Matt B's Blog

How To Get A Google Voice Phone Number

2012-01-07T20:21:00.000-05:00

1. Go to your Google Account settings

2. Under the heading "Email addresses and usernames", and next to your email address, click the "Edit" link

3. Set the Country to "United States" and click "Save"

4. Select "Language" and choose "English (United States)"

5. Go to the web page "google.com/voice":

6. Open Voice Settings

7. Click on "Get a Voice number"

8. Click "I want a new number"

9. Search for a number that you like

10. Choose a PIN and accept the terms

11. Enter a US number to associate with the account (this is mandatory to activate the Google Voice number, but can be removed once it is active, so you can use a friend's number if you don't have your own number in the USA).

12. Click "Call me now", answer the call and when prompted, enter the code

Once you've entered the code your new Google Voice number should be active.

It is also recommended to install the voice and video component for your web browser, so you can make and receive calls directly from within Gmail. For Chrome, this component is called "Google Talk Plugin", and can be installed from within Gmail, using the Google Talk widgets.

What a beautiful pig

2010-11-07T17:39:00.003-05:00

Call Me with Google Voice

2010-09-15T11:57:00.003-04:00

Below is my Google Voice "Call Me" Gadget. Enter your name and the number that you want to call me with. Google Voice will then call your number and put you in a call with me.

1000 Things I Hate About Windows

2010-09-03T13:16:00.001-04:00

1. I hate the fact that every time I want to watch a video that I recorded with my JVC camcorder in the last 10 years, I have to dig up the old JVC Everio companion CD in order to install the required codec to watch it in Windows. In Ubuntu, all videos created by the two different versions of JVC Everio Camcorder that I have owned during the past 10 years play without the need to rummage through a box of old CDs in order to find one fricking codec.

2. I hate the fact that I have to rummage through a box of old CDs in order to find the right driver for my HP Photosmart 3-in-1 printer/scanner/copier. This printer is only 3 years old, and I am using Windows Vista. Ubuntu works with this printer as soon as I connect it, without prompting for any driver downloads. In Vista, I have to rummage for the CD or search the HP website for a compatible driver (of course nothing ever finds the right driver automatically).

3. I hate the fact that I have to start a whole new console window in order to do anything with Administrator rights, and in order to so, I have to type in the full name and password of the administrator's account. I cannot just simply use the "sudo" command, which temporarily grants root permissions, using the current user's password (no need to remember two different passwords), and also is smart enough to remember this for a period of time so I don't have to enter it on every single command. Indeed the Windows "runas" command tries to do what sudo does, but it still requires a lengthy list of command line parameters, making it extremely cumbersome, unintelligent and inflexible compared to sudo. All you need to run sudo is to put the word "sudo" in front of any command, and to remember your *own* password.

4. I hate the fact that Vista corrupted my recently bought new 2GB SD memory card, and put it in a state where it cannot be reformated, ie; unusable! I hate even more the fact that this happened after I tested it for 2 weeks and thought it would be safe to get rid of the receipt and packaging, but now Windows has destroyed it just after the end of Best Buy's 30 day no-questions-asked return policy. A recent Windows update apparently fixed this issue, but it was too late for me, and probably millions of other innocent victims around the world. Will there be an en masse compensation to all these people, now that M$ have admitted to causing all this damage?

5. I hate the fact that I have to pay for this crap, or at least my employer has to because they are the ones forcing me to use it.

Ok that's only 5, but I have more important things to do, and Windows certainly doesn't help me to get them done quickly... Feel free to add liberally to this list.

Wow look, M$ invented this new thing called symbolic links!

