Dead Programmer's Cafe

Blog

  • Testing. Testing. 1. 2. 3?

    When programmers test their code, the need to come up with some kind of test data. And most programmers are not very creative (just as everybody else). Very often you can log into various websites with the login “test@test.com” and password “test”. I am afraid to even think about what test@test.com’s inbox contains. It’s a real email address you know, the emails don’t bounce.

    Here are some interesting test strings:

    Of course, everyone knows the famous “Hello, World” test string. I’ve heard that for the first time it appeared in the bible, but I am not sure.

    The other most famous test strings are “foo” and “bar”, which apparently come from foobar, which is derived from WWII slang. FUBAR is a relative of SNAFU.

    A professor that taught VB in college told us, that about the time he was developing a database application for a hospital. His favorite test person was James T. Kirk and his mates, and during testing the poor captain got every imaginable sort of ailment. With funny comments.

    When I worked at iXL, our tech lead, a German by the name of Lothar, liked to use a string “4711” as most people use “foo”. Once, in a meeting he asked if anyone new why he was using “4711”. He was pretty surprised that I new what “4711” was. “4711” is what some of you may know as Koeln Water, which was the first commercially produced perfume. That’s where the term “cologne” came from. And “4711” is the number of the building where Koeln Water was produced.

    I use “1729” for my testing needs sometimes.

  • One Ring To Bind Them All

    After I lost $30 pounds on Atkins diet my wedding ring started to slip off my finger. Of course, I am not Frodo, and wearing it on a piece of string was not an option. I used to leave it on the dressing table a lot, and finally it disappeared. Who stole Precious is not clear, but Tilde the cat is a likely suspect. So my wedding band is hopelessly lost.

    It was a titanium ring. It looked like this:

    Interestingly enough, the company that makes these rings is located in Canada. I wonder if they were inspired by the Engineer’s Ring.

    I have a somewhat unhealthy fascination with titanium. I love that metal. SR71 Blackbird planes, Akula class subs, and if you are a Star Wars geek, TIE fighters are made mostly of titanium. I own a titanium watch and eyeglasses frame. I used to have a titanium pda case, but I lost it too :( Titanium is almost indestructible, but easily lost.

    Well, now I need to replace the ring. I am thinking of choosing a different, fancier design. Probably one of these.

    I was also thinking about a more exotic material for the ring, like iridium, but nobody makes them.

    By the way, titanium rings are machined out of a single block of titanium. You can’t really smelt titanium, so resizing the rings is out of the question. Imagine how much skill is needed to machine interlocking rings out of a single block:

  • Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!

    mentioned in a post that his ship used to have gas turbines while in military service, but then was refitted with diesels. I realized that I did not know how a gas turbine engine works. I new that jets use turbines, but not much beyond that. Well, http://www.howstuffworks.com came to my rescue.

    The article mentioned, that there is a surprising amount of activity in home built gas turbine engines. Surprising doesn’t even cover it. “HOLY CRAP” is more like it.

    Check this out:
    Mike’s Home Built Turbojet Engine
    Larry’s gas turbine jet engine
    John Williamson’s gas turbine and pulse jet stuff!
    And that’s just the first page from google!

    The dudes who make ray guns out of microwave magnetrons pale in comparison.

  • What, Again With The Fishing Rods?

    If you’ve been reading my journal, you probably know that I like nice things. Consumerism is not foreign to me at all. Some of you are probably are sickened by my consumerism and are just sticking around for pretty pictures of New York that I take. In any case, I am going to brag a bit about my fishing rods.

    Mind you, custom fishing rods that I like so much do not help me catch more fish. In fact, for some reason, the biggest fish that I ever caught were taken on the crappiest rental rods.

    What does it mean for a rod to be custom made, you ask? Well, fishing rod industry is somewhat similar to the PC industry. You can either buy a pre-assembled rod, or buy all the same ingredients and put it together yourself. Of course, it takes much more skill and know-how to put together a fishing rod. A rod made by an artisan will be much better than a factory assembled one. The master will find the optimal bend of the blank and affix the guides so that you can cast a bit further, the balance will be a touch better, there will be a bit more sensitivity (all compared to a factory assembled rod made from the same ingredients).

    But one thing that the custom rod will have that will instantly set it apart is the butt wrap. Butt is the bottom part of the rod of course. :)

    What is a butt wrap? It’s a pattern made with tightly woven threads. These patterns are defined by hundreds or thousands of overlapping threads, often wound one at a time. Designs can be simple that take an hour or two or super complex ones that take days of concentrated work.

