How to Design Programs looks like a decent programming book. Though it seems a bit basic for me, I'm sure someone who wants to start out programming would get use out of it. I seem to have vague memories of the MIT press being a good publisher, though I can't place why. Thier site seems to be down, but I found it in an alternate location.
ACORN is a very "interesting" organization. I wonder if they lobbied Clinton in the 1990s to force employers to supply medical "insurance" (with tonnes of exceptions) to their employees? I was one of those "exceptions," and I because insurance companies only wanted to talk with large employers, I couldn't get medical insurace. There were offices all over the place selling everything but medical insurance. A lot of their policies sound like things which on the surface would appear to help the poor, but in reality screw them. Detrimental Assist.
Will the baby boomers be known as the "bailout generation"?
Many of our parents fought in WWII, and earned the accolade, "the Greatest Generation." We may go down in history as the "Bailout Generation."
And
Are we the bailout generation?
A slashdot post about how the US market is not a free market, but a series of cartels. Too true.
I should probably try to get more food supplies so I won't have to when I am recovering from the surgery, but I don't know what to go for. Can't think or plan ahead right now.
I'm also having trouble cooking. Last night I cooked up some ground beef, but I couldn't get the spices right to make it edible. I couldn't find my "sloppy joe" seasoning mix. My mind is just all too fu'doodad up.
This seems to be a common theme. I'll only have short spurts where I can do something.
We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garage by Cory Doctorow
C and many other programming languages are missing one important thing which Assembly Language has: the carry bit. Sometimes (usually) it is very important you know when your numbers overflow, but almost nobody even tries to do this in C unless it will be very painful for a number to be screwed up. You have to use some sort of contorted equation inside an if statement. In Assembly, it is easier. At least for all the processors I've seen, there is a flag devoted to telling if a carry happened, and there is a whole class of instructions devoted to jumping somewhere else based upon whether a flag or group of flags are set or clear. It is really as simple as:
add x,y
jump_on_carry_clear label
** code to handle an overflow situation **
label: Remaining code...
C, you have to do:
z=x+y;
if( z < x && z < y /* an equation which I'm sure many would get wrong */ ) {
** code to handle overflow situation **
}
Which isn't necessarily the normal way you would use C anyway. That x+y might be in the middle of a huge equation. Plus you have to use three variables instead of x+=y, so you can see if the carry happened.
One of the things which makes Assembly Language more daunting is you have to specify each operation yourself, however it also means you can check for carries all you want, so if one of your variables overflow, you'll know it.
Perhaps there would be an easy solution (besides making the numbers
grow dynamically). How about something similar to a try block?
on_carry { x=y+(z*2) } do { printf("x overflowed!") }
This missing feature causes many problems. But then, it seems many C programmers don't bother to check for out of memory condition when they allocate either. This is why programs crash when the system runs out of memory instead of warning the user and allowing him or her to save the files, or even just trying to reduce the amount of memory used.
So we all just create huge swap partitions to make sure we never run out of memory, because when it happens, it is catastrophic. Programs fail, we lose data. Some Linux kernel programmers even thought an "OOM Killer" was a good idea. If the system runs out of memory, you just kill a random process. But then with mmap, how would one signal OOM to a process? Allocating memory is triggered by writing to it. Then again, this would be the purpose of having si_addr in the siginfo_t structure used by sigaction. Catching SIGSEGV and doing the right thing may work, but doing the right thing based upon just being given a memory address is not easy. I suppose you would have to integrate something into your whole program design to make it work. Exceptions would make it easy (assuming the exception system didn't allocate memory itself), but they are not available in plain C.
I was thinking about going to Walmart after dialysis, but I was too ill. I guess I tried to push too hard taking off too much fluid. I can't go now because of the neighbors harassing me. Oh well, who needs vegetables.
