So this weekend is Trivia weekend, which means that my clock gets inverted for a couple days at least, as I tend to be on the “night team”. Right now it’s the beginning of hour 40, of which I’ve been around for about half. We just found out we’re ahead of the team on the other side of the city. Hooray!
Holy Hell. Audio Speed Round.
Okay, something bugs me, and it’s somewhat irrational, and somewhat rational. I totally hate really long URLs needed to “verify” that the sign-up is valid. There are more than one type of these, sometimes they are required to continue into the site, sometime just for extra features, but they are more often that not, very long. Now, I don’t like long URLs in general in emails, because there are manyservices which allow you to shorten them for public use. Recently I signed up for 30 boxes and they sent me this monstrosity:
http://30boxes.com/signup.php?action=finishSignup&d=aSDFJKLa43da
safjdAL5RLKj4afjrafa45J5kljtyTGJrALKJgFKLsaj5klJ4jkljakljdkalflk
fASJKjdfa4r23890fdfjskl342390fakjlei309dk390ujkal39032kd03j9djd9
Okay, so lets look at this rationally for a bit. How many unique strings can they have from that huge behemoth of an identifier. There are 145 characters. They are using the entire uppercase (26), lowercase (26) and numbers (10), so there are a total of 62 unique symbols for each spot. That gives us a total of 62145 different strings. That’s 7884877985816054063923340812443632867980747435265064547440365297877812230999983634922053904324829205441837830921209410767866820350392591496465345718879667228701033177516338179747430870298820209307821377548903252404736464300144342990107276174332102635697681203 different combinations. In scientific notation, thats 7.8 × 10259. Just for comparison, the entire number of atoms in the universe is high-balled at 6 × 1079 (on this page). That’s more than a googol of identifiers for EACH ATOM, EVERYWHERE. Isn’t naming each atom once enough? Then you would only need 45 characters, which would nicely fit in one line of my email client if you just shortened your “finishSignup” to “fS” and action to “a”. As a bonus, it also saves you approximately 117 bytes of bandwidth per email.
UPDATE: Apparently it has ALL the information, in addition to being completely too long. I replaced it with random crap.
Everyone would like to be more interesting. While this seems like a broad statement which can’t possibly be true for all people, I am confident that it is true for most. Even if you aren’t a person who is driven by social interaction, if asked “would you like to lead a more interesting life?” most people would answer with a yes (ninjas and pirates need not apply, I think).
There are very easy ways to make your life more interesting - you can volunteer somewhere, change your habits, or go out and party all the time. Unfortunately, some of these things aren’t interesting to you, and they may be downright boring. So an ideal way to make your life more interesting would catch not only other people’s interests, but yours as well, raising the whole world’s interest level.
The device today which garners the most attention is, arguably, the TV. It sits ensconced in the middle of almost every living room in America. We watch TV so much that there’s a considerable market for devices which make it easier to watch, either by time shifting or space shifting . If we’re guaging the interest of people just by what gets the most eyeballs, the TV wins hands down.
So if you want to be more interesting, and whatever’s on the TV is the most interesting thing around, it stands to reason that you should emulate what you’re watching. I’m not saying you bust into a hospital and start performing surgery just because you like ER, or start having saucy affairs with the other families on your own personal wysteria lane, but people can make small decisions which make things more interesting.
This is all a long-winded and round-about way of coming to my point, however. In most TV shows, the TV plays a very small role, if any at all. How many times do you ever see a TV screen on a sitcom? Almost never. They are always off screen, obviously not interesting enough to put on camera. There’s no “watching the tube” show, in which everyone watches the TV. It’s because that’s boring. This suggests that if people want to be more interesting, they should just reduce the amount of TV watching they do. In most shows on the tube, the only reason they watch TV is because of some specific purpose relating to the other, non-TV-watching. things which they are doing. Also there are very few if any big screen TVs on TV - I would bet someone that I’ve never seen even a 35 inch screen ever on TV. Smaller TVs and a minimal amount of TV watching make for more interesting lives.
