Random Brain Dump

I spent part of this past weekend creating a Powerpoint slideshow for my sister’s City Cafe. Ran across Don McMillan’s funny sketch “Life After Death by PowerPoint” which not only is entertaining but also contains some very valid points about things not to do.

Our government hatched this great idea of turning the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date will result in energy savings. The first time I heard this is when I received emails at work about how our machines need to be patched for this. I went to the corporate meeting and it was apparent to me that this was a big corporate effort just to comply with this change. It was Y2K all over again. I was wondering about thousands of man hours and how this would cost Yahoo!

I had doubted the saved energy is worth the troubles. Sure enough, no utilities have claimed any measurable impact from this bonehead flop. For the same effort spent this past spring, I’d rather see DST abolished altogether!

Ryan Tomayko wrote this blog entry called “How I explained REST to my wife.” Cool…

I wonder how it would pan out if I try to engage my wife with this type of topic in this manner… I can guess the outcome already… 🙂

Today, Yahoo! launches a completely redesign of pets.yahoo.com. In terms of content, it’s a relatively small site comparing to food.yahoo.com or health.yahoo.com, but still it isn’t a small task launching a site that scales to a thousand hits per second.

This is the first project where I’m part of from conception to launch, so I feel more involved. I was responsible for rolling out the launch, so last few weeks have been particularly frenzy. We were all feverishly testing last night but managed to roll out the site with an hour or two to spare. Woohoo…

Now, I can start having dinner with the wife & kids again. 😮

I customize my Bash shell with colorful prompts. But while, in a normal xterm, my prompt is displayed nicely, it looks like crap within Emacs. All the escaped color attributes get displayed as garbage characters. I finally got off my lazy butt and spent sometime looking into fixing it.

It turns out to be pretty straightforward, basically the way I fix it is to turn on ANSI colors in the shell. I add the following to my .emacs file to turn it on as part of a hook to the shell mode.

; enable ANSI color in shell mode
(add-hook ‘shell-mode-hook ‘ansi-color-for-comint-mode-on)

Earlier this year, the city of Tuttle in Oklahoma became the laughing stock when its city manager wrongly threatened a software engineer for “hacking.”

City manager Jerry Taylor, pictured here, claims to be a computer expert with “22 years in computer systems engineering and operation.” This so-called expert logged onto the city web site one day and saw a boilerplate configuration page from Apache on CentOS (a Linux operating system) instead of the usual city website. He panicked & assumed it was hacked and fired a threatening email to CentOS:

“Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else form accessing it??? Please remove your software immediately before i report it to government officials!!”

To which, the engineer from CentOS replied

“I feel sorry for your city…”

He followed up with helpful information which Taylor ignored and instead threatened to report the alleged hacking to the FBI . So emails flew back & forth. In the end, the developer figures out that it was the server had crashed and somebody reinstalled CentOS, hence the default test page. When everything was straightened out, Taylor finally apologized but still stubbornly pointed out that the whole situation could’ve been avoided had the developer informed him the problem in the beginning.

Unhappy with the apology and feeling unappreciated for help resolving a problem he didn’t even cause for free, the engineer posted the entire email exchange on the web. The exchange took on a viral effect. Pretty soon, people all over the world started blogging about it, articles were created on wikipedia, a deluge of phone calls made & emails sent to the city manager. In a short period of time, the city & its manager became the laughing stock on the web. Taylor had this to say about the incident, which didn’t exactly helped his cause:

“This is just a bunch of freaks out there that don’t have anything better to do. When I came in to work Monday morning, I had about 500 e-mails, plus anonymous phone calls from all the geeks out there. [CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he’s got on his hands.”

Looser with a capital L.

Here’s a TV news report, a Wikipedia entry, as well as the entire email exchange is posted here. This is one of the funniest thing I read in a long time.

Classic! 🙂

Okay, these are a bit geeky, but can’t argue that they are anything but uncool:

• Video of demo of a digital drawing board @ MIT.
• Here’s cool video of the inner workings of a hard drive. Amazing machinery.
• 3D bump desktop

When it comes to computer, I’m really finicky about little things. I do a lot of tweaks to get my computer works just the way I like it. Take the keyboard for example, I do a lot of key remapping. IT guys always think my machine is busted when Ctrl-Alt Delete combo doesn’t bring up the Windows logon dialog (I swap Capslock & Ctrl keys). IT guys don’t like me.

We use Putty here a alot @ Yahoo to logon to BSD development machines and it bugs me that the right Alt key doesn’t work as a Meta key. This is due to the fact Putty is a British app and those funny Brits use a different keyboard layout that maps the key to AltGr. Enough users complained such that this little gripe became a wish list feature.