    There is a book about this and even software called VisualWrap for making the designs. No, it’s not a part of Visual Studio :)

    Some designs, like this dolphin fish , work kind of like pixel graphics.

    Others are complex geometric shapes.

    The three nice rods that I own are not really custom, although high quality. Buy I’ve had them custom wrapped, although with rather simple patterns. I’ll take pictures sometimes, but right now I can’t figure how to minimize glare from the transparent epoxy that covers the pattern.

    I am about to buy two real custom rods, and I already picked a pattern for the wrap. The first pattern is going to look like :

    Take a look at the rest of this guy’s examples here.

    And a second one is going to be a simple solid diamond wrap modeled after Samurai Jack’s sword.

  • Membership

    Livejournal community “bad_sexis ” is pretty funny at times: “The moral of the story, kids, is that teeth and penii don’t mix“.

    But the plural of “penis” is “penises” if you are a simple semi-literate person like me, or “penes” if, like , you like to show off your knowledge of Latin derived words.

  • Fishing Weather

    As for fishing weather forecast: here’s one and here’s another one.

    And there is also real time data from a C-MAN station and a buoy.

    I am looking into making these into an rss feed.

    The weather is getting worse on Sunday. That sucks because I am thinking of going fishing for mackerel.

  • In the NAVY

    I was looking for marine weather sites and found this..

    Life in the NAVY is sweet. And not a single picture of latrine cleaning.

    Hmm, this would make a really nice woodblock print.

    Oooh, this is interesting: NAVY has a special set of ranks for photographers: “Photographer’s Mate 1st Class”, “Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class”, “Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class”. Hmm, I wonder how they earn promotions.

    Here’s how. By taking exams!

    Iiinteresting. Their insignia used to consist of a view camera,
    , but now now is this: (an enlarger?).

    I really need some good military uniform and insignia books. Online resources suck.

  • WML: Dude, I Am Getting a Dell

    Guess what? This post is going to be about microcomputers. PCs.

    I never owned a computer in the Soviet times. Not even a programmable calculator. I did have access to some old Wang clones called Iskra (Spark) in an after school program, played with a programmable calculator of a neighbour, played games on a frien’d PC, played games at my father’s friend’ work computer ( also PC), paid to play games on Sinclare computers that some enterprising people set up as a pay-per-play arcade, etc. Oh, I still remember the horror in the eyes of my teacher when I found a set of programs that calculated the level of contamination from a nuclear blast given the input of wind speed, bomb yeild and some other variables. Those Iskras were donated from the Red Navy.

    In the US, my father purchased a 386 for a humongous sum of $1300. It was put together in some computer shop on avenue U. That was in 1993 or 1992, I think. Since then, I’ve been upgrading my computer on the average once every three years. I think In all, I went through 3 cases, 6 motherboards and 2 monitors (not counting my wife’s computer). I never owned a brand name computer. After the second computer I’ve learned that I could be putting together myself.

    It seemed like a good idea at the time, putting together my own stuff. What could be simpler? Pop in a motherboard, a videocard, a modem, some ram, some hard drives — and you’ve got a box!

    I’ve become thoroughly familiar with what cuts from a ragged computer case feel like. I’ve learned how hard it is to be without the Internet when your computer is in pieces on the ground (and a driver needed to make the new hardware run is on the Internet, of course). There are very few types of flashable hardware that I did not have to flash. I accumilated a huge collection of computer screws, cables, cards and thermal processor grease.

    The questions that went through my mind were:
    Why are jumpers so tiny? (these days they have jumpers with little tails that can be taken out with just fingers)

    Why ide cables are so hard to deal with? (there are rounded cables available now)

    Why it’s so hard to find 0th pin on the hard drive connector? (newer ide cables come with a little peg that doesn’t allow it to be put in the wrong way)

    Which idiot came up with PS2 plugs? (one word – USB , well, ok, three words).

    And most importantly: WHY ALMOST NO PIECE OF HARDWARE, PORT OR CABLE COME WITH A LABEL THAT WOULD CARRY MANUFACTURER’S NAME AND A MODEL NUMBER????????????????????

    This is all slowly changing, of course, but the much bigger problem of minor factory defects and incompatibilities between chipsets still plague individually bought components.

