Matthew "Gallon of Strawberries" Sachs

11:13 pm: WIP teaser

A teaser for a work in progress:

No, I don't like that yellow either, not on that background.

Tags: tech

10:48 am: Smarter Spam
I just received a spam comment on my Diagnosis of Inferior Social Proclivity Disorder in Young Adult Patients: A Case Study entry (a "re-mix" of That's Why The Lady is a Tramp, written in the style of an article in a psychology journal) advertising medicine for OCD.

Tags: tech

06:21 pm: Scripty Goodness
I've finally moved my personal repository over to Subversion and added some recent scripts.

g2export will grab all of the images from a Gallery 2 website,
preserving the album structure on the website as a folder structure on
the disk and taking file names from captions if available.

ul2shoplist is designed as an iPhone bookmarklet for doing shopping
lists. It takes the first unordered list on a page whose first list
item doesn't contain a class attribute and transforms all of the items
on that list into checkboxes; when the boxes are checked, they will
move to the end of the list, and they will return to their original
location if they're unchecked. We do our shopping lists on a wiki,
and this is designed to work with that; the "first list item doesn't
contain a class attribute" restriction is so that it skips over the
"table of contents" list that MediaWiki puts in. I used the ever-nifty John Gruber's Javascript Bookmarklet Builder to convert it to a bookmarklet.

sms2txt and jotter are programs I wrote to export data from my P910
UIQ smartphone; I wanted to move my Jotter notes and SMS messages stored in the P910's Mail application over to the iPhone.

Tags: tech

09:30 pm: Adventures in Wifi
roguesylph's Netgear wireless router was dying a slow, painful, death, and it finally bothered me enough that I got a new one for her and Tabi, the new Apple AirPort 802.11n base station.

However, I wanted to set the new one up with decent security; the old one was using WEP. But the Nintendo DS doesn't support WPA, and management determined that DS support was mission-critical.

The solution I decided on lets us use WPA for the laptops, WEP for the DS's, and has performance benefits to boot. ( Click here for the gory details. )

Tags: tech

12:51 am: I've spent the past nine hours preparing for a half-hour lecture on unit testing that I'm giving tomorrow in CS22a, one of the classes I'm TAing. The best part of the code I wrote for the lecture is that it can throw an ImpossiblePizzaException.

Tags: creative, life, ta, tech

02:44 pm: Interface Design Question: Laptop Fn Keys

On every PC laptop made in the past 5+ (10+ ?) years, many of the "F1" (F2, F3, ...) keys, and sometimes some of the other keys (the arrow keys in particular) serve two purposes. When pressed normally, they act as their respective key — F1 acts as F1, etc. However, when pressed in conjunction with the "Fn" key, they perform a special function indicated by an icon on the key. Usually both the icon and the label on the Fn key will be blue (whereas the other key labels are white.) For instance:

Today, one of my professors tried to hook up his laptop to the projector and was befuddled when it didn't work. As soon as I saw him struggling, I knew that the problem was that he had to turn on the external video out. PC laptops typically have three display output modes: internal LCD only, external (VGA, or sometimes DVI these days) connector only, or both internal and external simultaneously. In order to change the mode, one typically has to either use the Fn function of one of the F keys (typically F5, F6, or F7.) Sometimes it can also be done through some buried option in the Display control panel.

( Analysis of the problem (long-ish)... )

Tags: creative, tech

12:17 am: Trust and Security in Harry Potter
Bruce Schneier links to some dissection of Hogwarts' security. The link at the bottom of that post is also worth checking out. Why do wizards attach significance to someone's appearance when making Polyjuice Potion is a grade school potions exercise?

Tags: media, tech

07:02 pm: Abusing SQL for Fun and Profit
SELECT run_id FROM runs WHERE (
  SELECT count(*) FROM run_diagnostics WHERE runs.run_id = run_diagnostics.run_id AND diagnostic LIKE "% Wed %" AND (
     SELECT count(*) FROM run_diagnostics AS 'rd_inner' WHERE run_id = run_diagnostics.run_id AND tool_id = run_diagnostics.tool_id AND rd_inner.line = run_diagnostics.line+3 AND diagnostic LIKE "%libstdc%" LIMIT 1
  ) > 0 LIMIT 1
) > 0;

Tags: tech

11:23 pm: Note to self: (row,column) position does not uniquely identify an element in an NSBrowser (OS X Finder's column view).

Tags: tech

08:49 pm: If anyone ever needs an excuse to shoot me in the head, the read buffering scheme used by Net::OSCAR up until several seconds ago will provide splendid justification.

Tags: tech

11:02 pm: Riddle
Q: How is bootstrapping GCC like Pokémon or some crap like that?
A: I currently have a stage 2 xgcc building banshee.

...Entry which isn't horribly obscure "joke" to come at some point in the future when I leave work before midnight.

