The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Thu, 16 Nov 2006

8:54 AM - (no subject)

Just Journal has several more active users now.  Most of the new users appear to be using the private journal feature though.  I won't build a community, but its nice to see users none the less. 

I'm hoping to do a code audit soon and make sure there aren't any holes in the private journal feature.  Until recently it wasn't used by many and it couldn't hurt to do some auditing.

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8:52 AM - Apple releases yet another X11 update

Apple patched a patch.  Version 1.1.3 of the X11 2006 update was released on software update today.  It seems they had font issues.  I hate to be negative, but patching a patch is a Microsoft thing to do.  What ever happened to quality control?  Perhaps Apple is trying to hard to compete with Microsoft?  Maybe its the stress of 10.5 coming out.  Still, this isn't the first time they've had to do this during 2006. 

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8:49 AM - Amazon unbox

I'm trying out the Amazon unbox service.  The first episode is free so why not?  It downloaded very quickly and I'm just waiting for my PC to get more idle before playing the content.  I had an unexpected security patch to apply to MidnightBSD.

unbox is no iTunes as its tied to Windows only.  It still might be a nice service.  Worst case I got a free episode of enterprise.  You're probably wondering why I picked enterprise.  Well its very low on my DVD purchase list and it was a free episode.  Still, if it ended up on iTunes I probably would buy a lot of star trek on there. 

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Wed, 15 Nov 2006

Fri, 10 Nov 2006

5:25 PM - LOL

Caryn published a link to the daily wtf yesterday.  Here is my favorite comment:

Code is breaking in bad an unpredictable ways. I do code review of threaded codebase:

 

me: what are all these sleep()'s for?

him: oh, i use them to reduce the chance of locking problems

me: do you use locks?

him: they are too difficult to use properly, so I use sleep()

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5:20 PM - (no subject)

Actor and Oscar winner Jack Palance has died at his home in Montecito, California, a family spokesman says, the Associated Press reports.

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12:00 AM - Xdrive, a free backup service

AOL is offering a free backup service called xdrive.  It only requires an AIM screen name and you instantly have 5GB of space for backups.  Its accessible from browsers using java in firefox, safari or IE. 

The service also has a windows component that lets you treat it like a virtual drive just as you can with Apple's .Mac service. 

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Thu, 9 Nov 2006

6:59 PM - Windows Media Player 11

One "feature" I hate about the new windows media player is when you are on the dvd item and hit play it does NOT start the DVD playback OR goto the DVD menu!  Instead, it starts playing the media library! 

To me this is a big bug or at least a serious usability problem!  DVD playback is one of the few things I actually use Windows Media Player for!

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3:26 PM - (no subject)

Unversal studios sucks! Every season of knight rider i bought has unplayble episodes from scratches on the discs during shipment or at the factory. Can't they make some damn DVDs without scratching them to hell. I'm so sick of this shit. And they wondered why season 4 didn't sell well..



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12:35 AM - FC paper done

I got my psych paper on facilitated communication done.  Most of the evidence for it implies its fake.  Its sad that people put autistic children through this when its not real.  Maybe someday someone will figure out a real way to communicate with them without the bias of a facilitator.

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Wed, 8 Nov 2006

Fri, 3 Nov 2006

Thu, 2 Nov 2006

1:40 PM - (no subject)

Caryn's new monitor came. It looks like there are 2 dead pixels that I can see. Still not too bad considering the price. It looks amazing. I think she's going to want a new Mac or video card soon though. I booted up WoW and ET on this. WoW supports widescreen quite nicely but the framerate isn't that great. I lowered terrain detail by one and it seems to render at about 10fps at this resolution (1400 x 900?) ET doesn't support it, and the widescreen resolution it does support isn't fullscreen, but 1152 x NNN works OK at 15-45fps depending what i'm looking at. Considering this is an old geforce 4 mx its not bad at all. OSX auto adjusted the resolution and its up on DVI. Using OSX in widescreen is quite a nice experience and I can't believe the contrast compared to her old monitor or even my CRT. Its amazing and I love the colors. This is the first LCD i've preferred the colors to my CRT aside from the 23 inch apple displays. This might do darks better than those.

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Mon, 30 Oct 2006

1:33 AM - The Evil of Microsoft's Vista EULA

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/420

Microsoft only allows transfer of a license to 1 new computer.  (so 2 total)  That means if you upgrade, you have to rebuy vista. 

Microsoft will not allow you to publish benchmarks of vista without using settings found in the documentation.  You can't benchmark older versions with newer ones. 

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1:00 AM - First Interenet Explorer 7 bug i found

Get this, IE7 will not honor table sizes in this fashion:

a table with 3 columns and 2 rows.  The first row has a colspan for the length and the second row has width=220, no width, width=220. I even tried CSS width: 220px;  Now if i use colspan/col with widths and * for the middle it will render correctly.  This is using HTML 4.0 transitional!

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12:51 AM - FSCK

Some damn asshole was running a cgi program on the server so I couldn't do final testing before the deadline!  It kept using up file descriptors and ram and apache was core dumping!  I couldn't do shit.  I told him in email that I could do testing in a reasonable amount of time.  Even better, his webapp to turn it in was down!  I had to email it to him! 
 
I got it done but turned in 45 minutes late.  I don't think I should be graded too harshly since the server was not available for at least 15 minutes and very slow after that.  Uploading a single 2kb file too like a minute and one time it timed out uploading a 20kb C file! 

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Sun, 29 Oct 2006