The Lair

My my my my. Can’t touch this.

MC Hammer has a blog.

Stop. Hammer time.

Imagine. If all the artistes of the 90s started their own blogs, we’d be able to follow their descent from the heady days of chart topping success to the bottomless trough of mediocrity without needing the “Where are they now” programs on television. Oh, the humanity.

(You knew it was coming, I couldn’t resist looking up Vanilla Ice at the same time. Just in case he has a blog too. Not that I’m interested or anything, you understand. What ? Stop looking at me like that.)

And on a completely different note, the last entry for Google Gals features a Sri Lankan. Well, a Sri Lankan name, anyway. Rawr ? Start your engines, fellow internet stalkers. (I’m kidding. Really. I swear).

I’ve realized that I have very definite opinions about what makes a website work for me. Or rather, I know what doesn’t work. The problem (if indeed it is a problem) is that my views are necessarily subjective and I wouldn’t want to impose them on anyone else. Well, except in the case of this blog, where I generally have the layout most suited to my reading habits and screen resolution.

For example, I prefer smaller fonts because that allows more information to fit into one screen. I’m not necessarily against scrolling to read a long page; but I’d prefer not to. I also prefer liquid layouts, where the content on screen can expand to accommodate a reasonably high screen resolution. If there is a lot of varied content, I’d prefer to have information arranged so as to allow scanning, without needing to read through a lot of (to me) irrelevant crap to get to the meat, as it were.

All other things (such as liquid layout) aside, one thing most people can’t stand in that laundry list above is the smaller fonts requirement. I can see why this is the case. When I was stuck with a lousy CRT at one point, I turned the screen resolution down to 800×600 to spare my eyes. Fortunately, I don’t need to do this anymore, so the screen resolution is turned up high – so as to fit in a lot of information into one screen. My point is, what works for me doesn’t necessarily work for someone else.

So I could go around building websites that suit only myself and fit all the information I want on screen and widen layouts to accommodate a reasonable screen resolution. Impractical, though. I’d be confined to reading my own content. Or, I could do what everyone else does and ignore the niggles. In fact, if you’ve bothered reading this far, you’re probably wondering why the heck I’m ranting about something quite so inconsequential as web page layout and arranging information. Think of the people starving in sub Saharan Africa, etc.

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I’ve made several references too many about the large amount of data that I need to crunch for my work. Well, here’s another … It’s contained in text files that are first bzipped and then tarred. Mere details, you might think… except that the tar file always refuses to decompress properly.

Trivial, I hear you say… just download the darn thing again and try decompressing it. This is gigabytes of data though, so ummm.. downloading it again takes about half an hour. No biggie. Download, try decompressing and you have the same result. My trusty WinRAR says the archive is corrupt.

So I have lots of data, in a corrupt archive and I can’t salvage anything from it.

Try the freeware 7-Zip archiver instead and it chokes and dies at the size of the file.

Back to square one. So, command line tar to the rescue. I tell it to do its thing on the gigantic archive and it actually runs through the entire file without complaining. Maybe tar just silently skips the parts that it can’t extract, I have no idea.

Was it a bug in WinRAR ? I don’t know and I’d rather not find out. But I have some test data. Wooo. So much for rigourous attention to detail. I’m treating this test data corruption episode as “what I don’t know won’t hurt me… much”.

And in keeping with the principle of uncertainty, an old bug report from Microsoft Visual C++ that makes interesting reading (via kashmera)

Yeah. So I don’t normally theme an entire post around an image (not big on the whole visual experience), but this was too funny to pass up.

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An Austrian court sentenced the 68 year old David Irving to 3 years in prison.

His crime? Holocaust denial.

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So Amazon basically bettered their estimate by more than a month and delivered early. I got myself The Complete Far Side.

Well, yeah. So buying a book isn’t a noteworthy episode anymore. Even buying a book of cartoons. Because that’s what Gary Larson does – he draws (drew) cartoons. The blurb for this set says that there are more than 4300 cartoons contained within two volumes. The product description also says that the package weighs in at a hefty 19.8 pounds. Even a set of books which weigh in at nearly 10 kilos isn’t a sufficiently weighty experience to blog about. Except for one thing. The Far Side cartoons are drawn by Gary Larson.