2010-08-23T12:54:00.012-04:00

You know, I get tired of seeing how the world thinks they need to make Bill Gates richer and richer so that they can experience the latest technological revolutions. If you want to see amazing stuff, just try a freely available operating system that's been doing high performance multitasking, windowing, INTER-networking and secure remote access since 20 years before the first anaemic little Windows version 3.0 bellyflopped onto the market. Yes, that's right, it took M$ three versions before anyone paid attention to them, and now 20 years later, not much has improved except for the transparency of the windows, and the security model which is slowly catching up with where Unix was 20 years ago, thanks mainly to pressure from frustrated Unix savvy people who are forced by their employers to allow Windows to embarrass them and keep wasting all their time, by frequent rebooting, waiting for stupid little animations, not to mention losing days and weeks from reinstalling applications and removing viruses that got in through gaping big obvious security holes. Oh, and those stupid "discovering" features. Why do you keep wasting my CPU cycles to discover things? I never told you to discover anything! I'm happy with what I have found by myself for now, you can go play later when I don't need my computer!!!

Read this email thread below for a laugh..., and note that the messages are in reverse order (like most email systems these days), so it might make more sense to start reading at the bottom.

Note also how this developer has all his/her source codes working copies on his/her operating system partition, great organization (NOT) ! Then again, (s)he has probably never set up a computer with more than one partition before.

I also like the way this programmer thinks that Shortcuts are a type of link ("Dragging the directory and holding ctrl-shift"), although he/she does recognize that they are not the same as actual symbolic links or junctions. Windows shortcuts are not, never have been, and never will be, a file-system feature in anyway whatsoever. They were an attempt by Microsoft to imitate Unix Symlinks when they brought out the abysmal Windows 95, but they require intelligence at the application level in order to work properly (so M$ can blame other software vendors for not following THEIR standards). Luckily, the standard file open dialog handles them reasonably well, but if you give an application the path of a shortcut, it will try to open the actual shortcut, not the target that it refers to.

From: <Me>

Sent: Monday, August 23, 2010 11:55 AM

To: <A Unix savvy friend of mine who's not on the ProductX development team>

Subject: RE: Using a link for Thirdparty

Thought you might enjoy this for a bit of a laugh. I was going to include the following two paragraphs as well, but thought that might be a bit much for a Monday :P Sorry to bother you with <ProductX> related stuff again :)

--------------------

MS also did not invent virtual memory, disk compression or window snapping. I’m glad they finally do have Window snapping although it doesn’t work properly on multi-monitors and virtual machines, so I’m guessing it only works properly on hardware which pays kickbacks to MS (just kidding, but who knows), and I’m rolling my eyes that this is considered an add-on feature because it’s so “revolutionary”, although of course it still doesn’t work half as well as on Gnome.

I’ve been using Linux quite a bit recently as you may have guessed, and I have to say it’s the first time in my life that I’ve seen the CPU actually hit absolute 0% ... right now I’m in Windows and my CPU is bouncing between 4% and 40% with absolutely nothing happening on the screen. Why? Security by self-denial of service? And I have never seen Windows drop below 3% CPU in my life, nor have I seen and heard the hard disk light and disk head inactive for more than about a second. On Ubuntu, sometimes it’s so quiet that if you blank the screen and turn off all the other noisy Windows machines in the room, you would think it’s turned off ... But as soon as you move the mouse, everything pops back to life, ready in an instant to submit to your will, without needing to reload gigabytes of worthless junk from the paging file.

---------------

From: <Me>

Sent: Monday, August 23, 2010 11:49 AM

To: <All Members of the ProductX development team>

Subject: RE: Using a link for Thirdparty

I’ve been doing this ever since I figured out that <ProductX> required two copies of the same thing on the same physical disk, so I ended up finding the “Junction” utility from SysInternals, and I showed <Programmer2 of ProductX team> how to use this utility back in February. I realized about 3 months ago that Windows now has the “mklink” command built in, so I don’t need to download Junction anymore. Symbolic links are something I learned from Unix about 20 years ago, although Unix itself has probably had this feature for almost 40 years, just in case anybody thought MS invented them :-)

Hard links are even more fun, they make the same file appear in multiple places, and all of those “places” look exactly like an actual file, not like a link, and there is no quick and easy way to tell from where else a particular file is being linked. If you delete the file from one location while others remain, the file seems to get deleted, but disk usage doesn’t change, just like a reference counting pointer :-)

From: <Programmer1 of ProductX team>

Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 6:59 AM

To: <All Members of the ProductX development team, including me>

Subject: Using a link for Thirdparty

To compile <ProductX> we need ThirdPartyBinaries and ThirdPartyBinariesX64, ThirdPartyBinariesX86.