I did hear some encouraging news on CNBC today. It seems some of the companies are going to try to pay back the TARP money. If enough is paid back, maybe hyperinflation won't happen. I know this is probably what the government planned, but there was a huge risk if it didn't pan out. I think it was a week ago I heard China demanded they buy back some bonds. Somehow I doubt congress and the president will be sensible though. Instead of paying off bonds, we'll probably be hearing them yell "goodie! Free speding money! Wooo!" Maybe they'll auction off some more of our radio spectrum for good measure. One CNBC story talking about it.
I should buy some Zimbabwe dollars just for the novelty value... and to prepare for the future. Haha ;-)
Players Who Suit MUDs by Richard Bartle. The paper mentioned by the slashdotter talking about different types of gamers.
This guy seems to lump people who like to help others into the "killer" category. While maybe they would share the same space on the graph, I don't think they really belong in the same category. Killers sound like sadists and psychopaths for the most part. Maybe normal people sometimes like to be a "killer" for a day, though, but it sounds more like most of a killer's activity is grieving / trolling, not combat, so maybe not.
I think may also be another type: the creators. Some people like to create new things. Write plotlines, draw new creatures, machines, backgrounds, etc. MUDs don't really allow this unless they are really high level and someone makes them a wizard. Perhaps some sort of voting or vetting system for each change could make this work without letting "killers" ruin it for everyone else. "Creators" would probably share the same space on the graph as explorers.
This reminds me. Elements in a game to add: When dreaming, if a dangerous creature is nearby, an in dream character will say, "Wake up! You're in danger!" The player will need to pass a mini-game to wake up.
For death, the avatar becomes a spirit. The dead players can play in the spirit world, or they can try to get back to the living by either having their body resurrected or reenter as a baby--losing all their avatar's skills and such.
Need attack free zones (IIRC, were common on many MUDs) for socializers and others to mingle without fear of being attacked. Maybe a few bars and small towns. Also allow a pacifist setting (can't be attacked by other players, and can't attack NPCs or other players) so some socializers who really don't want to play the game can just converse, though cut them off from many areas (maybe using a guard NPC?) so explorers and others who do want to play the game don't "cheat" the system.
There was a story on slashdot about how Philip K. Dick's novel Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said would be released as a movie. It sounds like he wrote some interesting stories / books. I may check them out. Here are some of his works at the Gutenburg Project. I just read beyond the door. I could see how someone may like it, but it didn't quite work for me.
Three Stigmata sounds like a strange idea--people find other planets "psychologically monotonous" and wish they could live on Earth? I could sort of see him thinking it would be "physically daunting", just because most Americans don't seem to think automation works and are strictly anti-automation. Robots should be doing all of the physical and dangerous labor, not people. Backwards thinking idiots insist automating things will take "jobs" from people. While it may be possible for automation to centralize the economy into a few big players, but guess what? This has already happened!
Scrolling down on the gutenburg page, it shows an author named William P. Dickson translated some books titled "The History of Rome". I think I'll download and read them.
The Art Bell show was talking about scary monsters or something like it last night--it may have been the repeat show, so it was the night before. They talked about Spring Heel Jack. It was apparently a strange guy in a costume with some sort of mechanical assistance which would let hime jump as hich as 9 feet, had some sort of device which allowed him to shoot flames out of his mouth, and he also wore Freddy Kruger style metal finger claws. He would go around attacking women and tearing off their clothes. Freaky scare. The legend would make an interesing monster in a game though.
Penny Dreadful -- a fiction magazine published in the 1800s. Featured
Spring Heel Jack several times.
... other jack info:
mysteries of canada (canadian copycat?) -
weird encyclopedia (has slightly different account of him) -
qsl.net
(seems to copy the account in the previous site, then includes stories
about similar incidents in Chile.)
whocalled.us appears to be a site to track telemarketers? Something to check out.
This slashdot thread talks about why it is bad to have the police harrass you even when you haven't done anything wrong. Why would this even need to be pointed out? Some people are just too naive.