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Hmmm, seems that Perl doesn’t really distinguish (or care) about a square bracket [] versus a function call. I made the same mistake that davorg seems to have made … instead of calling rand(6); as I intended, I called rand[6];

Just a difference in the type of bracket, but they mean something entirely different. And alarmingly, the interpreter can’t help you catch things like that. I was tipped off when the small random values I was expecting kept being inflated by a few 1000s.

And on the topic of things weird and hilarious, it appears that an internal mailing list had an unfortunate reply-to address. Secretarial support could be gotten by mailing secs@… Well, at least till they changed the mail alias just now and I saw that notification.

Yep, that’s S-E-C-S, pronounced “sex”. I think no one would appreciate the sort of juvenile humour that immediately sprang to my mind, so I’m reduced to blogging about it.

On a similar note, how do people pronounce OSX ?

You invoke the name of the Lord in vain while speaking to a devout Christian [who is also a lay minister]. A mere flutter of the eyelids, a rapid blinking informs that this isn’t the sort of exclamation he’s used to hearing…

You spend several minutes critiquing the work of a specific researcher [on being invited to do so], before remembering that this researcher is the same nationality and a university batchmate of your assessor… and your assessor is in the audience listening to your critique.

And your assessor isn’t nodding and smiling either.

So enough about me. How’s your day been ?

So Pittsburgh won. Which wasn’t totally unexpected, but the number of bad calls made by the referees in that game was shocking. All in the Steelers’ favour, mind you.

In the first half alone, there was the disallowed TD (pushaway ? Err.. what ?) and then the Roffleburger Roethlisberger “TD” which was stopped just short of the line… Man, the list goes on. On the plus side, Hasselbeck played better than I ever expected (I was thinking that that it would be a Pitts offensive line vs the Seahawks defense game). To give credit where it’s due, Roethlisberger made some nice moves to disrupt the Seahawks defense, so the scoreline wasn’t entirely unfair. And I might as well update with a note on the number of weirdass penalties that the Seahawks got… a 34 yard punt return, brought back to the 20 yard line… Hasselbeck called for an illegal block ? Aargh.

So much for the Superbowl. In other news, Scotland tripped up the French. I would have been more shocked at this result than the Superbowl, except that the French rarely played like they deserved a win – I lost count of the number of knockons after it hit 7. The French kept trying that silly little inside pass which always ran into a wall of Scottish forwards – and the one time that they actually went for a long pass into the wing, they scored a try. In short, the French passing sorta sucked.

And to cap it all off, Dennis Bergkamp points out the obvious. Not that I saw Bergkamp putting his hand up over the last few games he played, but a valid point nonetheless.

I just had the extremely pleasant experience of having a 2.0gb (yes, gigabytes) download complete in a bit under half an hour. Yeah, so I really shouldn’t be boasting about the bandwidth that’s available in this place, but … it’s slightly scary how fast that data file came down. Of course, the server was in a Spanish university, so they probably had enough upstream bandwidth as well. A word to the wise though – perhaps they didn’t realize that simply tarring a large file doesn’t compress it. With the sort of luck that accompanied my January 2006, I’ll probably find all the test data I need is in some wordy XML format and the actual amount of raw data is closer to 100mb…

In other news, The IT crowd is screening on TV today. I’m going to watch it, again.. for no apparent reason. The episode, of course, was available online since last week – even got a mention on Slashdot.

For some weird reason, the people doing the voice over on the teasers screening on C-4 insist on saying “it” [as in bit or hit] rather than “eye-tee”. Can’t figure out if that’s how people are supposed to pronounce it or not.. Surely not ?

For entirely different reasons, I find myself cottoning onto regular viewings of Hotel Babylon. I’m still struggling to explain why this is, in fact, the case. Especially since it reminds me most of a slightly more topical and trendy edition of The Love Boat.

And after watching a Newsnight panel interview last night about the cartoons, I realized something profound. It’s possible to agree with the stance taken by a side even though their overall demeanour and justifications are both unrealistic and sometimes repugnant. Did I mean the Muslims who are outraged about satirical cartoon jabs about their prophet while agreeing with anti Jewish cartoons in their own papers ? Or did I mean the clueless Christian fundie who said that Jerry Springer the Opera should be banned on religious grounds, but these cartoons were ok ? Or did I even mean the guy who was caught on tape calling Islam a wicked faith ? I’m not sure even I know for sure. I even saw the irony in the German newspaper editor insisting that there is a long history of satire in his culture. In that case, I wonder if he’d mind running a cartoon or three on a certain mustachioed goose stepping Austrian/German of 60 odd years ago ?