ThirdPartyBinariesX64 and ThirdPartyBinariesX86 are provided via sourcecontrol, ThirdPartyBinary is not and must be generated by hand (something I always forget).

If you are using 64 bit then it is a copy of the X64 directory, for these 32 bit machines if we still have them then it is a copy of the X86 directory.

Now instead of a copy we can use a link.

There are 3 ways you can set up a link.

- Dragging the directory and holding ctrl-shift. This creates a file which links to the new directory. Whilst we can use this in explorer to browse, it is no good for the compiler.

- Using a dos window (run as admin!) use mklink as follows:

C:\Development\Net4>mklink /d ThirdPartyBinaries ThirdPartyBinariesX64

symbolic link created for ThirdPartyBinaries <<===>> ThirdPartyBinariesX64

C:\Development\Net4>dir

Volume in drive C has no label.

Volume Serial Number is XXXX-9999

Directory of C:\Development\Net4

19/08/2010 11:44 <DIR> .

19/08/2010 11:44 <DIR> ..

19/08/2010 11:41 779 .hgignore

19/08/2010 11:30 <DIR> <ProductX>

19/08/2010 11:41 <DIR> Thirdparty

19/08/2010 11:44 <SYMLINKD> ThirdPartyBinaries [ThirdPartyBinariesX64]

19/08/2010 11:30 <DIR> ThirdPartyBinariesX64

19/08/2010 11:41 <DIR> ThirdPartyBinariesX86

1 File(s) 779 bytes

7 Dir(s) 285,707,583,488 bytes free

Notice how the directory knows that it is a symbolic link. And this works.

- You can also use the /j option in mklink which creates a junction, but this is not necessary...

HTH

From: <Team Leader of ProductX team>

Sent: 19 August 2010 10:30

To: <Programmer1 of ProductX team>

Subject: Command is mklink.exe

Can you work out what to do and then email the <ProductX> developers

What Dedication!!

2010-05-13T10:43:00.004-04:00

Matthew Breithaupt: Sheesh, all the sacrifices i make for my company... for example, this morning, when I arrived in the car park, Metallica's One was playing on the radio, and rather than sit through the entireity of this 9 minute masterpiece, i took my keys out of the ignition and went upstairs
Matthew Breithaupt: Naaah... i'm just kidding, I wouldn't do such a thing to Metallica!

My Feature Request for Adobe Reader

2010-04-27T18:07:00.003-04:00

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

*******Enhancement / FMR*********
Brief title for your desired feature:

Title: User Defined Bookmarks.

How would you like the feature to work?
Very simple idea: I would like to be able to bookmark locations in a PDF that you are reading. This should be completely separate functionality from the bookmarks that define the PDF's structure, and should not require modifying the PDF, but of course this would be an implementation detail.

Why is this feature important to you?
If the PDF has 100s or 1000s of pages, you can jump to the last place you were reading, or an important piece of information that you need to refer to frequently. I often refer to very large specification documents, and need to refer to to the same few sections over and over, day after day, and always have to search for the section number or title, instead of being able to bookmark the location and jump to the bookmark. I also use eBooks for my studies, and if I spend a semester reading through the book, I would like to be able to bookmark how far I have read. This is something that is so simple to do with real paper books, and I am baffled as to why this concept has not yet made it into the cyberworld.

If this is a new idea and you decide, I hope you will credit the idea to my name, Matthias Breithaupt. Thanks :-)

This has been posted on my blog as proof that I had this idea at this time, and if nobody else has thought of this I claim the Copyright.

Footnote added after submitting request: it gets even worse when the document is scanned from paper and has not been converted to searchable text. How do you find section 9.3.5 in a document which has 1000 pages and each page is just an image of the text, and not actual text that you can search?

Snowball Fight!!

