I have a laptop that has had a flaky screen for over a year. Finally today I had enough, and I took out the set of tiny screwdrivers. I ended up with 6 extra screws, one brass stand-off, and the defective microswitch, which had been causing all my problems, left over when I re-assembled it. Whenever I have had the pleasure of taking electronics apart I am struck by how many different sized screws are used in the design. While I understand different length screws I am not sure I understand why one would want screws of a different pitch or width. It seems to unnecesarily complicate assembly and repair.
Computer: January 2004 Archives
I am in my 4th hour of conference call now. It happens about once every month or so. It drives me ape. I work on teams that are fairly geographically distributed so sometimes it's the only way to move forward, but man does it drive me crazy at times. Today was horrible in that the call was punctuated with eardrum shredding static a couple of times.
I thought I would share a few of my favorite UNIX aliases.
cd cd !*; pwd cl clear ll /bin/ls -al | sort -k 5,5 -nr | more tenlet telnet
One utility I don't use nearly often enough. Screen, it's a funny little tool for detaching and re-attaching terminals in Linux. It's very cool. I can start a process at work, VPN back in an re-attach, picking up right where I left off.
I was reading a novel by Ellen Ullman called "The Bug" and I came across
a quote that made me think of you.
"Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of
putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no.
The job of putting in bugs is called programming."
If you see me hands bent over the keyboard, clacking away, with the
door closed, likely I am bugging. However, I'll keep the term "bugger"
off of my business cards and resume for the time being.
Having recently read the book, "A Beautiful Mind" and less recently "Who wrote the Bible Code" (don't worry I thought the Bible code was hooey before I read this book, this book just had some interesting approaches for suggesting exactly why it's hooey), I thought I would take two disturbing ideas and merge them. What are the two ideas? One, you can get messages from numbers by converting numbers into base 26 with all numerals represented as the letters A-Z. Two, by skipping every n letters you can get wierd messages out of a textual corpus. Why would I do this? Have I gone over the edge?
No, and no.
I don't think any words that might appear in my corpus could be anything other than chance, I am merely checking out the probabilty that text might appear in a seemingly random set of letters.
What's the method to my madness. One d/l the first 100,000 digits of pi. Step two, use a little perl and Ken Williams, Math::BaseCalc to convert to base 26. Step three, wait longer than you think (Ken, can you make it faster?). Step four, using various skip steps look for words.
How I love perl!