Last weekend I moved all of my websites from my expensive dedicated server solution to a shared server solution. So far everything has been working out great - the transfer of files went fine, and some of the automatic services that are setup for you, such as automatic secure webmail which is always nice to fall back on when you’re at say, a public kiosk or something. The switch saves me approx. US$720 a year, which is going to be great for my finances. However, I’m always wary when I move to a new place that something is going to be horribly wrong, so it’s watch-like-a-hawk time.
One of the consequences of moving to the new server is using IMAP for reading mail. I am amazed, shocked and appalled that I didn’t discover this earlier, but mutt has a caching mechanism, which increases the joy of reading both large Maildir mailboxes and IMAP mailboxes. To enable, just put set header_cache="/path/to/some/directory" in your .muttrc file - things go 10x faster after the first cache.
In the same spirit of switching for a new year, I decided to switch my finances up a little bit. I’m currently migrating to using the StackBacks system for managing finances. This is the budget for the generation of consumers who would rather carry around a debit card than a bunch of cash, and is especially good for weaning yourself from credit cards. At the same time, I’m switching banks from a national chain to a local credit union.
Recently I have started a new diet: the No S Diet. The concept is very simple: no sweets, snacks, or seconds (except on days which start with S). I started around the holidays, which actually wasn’t hard at all because holidays count as S days (they’re “Special”). However, I didn’t really get into it that much until recently. I can’t really tell if it is working yet, because it doesn’t have strict weighing guidelines like the previous diet, but I feel like something has changed in my life. There is a bunch of text on the page about why it works, but the basic concept is that you should be forming habits which are healthy. It is much easier to get into a healthy habit if it’s not hard to remember what the habit you’re trying to reinforce actually is. It makes it much easier to feel guilty when you fail in enforcing the habit as well, because you can’t make complicated excuses (“this is okay because I excercised off those calories”).
The No S Diet also has the bonus of being easily combinable with basically any other diet you can think of, unless that diet specifically requires you to eat sweets. I’m thinking of combining it with the hacker’s diet, which definitely appeals to my accountant side. The problem I had with the previous attempt at the hacker’s diet still exists, unfortunately - I still don’t have an easy way to keep track of my calories. I am considering dropping a few bucks on a calorie counter database for my new Palm, which may help in that regard.
I have noticed that most of the things which are now being termed as “lifehacks” are actually just habit-forming. The No S diet is a habit for eating, Getting Things Done is a collection of habits for todo lists and projects, and Early Rising is a habit for sleeping and waking up. These are not new ideas, they are just smashed into the new fad: improving your life through good habits. The accountant in me wants to do more than just that, so I am thinking of making a drupal module or two to keep track of my progress (and subsequently broadcast it to the world).
This is definitely some of the geekiest humor that I have ever read. Funniest site I stumbled upon all day. That is all.
College is not the launching pad for a job. It’s the launching pad for the rest of your life. High school is a mini-jail with strict standards that everyone must live up to. College is when you get to make your own choices. This is the sentiment behind this article. I agree with it on principle, but not completely on content. Computer Science in the past 7 years has gone through an evil transition - almost all of the Colleges out there shifted to a Technical style curriculum because that was what was in demand. While TAing the introductory classes here at the U of M, the most common complaint was that they weren’t learning things which will be useful in the future. The classes are taught in Scheme, for reasons that I completely agree with - the students would rather have them taught in Java, because that would be useful in the market when they leave college. What were they missing? The knowledge that programming concepts are what make good programmers, not language skills. Students want cookie cutter code which solves the problems that they are given. That is why people are lambasting the teaching of Java: people aren’t learning hard thinking concepts.
In my opinion, college is not supposed to teach you the skills you need for your job - instead, you are there to learn your specific learning style. This will allow you to learn anything you need for your job. Most jobs which exist in the Real World™ aren’t looking for people from a specific major, they’re looking for experience.