2009-12-18T18:57:00.001-05:00

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Our faces on the Stryper website :-)

2009-12-07T18:37:00.006-05:00

Go to http://www.stryper.com/Fan%20Zone/Sightings/sightings.htm, scroll down to the lower half, click button [4] where it says "Thumbnail Panels". We're famous! Woohoo! :-P

Jordan Chandler admits he lied about Michael Jackson

2009-06-29T18:37:00.009-04:00

Now that Michael Jackson is dead, Jordan Chandler is claiming that he basically cooked up the story to defame MJ and for the money. http://www.techbanyan.com/4554/jordan-chandler-admits-lied-about-michael-jackson/.

"Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believed in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." Matthew 18:6

...Michael was one of these little ones, IMHO...

Michael gave so much of himself to make the world a better place, to make children happy, to keep adults honest, and he had every right to at least try and make up for his own lost childhood. In return he ran into some adults which corrupted their own children for their own selfish aims. Shame it is so difficult to keep your innocence in this world, it will always find a way to drag you down.

Court hears NASA hacker 'at risk of psychosis'

2009-06-10T11:21:00.012-04:00

Original article on ZDNet:

http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-310515.html

My view on this:

Of course NASA or the US army will never have to *prove* that it cost them that much money. They will probably never be asked to produce a report of work orders or insurance claims constituting the *actual* damage caused. They just need to say it, and thereby discredit someone with too much curiosity who happened to stumble accross a security hole that they didn't patch.

Let's think for a moment what this apparent $700k of damage might consist of. Some possibilities are:

1) man hours to reinstate the system critical files: $700k equates to 30 man-years of labor - somehow I don't think so.

2) physical damage to equipment - unless he wrote code to fire missiles or successfully burned out 1000s of video cards, I don't think so.

3) loss of data? If it cost that much, an organization like NASA should be sophisticated enough to use a non-volatile backup medium, and it would NOT cost $700k to restore from backup. Imagine if they lost all the deep space pictures that hubble has taken over the last 15 years, because they didn't back them up. I don't think so.

4) loss of software licences costing $700k? I'm sure that any software vendor dealing with NASA would have a relationship that allows them to reinstate licenses at little or no cost in such a situation.

Maybe they just thought that the public is getting tired of US government tarring everything with the same terrorism brush (the "cry wolf" effect), so they had to trump up their claims because other than that, the hacker was really just 'looking around'.

Finally, I would like to see a more precise definition of "hacking" in a legal context. Does it mean "attempting to gain unauthorized access", or "actually gaining unauthorized access", or "using unauthorized access to aquire unauthorized information and/or cause denial of services and/or data loss" ? It's like the terms of service on iTunes, which states you are allowed to "burn" your songs up to 7 times. Does copying it to my external hard drive or a USB memory stick constitute "burning"? Couldn't they say "make backups onto specific types of media which allow playback on musical devices"? What if I use a Re-Writable CD, erase it and burn it 7 times? What if I lose count? How can they ever hope to prove anything to enforce such a rule? Hey, Apple, you know that track I paid 99c for the other day? I just made 8 copies of it on my USB memory stick! Send 'round the feds! Haha!

Colloquialisms and jargon like "burning" and "hacking" in my opinion have no place in legal agreements or the court room.

Programmers vs. The Matrix

2009-05-29T17:46:00.015-04:00

Matthias, Wolfgang and Stefan planning their infiltration of Nick's secret source code repository

Your smelly secret code is like a virus infecting the entire code base. I can taste its stink as it fogs up my ray bans.

Nick, you vill gif us ze codez to ze build server!!

Disclaimer: this comical blog entry bears no resemblance to actual people or events (except for some possible similarity in hairstyles and fashion sense).

A Simple effective and 100% free anti-virus strategy

2009-03-19T11:51:00.006-04:00

What you're about to read might seem quite radical to you if you haven't thought about it before. Even if you have thought about it before, you may have concluded, "Oh it's all too hard" and gone back to doing things the way everybody else does, because of course, if everybody does it, it must be the best way. Or you may be an avid Linux fan and think "ho hum big deal that's soooo obvious".