    My last self-put together box – a dual processor PIII 1000 sucks ass. I could not get a single AGP video card to work with it. An IDE raid controller that worked ok on my previous motherboard wold cause all OS to crash. And finally, two little pegs that held the cooler on the processor broke, and I can’t keep PIIIs from overheating.

    I’d like to say, that after I’ve removed the raid card and put in a PCI video card, the system ran extremely steady for a year. Now it’s time to think about the future of my computers.

    So my resolution is this:

    1) Throw out the crappy dual processor motherboard and the crappy coolers. Buy a nice cheap and super steady single processor PIII motherboard + a stock Intel coolers and turn that computer into a file server. Four 120 Gig 5400 RPM drives (I don’t need the speed, and those drives run much cooler) should do the trick. The case of that computer is very nice and cool looking (it’s a square. It looks like this:

    Maybe I’ll even make the drives removable, but so far all removable racks that I’ve tried sucked ass.

    2) Buy a nice Dell workstation. That will be used for image manipulation and coding.

    3) Buy a big ass LCD monitor (or maybe one of those Sony 27″ CRT monitors) for use with the workstation.

    4) Buy a tablet pc for myself and a laptop for my wife.

    5) Donate or sell on eBay all the crappy hardware still sitting in my drawers.

    I think all the money I saved this year on rent should easily buy me this hardware.

  • Speakeasy, I love Eu!

    Speakeasy service is rockin’!

    When the TT was closed, they asked for feedback. More than that, they’ve replied to it!
    I’ve got my money back for the eBay modem and an apology.

    Wooo hooo!

    So the moral of the story is – use Speakeasy DSL!.

    Now I can go back to writing something more interesting.

  • This EU would like to take a TT and DSLAM somebody

    My trials and tribulations with Speakeasy DSL reminded my of an old phone prank which goes like this:

    Part 1.

    Prankster#1: Hi, I am a phone technician, Do you have a minute to help me test your phone line?
    Victim: Ok
    Prankster#1: Fold your phone cord in half. Can you hear me?
    Victim: Yes
    Prankster#1: Fold it in half again. Can you hear me?
    Victim: Yes
    Prankster#1: Fold it in half again.
    [long pause]
    Victim: What do I do with this now?
    Prankster#1: Stick it up your ass. [hangs up laughing]

    Part 2.

    Prankster#2: Hi, I am investigating some complaints about phone pranks. Did somebody call you recently?
    Victim : Yeah, yeah. Somebody called me pretending to be a phone technician.
    Prankster#2: And what did they tell you?
    Victim : They told me to stick phone cord up my ass!
    Prankster#1: Well, now you can take it out!

    So, back to my DSL trouble. I got on the phone with a very cheerful technician who asked me to turn the DSL modem on, tested something, then asked me to turn it off and again tested something. After a few rounds of this she told me that my modem is finally busted after 3 years of service.

    She said that I have 3 options: to have a Covad tech install one for me ($$$), purchase a new one from Speakeasy ($$) or get one on eBay ($).

    I won a bid for a modem on eBay (which set me back ~40) and proceeded to take apart my own modem (to see if there is an apparent short from dirt backup). Turned out that inside it was wrapped in some sort of metallic wrapper (I guess for shielding). The circuit board said that it was made in Mexico. Interestingly it said “made” and not “hecho”. I wonder why.

    In any case, next day I tried to connect with my supposedly busted DSL modem, and surprise-surprise: it worked. I went straight to Speakeasy support center web page and it said “Waiting on covad to replace the DSLAM card. It was not responding to testing requests. I will update this in the morning” – exactly the opposite of what the cheerful tech told me.

    Well, I guess Covad’s “DSLAM” – “Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer” was causing the outage.

    I Speakeasy support again and told them that I’ve already purchased a new modem. I’ve been told to sell it back on eBay.

    While going through this shit I learned a few interesting acronyms:

    EU – End User (that’s me) and not European Union. I guess it’s pronounced “E-uuu”.
    BERT – Bit Error Rate Test, and not the evil muppet of the same name
    TT – Trouble Ticket , and not the TT (Tokarev Tula) handgun
    CPE – Customer Premise Equipment (a fancy name for a DSL modem), and not Continuing Professional Education

    Now I have a fun task of grading my tech support experience. Hmm, I think I’ll send them a link to this post. Ha.

    Oh, by the way. Speakeasy still rocks. I do like their service. I think it’s the Covad people who are at fault here. If you want to get DSL, get Speakeasy.