It appears Wolfram Alpha is live. It is a program designed to answer questions and get information. I haven't had a chance to use it, but sounds incomplete and it doesn't sound like a search engine exactly. More like what one sometimes tries to do with Google, but Google only returns web pages, so sometimes your question isn't answered or you get wrong results. Just think if some jackoff trolls decided to game Google's page rank to put their 2+2=5 answer at the top of a search for 2+2, I think you get my point. ( Slashdot thread.)
Just tried it. Works nicely. I just don't get why there isn't a program to do most of this on everyone's computer already. Certainly metric / royal conversions and math are easy problems for a computer to solve. We don't need complex scientific and AI systems to do that. For a few years I have thought of trying to make a program to do this, but I never got around to it. A simple thing which will tell the answer to an equation, convert measurements, find man pages, books, and other relavent things on your computer or in your database. The man page thing is already there, just type "man subject_name" at a command prompt, but I want something which is integrated into the above, and will extend to the basic keyword thing and deep searching too. I would also like it to search things like, say wikipedia articles, databases (of book/movie listings and other things you type in), meta tags for audio and picture formats (to find an audio clip of linus torvals or picture of the grand canyon, for example), and other things in the filesystem. It is all there, why not use it?
This slashdot thread discusses what a women really wants in a computer.
-- from the thread:
Change the BSoD color. I always see these tips for customizing MS Windows.
How is this easier than Linux? Some will say Microsoft has tools to change
all the major settings. ...so does Linux! Too many people have been brainwashed
by MS marketing.
Ketracel white was the drug the founders in Star Trek used to control the Jem-hadar.
A slashdot comment talking about the different kinds of gamers. I sound like an explorer. It's why I like maze games, well not the plain ones, the ones where you search through a massive dungeon or something. :-) --- keywords to search Bartle, paper, MUD. Types of players: achievers, explorers, socializers, killers.
Found another article. Boomers, your crisis has arrived. Haven't had a chance to read it yet. Going to dialysis.
Really need to read more about bitfrost. It is the security model OLPC supposedly uses. Supposed to be secure but easy. codinghorror's take.
China has their own secure OS now?
An interesting article about baby boomers. Though to call them the "Dr Spock generation" may be unfair. Reading Dr Spock's wikipedia article, some people blamed him for the baby boomer's behavior, however apparently those people never read his book. Just like congress and clergy cried out against the game "Night Trap". None of these people ever played that game, and if they did, they'd realize it wasn't any more violent, gruesome or sexual than any "G rated" kids show.
The question is: what caused this behavior? Natural cycles?--the Chinese believe everything happens in 71(?) year cycles. Advertising?--they were the first generation who were brought up by TV, but I think the previous generation had audio only radio, so I don't know about that.
The other question is: what to do about it? Their selfish and self-absorbed behavior is clearly causing major problems. I think the core is the "positive only" attitude. They hate hearing anything "negative" at all and will accept anything "positive" as the truth. This allows bad behavior and psychopaths to run rampant.
---
Oh, and before I forget: Microsoft integrated Internet Explorer into Windows to evade prosecution of their monopoly case, not because they thought it was a great idea. This is why IE vulnerabilities should count as an "OS" vulnerability. They shoved the two things together into an inseparatable mess!
You might say, but you need a browser to use Linux (or a Mac), so theirs should count too. This is true, however you can choose what browser you run. With Linux you can use not only Firefox, but Dillo, lynx, wget, curl for web access. ...but you don't even really need to use HTTP if you don't want. For downloading files, you can use FTP, which has about a thousand client programs. (There are also other protocols like bittorrent)
For email, there are about a thousand clients which use POP/IMAP and SMTP. You don't have to use the crappy webmail front-ends. For news / blogging / discussion, you can use NNTP / Usenet, though the "offical" usenet system sucks because it is full of spammers, trolls and FAQ Nazis--there are even people who send bullshit abuse complaints about FAQ maintainers who are the authority of the group. I actually saw this happen. Better to run your own The problem is new users (sometimes called the "AOL generation") never heard of any of these protocols and think the internet is the web, so most hosting companies only do web service. With new technology (sort of new anyway), some companies now allow you to have your own "server" which is really part of their server partioned off acting as a whole server system to you and your programs, so you can roll your own--to some degree. They are still somewhat expensive. $20(us)/month was the cheapest last time I checked.