Anyway, there is a very simple, effective and 100% free way to radically improve your Microsoft Windows computer's resistance to viruses/trojans/rootkits/malware/adware/spyware, etc. I am not saying that you don't need any antivirus software, but as there are deficiencies in antivirus software and lots of other vulnerabilities in many common Windows applications (yes, there are vulnerabilities in Unix/Linux too, but this article is aimed mainly at Windows users), this strategy will make your computer several orders of magnitude more resistant to viruses, making you less reliant on constantly having the latest virus database downloaded from your AV vendor. It does however mean that some tasks become a little bit more difficult, but that's the whole point... viruses try to modify your system in undesirable ways, so if we make it more difficult for them to modify your system, then naturally it's going to be slightly more difficult for the user to modify the system as well. But, when you consider that once you have your system set up the way you like it, and want it to stay that way, doesn't it make sense to prevent yourself from making further changes accidentally, with the only trade off being that it takes a little bit more effort to install new software, or make the occasional change to your system settings?

What I am talking about is a strategy that has been used in the Unix world long before DOS and Windows even existed, and long before the Internet was a commonly used medium, and will almost certainly continue to proliferate for all eternity in the Unix/Linux world. All it takes is *not* to give your normal user account adminstrator privileges, by *not* going to your local users and groups and adding your domain account to the local Adminstrators group. Most people will at some point add their regular user account to the Adminstrators group because they try to install some application which tells them that they need Administrative rights, and they don't want to log off and on every time they install something new. Instead, we can give our regular account the minimum level of privilege that it needs in order to run the software that you need to run from day to day, and invoke higher privileges only when necessary, without having to close your current session.

To do this, start by making sure you know the password of the local "Administrator" account of your machine eg; ARI-MBB-WS\Administrator, if your machine is called ARI-MBB-WS, which it better not be because that's my machine's name! :-P To test this, log out and try logging in as local Administrator (you have to change the "domain" field of the login box to show your machine's name). It is possible that the password is blank, which is another major security problem, so if you can login with a blank password, change this to something non-blank immediately. Once you have logged in as local administrator, go to Control Panel / User Accounts, and if your domain account appears there, change it to "Restricted User". I would strongly reccommend this over "Power User" or even "User". Why? You may say that you trust yourself as a power user, but ask yourself this: do you trust every piece of software that you use or may use in the future with the same power that you trust yourself with? What about software that installs itself without your knowledge... do you trust *it* as mush as yourself? In order to restrict the software that you (knowingly or not) allow to run on your computer, you must unfortunately restrict yourself. That is something that Unix users have understood for decades and learned to live with, and that's part of the reason that there's no such thing as a Unix or Linux virus.

The next thing you may complain is that you have to log off your regular account and log back on as administrator in order to make any system changes or install any software. Not true at all. You just need to use "Run As..." to perform administrative tasks, which requires entering the administrator's password, but does not require you to log off an back on and back off and back on. Being required to enter a password makes sure that a virus cannot make changes to your system, because any virus that runs while you are logged on as a Restricted User will be, as expected, restricted from modifying your system files and settings.

In some cases, the "Run As..." option is available directly by right clicking on the icon or start menu item for the thing that you want to run administratively. In many cases it's not, and this is an annoyance with Windows that I don't fully understand, which may or may not be related to the fact that Microsoft make money from AntiVirus software (ooh... conspiracy... well... who knows?). Anyway, you can run ANY task as an administrator, and considering the benefits, and how often you need to do so, it is well worth the extra effort. In order to run ANY task as administrator, look at the properties of the shortcut that starts it to find out where it actually resides on your disk(s). Then click on Start / All Programs / Accessories, and when you see "Command Prompt", don't just go clicking on it willy nilly, hold your horses! Right click on the menu item "Command Prompt" and choose "Run As...", then choose the MY-MACHINE\Administrator account and enter its password. Then go to the directory where the target application lives, by typing (for example) "cd /d D:\Installs\Subversion\TortoiseSVN". Then run the target application, which may be an MSI file, by typing "start TortoiseSVN-1.5.9.15518-win32-svn-1.5.6.msi". To save typing, you can always type the first few letters of the target application and press the "Tab" key until you see the correct name, or copy the name from Windows Explorer. Of course you still have to trust the source from whence you obtained said target application, and for this purpose some software providers provide checksums to allow you to verify the integrity of their applications. This is a different topic, but there is plenty of information on the Internet on how to verify checksums, which may come in the form of MD5 or GPG. Also, if you got your software from rapidshare or bittorrent or some website starting with an IP address or containing "....(ru|pl|cz):8000/dodgy-stuff/warez" then don't blame me if a white rabbit suddenly comes knocking on your door.