Rather than waiting for the feature, I found a simple workaround with a nifty little open-source app. called Auto Hot Key. It enables macros & key remapping.
In this case, the workaround is to simply map the right Alt key to the left Alt key with the following entry in the script:

RAlt::LAlt

Like most open source products, the GUI is lacking and requires editing scripts. Usability aside, it’s pretty powerful though and is worthwhile checking it out.

Last several years, I got into a habit of upgrading my computer during the holiday season. The holiday season seems timely for such thing, and good prices on parts are plentiful. I look forward to it each year. Last year was an exception, I didn’t do it for some reason I don’t remember.

With Windows Vista coming in February, I definitely will do it this time. Since my nephew Andre wanted a computer of his own, it’ll be a full system build instead of just an upgrade. With Intel’s new dual core chips being all the rage, I expect to see a significant boost in performance this year. I don’t expect having to spend a lot of time researching for parts, thanks to [H]ardOCP’s new 2006 holiday PC build guide. Good content and very timely for me. Check it out…

…to our commie.

<rant>

When our 5 years old projection TV went kaput last December, we got it fixed by a local TV repairman. Recently, the Sony unit decided to get creative and started rendering the picture all in hue of blue or sometime of green. Other times, it’d paint several long red arches across the entire screen. And once it is on long enough, the unit would decide that some napping is in order by flickering a few red flashes and turns itself off. The darn thing is starting to develop a mind of its own. But I digress, this entry is about the Commie!

Anyway, I decided to cancel our subscription to Comcast HD cable TV a few weeks back. I mean what’s the point, when my HD shows are in monochrome! 🙂 While we’re watching analog TV now, it does feel great not living under the control of The Commie. I had discovered that some users began to call the Comcast DVR, The Commie– appropriately I thought.

You see, the Commie sucks. In fact, it really really really sucks! There had been many occasion that I came close to throwing its ass out of my window. I’m not exaggerating. The darn thing infuriates me! I’ve never had a worse user experience with an electronic gadget in my entire life.

Here are some of things that bug me:

1. Slow as a 2000 years old tortoise. You change the channel or clicking any of the button on the remote, you wait for a delayed response. Unbelievably annoying.
2. Search sucks. It seems I’d have to “type” a lot to search for anything. Entering a letter is a pain since you scroll through the entire alpha bets, one letter at a time. Hello? These Commies are built by Motorolla, couldn’t these geniuses learned a thing or two from the phone engineers in terms of keypad input?
3. Long boot time. Whenever unit is unplugged, it means we’d have to wait for a few minutes before rebooting completes. It’s worse than my 2 years old Windows desktop PC.
4. Crashes and freezes. The unit would sometime crashes or freezes– fixing it requires you to unplug it, which leads the problem above: long boot time. Argh!
5. Unresponsive. Often, I have no idea how to get the sucker to respond to me. Not infrequently, it would freeze, but not really! :0 This happens a lot. I’d press Channel Up and nothing happens because the unit freezes up, so you press the button again, again, again… but nothing happens, until the Commie wakes itself up and executes the last 12 commands queued up. It ends up jumping 12 channels. As I noted, this happens a lot with my unit. I had to deal with this almost everyday. One minute, it’s unresponsive and the next minute, it runs 10+ commands. This is the most horribly infuriating thing about The Commie.
6. Stupid warnings. Some of the warning messages are so brain dead. For example, if my unit is low on empty space, it’d warn that “Your unit is low space: 10%”. Why tell my percentage? I’d have to do some math to figure out that means I have 8 hours of recording left. Give me a break! Why not just say that!
7. Dumb UI. Too many instances, but I’ll point out just an example. The unit has 2 tuners which the unit makes them too painfully obvious. The user has to aware which tuner he’s using. If I starts a recording and then attempting to change the channel, it wouldn’t let me. I’d have to hit a button on the remote to swap to the other tuner. Why doesn’t it switch the tuner automatically? Why require the user to be so aware of which tuner he’s using.
8. Repeats. Even though I specified no repeat, my unit kept recording repeated shows; we’d have 6 recording of the same South Park episodes each week. Wassup w/ that?

The Commie was crap. It’s the Fidel Castro of DVRs. These Commies are bad for TV experience, bad for your blood level, bad for your psychological health & sanity. The Commie can shorten your life span. I can’t believe Comcast is pushing thousands of these crappy units out to their customers.

I have acted: out with The Commie! Let freedom rings again in our living room…

</rant>