I want to make cookies and eat them, but I probably don't have time before my parents come home (whenever that is) and I am not sure I am up to it. I also don't think I should eat after midnight, since I have the fistulogram tomorrow. (though they didn't actually say I shouldn't.) At least I cooked pasta and can make salad.
I just saw that Corey Doctorow wrote a book called Little Brother. It is sort of like a conspiracy theory / cyberpunk novel. This is the guy who offers his books as a free download on his website.
This post at slashdot sums up what we may be in for in the economy, the very real possibility of hyperinflation. The question is: what to do about it? The patriotic might buy US savings bonds, but then the Feds would probably just print and spend more money.
The practical would buy food storage and housing, but those who couldn't affort to buy a house (or whatever) would be screwed when their rent starts going up and up. Apparently many have been starting to buy gold. It may have been a good idea when the news first broke, but from what it sounds from people in the know (heard on CNBC and Coast to Coast AM), gold is probably overpriced now. In addition, I have heard gold was confiscated during the Great Depression, apparently people were buying it for the same reason, and the government took it and gave them paper money for it. I wonder if perhaps antiques and precious gems would be the way to go. Then again, with today's government, if they want to "fix" the problem, they'd probably just claim you were a "terrorist" or "drug dealer" and take the stuff without compensating you at all.
Me, doing none of those things would help, since there is no way I could pay for dialysis. I may as well have a potato party. The price I have to pay because psychopaths and religious zealots want to murder me. And my stalker parents will do anything to keep me prisoner. Doesn't matter if I move. If they are willing to lie to people and make false police calls about me, it doesn't make any difference where I live. May as well go off dialysis and have a potato party now. Being dead and homeless is better than being shit on by to psychotic psychopathic pieces of crap all day. Can't even go to the fucking grocery store without their crap.
They claim they want to "help" by taking me grocery shopping, but they may do it for a week or two, then they'll decide I'm not visiting relatives enough--they'll fucking stay for several hours, doing things like playing cards the whole time, which is really draining on me. I did have two strokes, but then psychopaths don't care. If you don't do everything they want, you are committing a "crime" against them.
Then my mother uses me for money. Either "borrowing" from me when she can, or using me to extract money from my dad. She'll go on spending sprees, then buy some knik-nak "for" me and tell my dad the money was for something she had to buy for me.
My coordination has been getting worse in the past few weeks. Is it potassium related? Probably. I've also been taking on too much fluid. Between Kool-aid/pear juice and coffee, I probably drank 2 liters so far, and I was 1 liter heavy already when I came off dialysis yesterday. All this bullshit with the harrasment and my psychpathic parents trying to control me causes me to be too pissed off to care. Why should I bother living if I am forced to be in a prison like existance controlled by shitheads who make my life hell. Even if I found a place I could afford to live, they'd do the same things there. Except they wouldn't be pissing in their own pool, so It would be worse.
I dropped my pills. Luckily it was only the ones in one compartment. One fell on my backpack, but the other whent way under my bed. Nasty.
I found one of those things the kids made for us at dialysis. It is from Easter. I wonder what the statue of limitations for throwing it away is? I can't really keep it forever.
Whirlpool looks like the hash function to use now, so if I ever write a program which needs one, maybe I'll go for that. I'd also like to look into Subhash and RadioGatun. Apparently they don't use rounds, which makes me wonder if they may be faster. Subhash uses a small 32 bit block size which also makes me think it will be efficent, especially for small items like passwords. I also wonder if these hash functions could be used as a pseudo random number generator.
It seems someone found an attack which makes breaking SHA1 easier (Something like 2^63 instead of 2^80 computations). I don't think script kiddies have that kind of processing power to abuse this (though maybe those with botnets could), but goverments and mafia style organizations most likely do.