I may at some point work out how to start an adminstrative command prompt in any directory, or force windows to always show the "Run As..." option, in which event I may or may not be bothered to update this document.

If you don't want to try this straight away, I will be your guinea pig starting from the time of this writing and go where no Windows machine has gone before (okay, that might be a bit of a high claim). If you want to let sleeping dogs lie for a while and first see how things are going on my computer, I will more than happy to share my story with you.

As a final word, if any software does not work without adminstrator privileges on an ongoing basis, it's a badly designed piece of rubbish and you should either 1) ask to have this abominable deficiency fixed or your money back, or 2) just stop using it if you can get by without it and/or didn't pay too much for it.

Happy Windowing!

Session timeout? WTF?

2009-03-17T16:44:00.005-04:00

Don't you hate it when sessions time out on your own private PC, especially when you're doing several things in parallel, like budgeting in Excel while doing transfers through online banking, or working on a presentation that you wanted to attach to a message that you started writing in an Outlook Web session and suddenly realised that the attachment wasn't finished, so while you work on finishing the presentation, the web session times out and you don't realise it until you actually hit "Send" and suddenly need to rewrite the message from scratch?

Here is how I think session time out messages should read:

Sorry, your session has timed out. We may pretend that this is for your safety, but given that all web browsers in common use can fill out your username and password automatically, and we haven't bothered to try and use a very simple and well known solution to prevent this even greater security hole, you will soon realize that we are actually more concerned with not storing a measly 100 bytes or so of information on our massively powerful cluster of web servers for more than 30 minutes, just so that you can leave a window open in the background of your pesky little laptop and do several other things in parallel without having to reenter your password several times a day on your machine which you sit at all day and nobody else can touch without your knowledge because 1) you are always chained to your desk and/or 2) you always lock your screen whenever you walk away from your desk.

Anyway.... ahem :-P Hooray to Google for keeping login cookies active indefinitely!

From a pile of gravel to actual Google Maps vector data

2009-01-30T12:42:00.017-05:00

I just find it amazing that there exists a piece of data on Google's servers in the form of a vector tracing a piece of road which for 10 years I was the only person on this entire planet to walk along every day as I went to school from the ages of 9 (4th grade primary school) through to 18 (year 12 senior high). I am referring to the dirt driveway leading from Glen Ora Road to our house on the 15 acre plot of land where we lived those years. I saw this piece of road constructed from a 200 metre long, 1 metre high pile of yellow limestone rocks and reduced down to a driveable and walkable roadway leading from the public road to our house. During those 10 years, the road was driven on every day only by my father, and several times a week by my mother, and walked on by myself everyday as I went down to the bus stop on the Pacific Highway to go to school. This piece of road doesn't even have a name, and it was protected from casual wandering members of the public by 4 pieces of fencing wire and a rusty metal truss which I had to stick into a hole in the hard clay ground and push against the 15" wooden fence post with all my might so that I could lower the fencing wire loop over it to close the "gate" every morning and afternoon.

Many of those days included me writing software on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer with 64Kilobytes of memory and an audio cassette as the only means of saving my projects. This often failed, leaving me to write down all my code on paper by hand because I had no real need for a printer, and reenter the code another day in the hope of being able to save it to cassette. Aaaaanyway....
Now this insignificant piece of dirt road exists persisted as a polyline within the cluster of Linux boxes which host the Google Maps application! Absolutely... mind blowingly... amazing!!!

