start banging into each other and everything else on the road. For some reason I didn't see a single wreck either day and got to work in less than an hour. Yesterday there was heavy mist (it wasn't real fog. Real fog is what you get in England. Texans have never seen real fog) and yet I still got to work in about 45 minutes. Today the weather was dry, bright and clear and I-635 was clogged with idiots doing 45, changing lanes without signaling, tailgating and all the rest. It took me an hour and a quarter to get in. Go figure.

The cheap and junky headset for my cellphone fell to bits after three weeks of use when I got out of the car this morning, so it's going back to the shop. I never liked it anyway because it kept falling out and the only way I could get it to stay put was to mash it in so hard it wasn't comfortable. I much preferred the one I had on my old Nokia - it stayed where it was supposed to be and I could leave it there all day without discomfort - but of course you can't plug that into a Samsung phone because the Samsung uses a good old 2.5mm jack while the Nokia has a fancy thing with spring contacts. Haven't the people who design cellphones ever heard the word "standardization"?

UUID stands for Universally Unique IDentifier. UUIDs are 128-bit numbers generated using a technique that's guaranteed never to produce the same value twice. Basically it mashes up the computer's ethernet adapter address, the system clock time and some other junk. You can have a dozen machines churning out ten million UUIDs a second for a lifetime and you will never see the same UUID created twice. They're used as labels to identify all kinds of things, from bits of data passed between computers over the internet to the secure codes some computer games use for copy protection. When printed out they're usually represented as hexadecimal digits in groups of 8, 4, 4, 4 and 12, like this: "9f71abfe-83bc-4338-acae-6d0088d99c41". If you see a set of numbers like that printed on something, it's almost certainly a UUID. Microsoft calls them GUIDs instead, for Globally Unique IDentifiers. The reasoning is that while we can guarantee that the same number will never be generated twice here on Earth, we can't be so sure that out there in the depths of space there isn't another civilization that's generating UUIDs. Which means that someone in Microsoft thinks that there is a real chance that beyond the final frontier there is a civilization that has discovered not only fire, electricity and the wheel, but also computers fitted with standard ethernet adapters and the "uuidgen" program. I wonder if those computers run Alienix, or Little Green Windows? Does Microsoft know something the rest of us don't? I think we should be told...

I'm trying to work on some code refactoring, and suddenly something bumps into my cube wall. It's a tennis ball; two guys are playing pseudo-cricket in the aisle. After a couple more bumps the ball bounces off my filing cabinet and just misses my monitor. Who is responsible for this? The one holding the cricket bat is none other than Kumar, my manager's manager. This place gets stranger every day...

Val just told me Fry's have those 128mb pocket disk-drive things on sale for $20 right now, limit one per customer. I'm thinking about dropping into the Fry's in Irving on the way home to pick one up.

Umlauts and other grammatical oddities.

I really laughed about the umlauts over the e and a in the blog title. Too funny. Maybe you should have named it, "Smell the Blog". In any case, welcome to the neighborhood. Watch out for delinquent blogs though they run rampant. You might end up with a virtual rolling of your blog.

Happy Blogging!

Kate

Reconstruction

Yes, the title has changed, and so has the template. More changes are on the way and the title will probably change again.

New travel links

The way things were, if you wanted to find a cheap flight you'd check Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia and so on until you found a price you liked. That would take time and there was always the chance that you'd forget one of the lesser-known sites like Sidestep or Destina.

Now there's a new wave in online travel services: Meta-search-engines that do all that searching for you. These are new but they look good, and from what I've heard they're likely to find the best deal you would have found the hard way but much, much quicker.

The two I've heard of so far are Mobissimo and Travelgrove. I'll post more as I hear of them.

Bad floppies, spam and scram

Well the way things are panning out I'm not getting much time to write blogs - Kate and I were talking about this just this morning - so I think the solution is rather than writing full-length articles I'll just add short notes to a text file as and when I get a couple of minutes, then post a batch at a time. With that in mind...

Looks like the floppy drive on my office workstation has bad head alignment - it'll read and write floppies but they won't read properly on another machine. Val just tried one of my disks in his machine and it's shot. He showed me a little pocket-keyring-thingy that you plug into a USB port and it works like a 128Mb removable disk. He says he got it on sale for about ten bucks. I've seen them before and I thought they were just a gimmick, but now I'm converted - in the words of Confucius, "I gotta get me one of these".

Earthlink have announced that they'll be using DomainKeys as an anti-spam measure, which I think is great news. The alternatives - SPF and SenderID - are too weak and won't work if a mail gets relayed through an intermediate SMTP server, and that means that SPF and SenderID will probably have to change to fix the problems. The way I see it the more they have to tweak it to get it to work reliably, the more chances there are for the spammers to find ways round it. Call me cynical but here's a prediction: Microsoft (who are pushing SenderID) will start providing add-ons to strengten SenderID, and these will be Windoze-only so that they can then say that the Linux/open-source alternatives don't work as well. If I'm right it'll be all the more reason for the industry to go the DomainKeys direction. Also I read that a company in Atlanta checked a sample of 2 million mails and found out that (1) only 5% of senders had installed SPF records on their DNS servers (although that's likely to increase rapidly) and (2) of those 5%, only one out of four were "legitimate" mailers - the rest were spammers. So until the ISPs start building reputation databases to weed out the spamming domains, this means that if you get a mail from someone who has a legit SPF record, there's a 75% chance it's spam.

More on the spam front - I just saw a CNN headline where Bill Gates claims he's the most spammed person on Earth, at 4 million emails a day. Yeah, Bill, you just have to be better than everyone else... :)

NASA tested their Scramjet X-43A yesterday and broke the speed record - 6,600 MPH, or almost mach 10. To put it another way, Dallas to London in less than an hour. Freeow!

First things first

This is a kind of statement of intent... all I'm using this blog for is to make comment on things that interest me, bug me or have some kind of impact on what I do at home and work. The first real post will be coming along shortly...