A guy from Debian wrote about migrating from SHA1 for gpg in his blog. -- slashdot story. One guy asked about SSL certs. Good question. Though another guy replied that his version of Ubuntu will take the -sha256 argument.
I hope this doesn't make it more feasable for organized crime to redirect people and fool them into thinking they got the correct site because the cert looks valid. With the DNS poisoning attacks talked about in the past years, this could become a serious issue.
On the slashdot story, one guy was talking about some has functions called Whirlpool ( home page) and Tiger (home page). Maybe I should check them out...
Yay Challah! Yesterday I managed to buy some Challah and rolls from Zeppole.
I installed glhack (which is a descendant of nethack which is a descendant of rogue.) For those of you who don't know anything about those games, they are RPG video games. Basically you have a character which you try to advance by usually fighting or using skills. You are often charged with some quest. In glhack this is locating the "Amulet of Yendor". Of course, you have to search through a dangerous dungeon filled with nasty monsters to fulfill this quest. Compared to modern games, the graphics aren't good, but the gameplay is great. It also uses randomly generated mazes, so you can replay it over and over without going through the same environment every time.
The subdivision are back at their shit. I had to pick up some eggs from the grocery store last night, and as I was walking down the street next to the subdivision, "coincidentally" there was a motorcycle cop sitting there and "coincidentally" he left shortly after I walked by, "coincidentally" turning down the same street I turned down. There was something going on at the clubhouse (several cars were there), so it was probably one of them.
Their constant harrasment makes it even more difficult to do basic things. Most of the time I have serious trouble just going to dialysis, getting groceries, preparing food. All things I must do, or I will die. Not that anyone cares.
My GUID is 445D0D89-25B3-4D95-8BF5-437627F4FCD8 . From createGUID.com. Haha.
Hogland was on Art Bell, and he was talking about this book NASA publishes about all the technology they produce. I think I'll check it out.
Hmmm... it has quite a few interesting things. ( ToC)
Why does Gmail call the button archive, but it puts the email in the "trash" folder?
It seems keeping people from using up all my cpu power is working. I have conviced my mother to stop constantly bothering me every five seconds. It is especially bad when she interrupts me when I am doing something involved, like cooking or programming. Telephone is nearly as bad. I don't know why, maybe because I can't see who I am interacting with, but the more time I spend on the telephone, the worse I get. Sometimes if the conversation is really engaging it doesn't hurt too much, but you can't keep a conversation that way for very long, five minutes maybe. This is why I prefer the internet.
Funny, I haven't read my book for a few days. Though maybe the video game (Dragon Quest) I am playing helps nearly as much. I have found reading a book which isn't too low-bander (I just blow through it and it doesn't give me much benefit), and isn't too complex (that uses too much cpu power), increases my mental abilities. When I am able to program, it seems to help too, like a mental puzzle exersizing the brain.
It is a delecate balance, but it works sometimes. When I am in the zone, it gives me a few hours of clear thinking. Unfortunately the causes in the first paragraph are out of my control and most the people in my life don't really care, especially my parents. In fact, it is obvious my mother tries to use this to control me. If I can't think, I can't do much and end up staying home. It also makes it easier for her to manipulate me.
Nepomuk (Wikipedia) is a new meta tagging system. KDE appears to be embedding it into their system. Supposed to be for social networking or something like that. I wonder about security. Have they thought about it? Will this put the metadata into files which support metadata, or does it only use its own database?
I'm reminded about when I heard of "resource forks" on the Mac. If a file was transmitted through a means or to a filesystem which didn't support these forks, all the data from the fork was silently discarded. Will KDE / Nepmuk do the same thing?
If the Nepomuk data is put into the files, will it be compatible with other systems, or will it show up as garbage / not at all like some proprietary vendors have done with standard file formats. (I'm thinking things like jpeg with camera mfgrs and I think it was Adobe Photoshop.) If they use a special format, especially for information which is already supported, such as mp3 tags for example, then all applications which read the mp3 tags will have to be updated to support Nepomuk. This will be a big problem with hardware mp3 players. In fact most vendors probably wouldn't support Nepomuk unless it became really huge.