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&om=1&t=h&source=embed&msa=0&ll=-32.115857,152.37564&spn=0.005025,0.009656&z=17

Merry Christmas my Beautiful Queen

2008-12-24T19:28:00.002-05:00

My beautiful queen, I want to dedicate this song to you because it makes me think of you, because you are so beautiful that I just can't keep myself away....

Merry Christmas, thank you for being my wonderful, beautiful and sweet wife, I adore you forever and ever!!
From Your Adoring Prince

Quote of the Day

2007-11-05T11:10:00.000-05:00

I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Terminator and Jesus

2007-10-18T18:07:00.001-04:00

Terminator & Jesus - More bloopers are a click away

2007-10-16T11:47:00.000-04:00

Just testing image uploading...

If you like Dilbert, go to http://www.dilbert.com

If you like Dilbert AND you like Unix, type
wget --mirror -np http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ about once a week, as I do ;-)

2006-05-18T12:15:00.000-04:00

Macs are for those who don't want to know why their computer works.

Linux is for those who want to know why their computer works.

DOS is for those who want to know why their computer doesn't work.

Windows is for those who don't want to know why their computer doesn't work.

Pixelate Transition in IE

2006-05-17T17:01:00.000-04:00

Cool man, try this for a transition effect...

<META http-equiv=Page-Enter content=progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Pixelate(Duration=2)>
<META http-equiv=Page-Exit content=progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Pixelate(Duration=2)>

Unfortunately these tags are not allowed on blogspot, and I'm afraid I haven't got time to start playing now, so you'll have to add it to your own page, sorry. Just edit up an HTML page and paste in the above metatags, open in a browser and voila... pixelations!!! I've only tested this in IE, and I would guess it probably only works in IE since it's using a Microsoft specific COM (?) component.

2006-05-12T12:21:00.000-04:00

There are 10 kind of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.

2006-05-10T06:48:00.000-04:00

What on earth do people mean by "humor me" ? I found this somewhat enlightening...

Definition of indulge - Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

indulgeOne entry found for indulge.
Main Entry: in·dulge Pronunciation: in-'d&ljFunction: verbInflected Form(s): in·dulged; in·dulg·ingEtymology: Latin indulgEre to be complaisanttransitive senses1 a : to give free rein to b : to take unrestrained pleasure in : GRATIFY2 a : to yield to the desire of : HUMOR b : to treat with excessive leniency, generosity, or considerationintransitive senses : to indulge oneself- in·dulg·er nounsynonyms INDULGE, PAMPER, HUMOR, SPOIL, BABY, MOLLYCODDLE mean to show undue favor to a person's desires and feelings. INDULGE implies excessive compliance and weakness in gratifying another's or one's own desires . PAMPER implies inordinate gratification of desire for luxury and comfort with consequent enervating effect . HUMOR stresses a yielding to a person's moods or whims . SPOIL stresses the injurious effects on character by indulging or pampering . BABY suggests excessive care, attention, or solicitude . MOLLYCODDLE suggests an excessive degree of care and attention to another's health or welfare .

2006-02-28T07:19:00.000-05:00

Handy Tip for filesystem performance:
To disable 8.3 file creation, you set the NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation registry value to 1 (one) and reboot; for further details, search for this registry value on www.support.microsoft.com.

2005-07-17T19:06:00.000-04:00

MathWorld News: RSA-200 Factored

The Burrows-Wheeler Transform: Theory and Practices

2005-06-25T11:40:00.000-04:00

The Burrows-Wheeler Transform: Theory and Practices: "In this paper we describe the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) a completely new approach to data compression which is the basis of some of the best compressors available today."

Modern Information Retrieval - Porter's Algorithm

2005-06-25T11:35:00.000-04:00

Modern Information Retrieval - Porter's Algorithm: "The rules in the Porter algorithm are separated into five distinct phases numbered from 1 to 5. They are applied to the words in the text starting from phase 1 and moving on to phase 5. Further, they are applied sequentially one after the other as commands in a program. Thus, in the immediately following, we specify the Porter algorithm in a pseudo programming language whose commands take the form of rules for suffix substitution (as above). This pseudo language adopts the following (semi-formal) conventions: "