Tags: humor, life, tech

09:32 pm: Resolving CVS Conflicts for Dummies

Before:

<<<<<< foo.c
blah
blah
======
snoo
snoo
>>>>>> 1.1

After:

#ifdef MERGE_BORKED_DARWIN
blah
blah
#else
snoo
snoo
#endif /* MERGE_BORKED_DARWIN */

Tags: tech

11:02 am: GCC Source File of the Day

gcc/config/rs6000/t-rs6000

Fade into an early-20's John Connor creating recruiting films in Final Cut Express. Ominous music plays subtly in the background.

Twice, the machines have tried to assassinate John Connor. Twice, they have failed. This time, they have AltiVec instructions. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, and Bruce Campbell as the PowerTerminator 975FX.

Music crescendos as the "bomb" error dialog from MacOS System 6 appears, with the text "Illegal instruction error, prepare for termination."

John: "How can we stop him? He can figure out our every move faster than we can!"
Sarah: "Damn it, I couldn't stop them from pushing the clockspeed to 3 GHz."
T-800: "He has a hypervisor with dual cores. It's like there's two of them."

Montage of action sequences, each cut accentuated by beats in the music. Sarah pointing a gun at Richard Stallman. John leading a platoon of troops in basic training. Something exploding. Finish with long shot of the PowerTerminator, fading into the words "July 2005".

Tags: creative, humor, tech

04:54 pm: Some things are not what they sound like
Here at work, I've just written a long comment about deviant compilers involved in three-way merges.

Tags: humor, tech

07:55 pm: Death to the demoness DejaGNU!

"Gee, Bob, I'd like to design a test suite for a large software product."

"That's great, Alice. I'm sure people working on that will appreciate the ability to know that their thing is correct."

"Yeah, but a lot of the time they'll probably run this test suite, and a particular section of it will blow up because they broke a particular area of the thing. Do you think that people might want an easy way to, given the name of a particular test or group of tests which failed, rerun that subset of the test suite?"

"I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I was busy enjoying the many fine hallucinogens I frequently partake of."

"Ooh, shiny!"

—Conversation amongst the GCC test suite designers

Hm, my code does not appear to have written itself. Oh well, back to work...

Tags: life, tech

11:15 pm: Fun Bugs
What's the best place in Perl to find a bug? Why, the test harness (login: guest, password: guest), the thing that runs the Perl test suite, of course!

Tags: tech

05:06 pm: GCC is incredibly amusing

(GCC is the program my group at Apple helps develop.) Don't believe me? The GCC sources have:

• A directory called "gcc.c-torture/execute"
• Proof that Apple thinks that their platform is manlier than anyone else's — lots of Apple-specific code is surrounded by "#ifdef TARGET_MACHO"
• Proof of GCC's egotism — if it detects an internal compiler error — an indication of a problem with itself — it normally aborts with the message "internal compiler error". However, if it detected any kind of problem anywhere in the user's source code prior to the internal error, instead of fessing up to its own issues, it whines "confused by earlier errors, bailing out"

Tags: humor, tech

07:13 am: Announcing Net::OSCAR development drive towards 2.0

One 13-hour hacking binge later, and the NO_XML bugfixes branch is merged back into the Net::OSCAR trunk, and the protocol is fully XMLified. See my posts to net-oscar and imirc-devel lists for some more info.

Er, and if you want me to explain any of that in a way that makes a bit more sense to you, let me know... I think that the Protocol.xml stuff is very nifty and quite possibly worth generalizing and putting on CPAN, I'll have ask the monks what they think about that, I'm not 100% convinced that it's not a hideously over-complicated insane boondoggle.

I'm giving an interview tonight for the WebTV Users newsgroup regarding IMIRC, irc.zevils.com #imirc @ 1600 PDT / 1900 EDT.

Tags: life, tech

03:16 am: Four down, one to go

Finished my penultimate assignment of the semester, UDRP Wizard. The UDRP is the policy for resolving conflicts between trademarks and domain names, like when some schmoe registers microsoft-online.com — which I swear is a random example I made up, but actually is registered by some schmoe who would lose a UDRP case and get his domain transferred away from him if Microsoft ever bothered to file a complaint.

Reading through past UDRP cases is not a good way to renew one's faith in humanity, there are an awful lot of people doing stupid crap. The UDRP panelists get annoyed, there was one case where the judgement said something like "Since the Respondent did not decide to grace the Panel with a response to the complaint..."

Tags: life, politics, tech

03:48 am: Programming Fun Challenge

A couple of years ago, I took part in a series of events on K5 called the Programming Fun Challenge. The tradition has been resurrected. Given a deck of cards for the game Tragic, each of which has one or more of five colors, can the deck be decomposed into piles of 20 or more cards for each color?

You can find links to previous PFC problems and results here.

Tags: tech