Since they are open source, I imagine they will try to maintain compatibility, but then again, I have seen some projects which don't care or want to force people to only use their system. It seems to me KDE and Gnome used to be like this.
linux.com - Nepomuk and KDE to introduce the semantic desktop
Syllable looks like an interesting Linux distro. I wonder how well it works. I think I may buy their CD...was thinking of using lulu to create a custom planner like book--something that has a calendar and various things I need to remember such as medical data. This OS may give me an easy way to get the emachine going again.
The lemon bars aren't too bad. The topping collapsed, so it doesn't quite taste like a lemon bar. More like a lemon cookie.
Damn! Made lemon bars. Halfed the receipe because I thought it would be too tall for my baking dish (it was), but I didn't think to adjust the cooking time. Hopefully they are still edible. :-)
It seems the ZFS filesystem everyone is so crazy about doesn't support 32 bit systems very well. That is okay if you are running a major server which you probably want to upgrade to 64 bit anyway, but if you are doing some simple server tasks in your home or a small business, this is a show stopper for ZFS. The ancient 32 bit computer you found in the dumpster or was handed down works quite well for any activity on a small scale. They will do file and web serving just fine. From what I hear, ZFS would make admining your server easier, but is it really worth shelling out the extra cash for a new system? IIRC, Sun is the company who released this filesystem, so maybe they are trying to get people to buy their servers. ;-)
FreeBSD Jails seem like a good way to separate things. The closest thing linux has is chroot, which doesn't have any real security (root can break out of it easily)
They canceled the surgery. Spent the day with my friend. Was nice.
I can't seem to get mental rest. Between my mother constanly disturbing me and people who insist I be on the phone for extended periods of time or interrupt what I am doing constantly. It puts me in a mental fog all the time so I can't do basic mental tasks. Not to mention other things. I think I blacked out while I was on the phone last night. The other person was talking, then I feel that sort of distorted feeling, and suddenly the sound phones make when they've been off hook for a while is there. It makes me so I can't plan ahead and certainly doesn't help me remember things. This is why I don't program much anymore. I could probably make some to help me, but if my brain isn't working, then I can't do it. I am constanly forgetting which passwords go where too, so it takes me a while just to log in.
Well, my friend or my dad may pick me up from the sugery tomorrow, so it may work out. I hope.
I just got a call for a pre sugery interview. Apparently they scheduled it for the 30th. Now all I have to do is figure out how to get home when it is done. My friend probably can't do it because she has other things to do. I can't let my parents do it because they will make more of a nightmare than walking home. Probably make me give them power of attorney or something before they take me home.
I don't know anyone else. It is not like I can meet anyone, I barely struggle to get food and go to dialysis. Medicaid transport doesn't work because they only do pre scheduled times between 9-5, and the H&W people want to deny any claims, so I doubt any company would do it anyway.
Though I don't understand why they can't schedule these things in advance. I've been waiting a few weeks, I think. Maybe I'll end up taking the bus home after surgery. How fun.
I've just come to a revelation. All these people (sometimes even me) on slashdot keep saying C is inherently insecure, and should be replaced with easier programming languages. The problem is the underlying implementation of these languages may not be secure.
I remember looking at a security vulerability listing site a few months ago (probably cert or securityfocus.com), and there were a few listings for Python. Buffer overflows for string handling and things like that. Obviously this shows even if your Python program is provably secure, you may still have security holes to worry about.
A second problem would be the APIs. Often they have extra features
which an attacker can try to trigger to get in. Think of the system()
function. Inserting a string such as
Now in the long term future (maybe even now?) there may be a high level language which has been audited enough to be considered secure and is well designed enough for programmers to not make mistakes, but I think until a language is shown to be one of those, we should not be so quick to jump ship. If you know how to program, C is still a great choice. I think it is good to profile in a high level language at first, but for big / heavily used projects, they should be translated to a low level language when the design is complete.
The religious zealots have a plan: legislate everything away until the only thing left is their "one true" religion.