I also share the views that you don’t need to get perfect grades - the effort required to get an A over a B+ or a B is not worth it for the slight bump in your GPA, and you will have much more fun in college. Meeting friends in college is just as important as your actual classes. The Real World ™ calls this “networking”.
Choosing your major in order to get a job is also such a crap shoot otherwise - you’re betting that in 4 years, the market will need the skills that you learn in a major.
Today is a bunch of quickies about random stuff.
..and subsequently waking up. I have been trying out the advice of How to Become an Early Riser recently, after discovering it about a week ago from somepeople. I had been sleeping from about 4am to noon or 1pm, depending on the day. I decided to go all out and set my alarm clock for 5:30am, never to be reset again. It didn’t work out the first couple days, but after three days of getting up on time, my body is definitely adjusting well to it, and I get a bunch of work done in the morning before I head off to work at 9.
vgrabbj finally got out of packages-arch-specific hell and is building on almost all architectures. I think the addition of a new person to the team maintaining packages-arch specific helped a bunch, because shortly after I emailed the new maintainer movement occurred after two months of nothing from the other two. I don’t know if they had to actually check out the package itself efore removing the line, but it seems like something as simple as removing one line from a file in cvs shouldn’t take that long.
For some reason, the posts from my blog which are syndicated to PlanetDebian are showing up on the planet 2 times for every post I make. If anyone has some insight as to why, and whether it’s a problem on my end, I’m all ears.
Diana makes me happy like a bright sunny day after a long cloudy winter week.
Yesterday I needed to get a simple task done: scan a piece of paper so that I could email it to someone. Simple enough, as there is a scanner available for use in the grad lab. When I arrived, the lights were turned off and the lab vacant. Walking up to the machine with the scanner attached, I was surprised to see that the screen was locked. This annoys me to no end, and got me thinking about the thought processes of people when they choose open resources. Economics tells us that scarce resources are more valuable. The problem with this is the hoarding of resources - obviously the person who locked the computer was not using the unique resource attached to it, but if economics guided his decision would this be the correct answer? I would like to think not - it is far more valuable to use identical resources which were available (other M$ computers) while leaving that resource available for use by others. This seems to reverse the normal economic idea - you should use the resource which is the most abundant which suits your needs, allowing the scarce resources available to be used by others.
Sidenote
As it turns out, the user of this locked computer had left the computer locked for a considerable length of time. I left at 9, returned at 11, and returned again at 1 and there was no sign that it had even been used. I got tired of waiting and rebooted the computer, which I justified by the fact that you’re not supposed to lock computers for long times in the grad lab. This particular student I do know, and he has taken some of the exaggerations about grad school a little too far - I’m pretty sure he sleeps in the building most nights, which just shouldn’t be done IMHO.
I have noticed a new trend in my shopping habits lately: I will ask for help from a “sales associate” much faster than I did previously. This could be a product of the instant-gratification culture, but I really don’t have much patience with floundering around a store trying to find what I need, especially if I have done all of my research earlier and show up at a store with just one thing in mind. I will go to great lengths to find a live person because even if I spend 3-5 minutes trying to find help, they will most likely be able to help me right away. That said, I won’t just grab the first employee that I see in the store, I will actually make a reaosnable effort at finding the item first. After getting help, I can look at my handy palm pilot and see if there’s anything else in the store that I need.
I have noticed that Target is especially good at having random people walking around the store doing things that are quickly dropped in order to help a customer. In addition they have these nice little buttons sprinkled around the store that you can press and the entire floor staff gets paged notifying them that you have a question. I prefer this to the “pick up the phone” approach, although that is also available in some stores.
The worst store by far for this strategy that I have come across is Home Depot. You sometimes have to walk a very long distance before you find anyone, and then when you do, they just point you back in the direction that you came from and said that someone over there can help you. If there was someone over there, I wouldn’t be asking over here. I wonder if they just think I’m too stupid to read the HUGE SIGNS which state what is where in a Depot.