"irony cafe" oh that's brilliant!

http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=14

New keyboard and NOT a rant.

I bought a new keyboard a while ago. A few things worth noting are:

- it is split keyboard. in the past some split keyboards have, well, sucked. The most common problems have been the mangled 'delete/insert/home/end/pg up/down' cluster and putting the ctrl keys in hard to reach places.

- it is a Microsoft keyboard. yes, that's right. I bought something from Microsoft. Now will you believe me that I don't hate microsoft, I don't think it is an "evil" company, and I don't think linux is perfect. I mean it when I say I think MS Windows has a crappy user interface and as someone once pointed out I mean it has a crappy user interface for me.

Anyway I bought a "Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000". I don't know what the 4000 means. Also none of the fancy keys work under linux so I don't know how useful they are. (There is a kernel patch I haven't bothered with.)

I've been using it for a couple weeks and it is on my recommended hardware list.

List of country's net worths

#1 is Japan worth $ 165 600 000 000
#150 is the USA worth $ -829 100 000 000

List of country's net worths:
https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2187rank.html

In other news Canada only has 22 Billionaires:
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0327/112a.html

A vision of a future in which connectivity is literally in the air around us

Award-winning science fiction author Vernor Vinge, speaking at the Austin Game Conference, gave his vision of a possible future.
Keynote - Vernor Vinge On The 'Inside Out' Cyberworld

I've been wondering about this for a long time

Broadening Definition Of Gambling May Include Virtual Worlds

Alcohol Consumption Report

Americans consume a bit more alcohol per capita (age 15 and above) than Canadians.

-- Liters consumed per capita for 2003 --
Canada: 7.9
Ireland: 13.5
Luxembourg: 15.5
Mexico: 4.6
Norway: 6.0
Turkey: 1.5
UK: 11.2
USA: 8.4

http://www.finfacts.ie/Private/bestprice/alcoholdrinkconsumptionpriceseurope.htm

Joel mentions "Peopleware" again.

"Peopleware" is one of my favorite books of all time.  I can't stress how important it is to read this book.  Anyway the following comes from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDevelopers.html


I went to a Computer Science conference at Yale. One of the speakers, a Silicon Valley veteran who had founded or led quite an honor roll of venture-capital funded startups, held up the book Peopleware.

"You have to read this book," he said. "This is the bible of how to run a software company. This is the most important book out there for how to run software companies."

...

After the speech I went up to the speaker. "I agree with you about Peopleware," I said. "Tell me: did you have private offices for your developers at all your startups?"

"Of course not," he said. "The VCs would never go for that."

I don't really care about web-logs.

I don't really care about web-logs. ie I don't hate them.

I read Cringely's Essays. I read Schneier's web-log posts. I also read
Paul Graham's Essays and Joel Spolsky's web-log-like posts. I read this
content because it is worth reading. I don't care about the blog/no-blog
difference in these cases.

Aggregating a bunch of posts from different sources into one common
interface seems like a reasonable thing to do. RSS seems to make sense.
Just like email with folders and filter rules seems to make sense.

I sometimes read web-logs and I think RSS is a good idea so why don't I like
to use web-logs myself? For the same reason I don't use an Apple Mac.
The tool is slow, confusing, difficult to configure, and difficult to use.

Blogger / Blogspot has a poor user interface. It's hard to find the page
I am looking for. There are links missing. It's slow to load and click
through to get to the page I am looking for. ie I don't have the patience
to use blogger.

Sweden Follows Norway, Blacklists Wal-Mart Stock Over Ethics

"Sweden follows Norway in blacklisting Wal-Mart stock from the portfolio
of a national pension fund, citing persistent human rights violations."

http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/3829/43/

Cool Graphics

http://www.complexification.net/gallery/
http://www.levitated.net/

This guy does cool stuff with flash and java animations. It reminds me of elektroplankton for the DS. And it reminds me of one of the presenters at Graphite NZ 2006, who presented interactive art.

Anyways, I found the guy by browsing around this site, http://www.iospace.com/ and this site http://www.etsy.com/ If you browse either of these, you'll find a whole bunch of neat flash tools for browsing. you can tell he's touched them both.

Picasa Web Albums

Look out flickr, here comes Picasa Web Albums. It's so new they are calling it a "test" as opposed to "labs" or "beta" like all the other Google offerings.

I submitted my gmail address for a first-come-first-serve invitation and I was accepted almost immediately. The invite request page errored out while I was logged in to gmail. I logged out, entered my email address, and now it says "Photos" in my Google services list.

I can't wait to have a mid life crisis

Tesla Motors

LEGO Star Wars

This is what you get when you teach your nephew to email. LEGO.com Star Wars Anakin Animation

algorithms

I saw this on reddit. Mostly I'm interested because the complexity theory book i have was written by Papadimitriou -- also I like to say his name!

Algorithms

Openssl issues.

I'm sure some of you have seen this already, but just in case.

CAN-2006-4339

Blue?

"Studies show weightlifters are able to handle heavier weights in blue gyms." from http://www.infoplease.com/spot/colors1.html

In the book "The E-Myth Revisited" Gerber claims people in blue suits sell more than people in brown suits. It seemed to work for IBM for a couple decades. :)

sudo go make me a sandwich

If only this worked.

They didn't call him "The Stingray Hunter"

Steve Irwin died after being stung through the heart by a stingray.

All non perl regex are belong to suck

(09:47:43) chad: Oh and emacs regexes suck.
(09:48:01) lakin: by suck, you mean they're different?
(09:48:07) chad: Yes, and they suck.
(09:48:08) chad: ;)
(09:48:14) lakin: define suck?
(09:48:24) chad: They backslashing is all wonky.
(09:48:26) lakin: cause I'm pretty sure they're computationally equivalent.
(09:48:58) chad: I googled for "emacs regular expressions suck" (no quotes) and found 155 000 hits.
(09:49:39) lakin: google for "regular expressions suck" and you get 1.6 million hits.
(09:49:58) lakin: so emacs regexes suck less than other regexes, ie they represent a lesser portion of the regex suckage that is out there.
(09:50:03) chad: that's just all the loser programmers out there. ;)
(09:50:08) chad: :)
(09:51:15) lakin: http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=perl+regular+expressions+suck&word2=emacs+regular+expressions+suck
(09:51:43) chad: shit!
(09:51:47) chad: that's amazing.
(09:51:53) chad: I don't believe it.
(09:52:03) chad: Perl is the only language where regexes make sense.
(09:52:07) chad: Oh.
(09:52:09) chad: I get it.
(09:52:26) chad: perl regexes make sense to me and the others are all screwed up.
(09:52:42) chad: that means anyone who uses one of those "lesser" languages doesn't get perl regexes.

Mad scientist bookstore

Lindsay's Technical Books http://www.lindsaybks.com/ claims to sell the "Highest quality books, new and old, for experimenters, inventors, tinkerers, mad scientists, and a very few normal people."

I saw "mad scientists" and requested a catalog right away. The site lists books on making a still (for alcohol to use as fuel), vacuum tube radios, a motorized bicycle, a carbon arc torch, tons of stuff on metal working.