Posts

Posted on

Kajillion Words You Can’t Say On A Scrolling Cubicle Marquee

Remember my geek toy, right? It’s out of commission for a little while, even though even my boss’ boss told me that I am probably being too cautious. Well, I checked the search terms in the logs for obvious signs of profanity and didn’t find any. But of course people search for some anatomical terminology that would probably not be a good idea to have scrolling above my cubicle. Also my merry co-workers will go to great lengths to stuff searches with embarrassing stuff. And then there’s that person who keeps searching for “bunghole” (and not finding anything).

So the question is this – do you know any industrial strength open source profanity filter list that will be restrictive enough to filter out anything above and beyond George Carlin’s Famous Seven?

Posted on

Run Silent, Run Deep

There seems to be a sleeper cell amongst readers. From a recent email exchange with my former tech lead and mentor I learned that he’s been reading my journal for 2 (!) years without making a single comment. That’s some advanced blog ninjitsu, I got to tell you.

So, what is it that makes commenting in my journal such a hard thing to do, and who else is out there?

Also, does the facial expression of the user icon that Howard Tayler drew for me annoy you? I think maybe I should ask him to draw me another one.

Posted on

I Wonder What Are They Shaped Like

A man is walking down the street in New York City when he comes across a shop with clocks and watches hanging in the front window.
”Good!” he thinks to himself. ”I can get my watch fixed.”
He walks into into the shop and says to the man behind the counter, ”My watch stopped a couple days ago. I’d like you to fix it.”
The shopkeeper replies incredulously, ”I don’t repair watches, I’m a mohel!”
”Then why do you have all those watches and clocks hanging in your window?”
The mohel replies, ”What would you suggest I hang there?”

Posted on

RNC In NYC

Conventioneering Fingerlicans and protesting Tastycrats are out in full force, but so many New Yorkers got out of the city that the streets are almost empty (by New York standards of course). In honor of those who left the city the Empire State Building was yellow yesterday (despite the fact that the official website says that it’s in honor of US Open).

I’ve seen a lot of regular police officers and semi-military ones out before, but I haven’t seen such a concentration of police brass performing regular cop duties. There was a police lieutenant guarding the subway turnstiles, another lieutenant directing traffic and a captain guarding what looked like a normal transit bus with police “Christmas tree” on the roof filled with cages and lockers of assault rifles (and probably other stuff). They even posted a sergeant and a couple of cops to guard Victoria’s Secret (probably from Republicans who might want to find out what it is).

I took this picture because my wife was egging me on. Now she wants credit.

There was this cool bigbrothermobile driving around. Hey, it doesn’t matter if you are in a velo-rickshaw. You gotta get your 2 minutes of hate on.

Posted on

/dev/sign

Ok, I am going to wallow in my geekiness. I went ahead and bought a Pro-Lite led marquee Model PL-M2014RV6 (aka Tru-ColorII ) on eBay for 150 hard earned American dollars.

I mounted it in my cube, connected it to the serial port of my computer and proceeded to hack together a perl script that talks to it. Easy enough. Then I innovated (in a Microsoft meaning of the word) – wrote a script that parses our weblogs and outputs what people search for on the marquee with fancy dissolve effects. Add a couple of lava lamps and it’ll be just like Googleplex.

I read up on Pro-Lite programming on this website, but ended up not using any of the code from there. Also some of the information there is outdated – the ROM on my sign is version 6.5

P.S. For those of you who are wondering, “tru” colors are: red, orange, yellow, lime (!) and green. They come in dim, normal and bright varieties, also rainbow, red/green, red on green and other combinations. All other colors are not “tru”.

Posted on

Dream A Little Dream Of S-40

If you’ve been readin my journal for a while, you might know how important dreams are to me.

There are a lot of important and famous dreams recorded in history – Mendeleev seeing the periodic table; Kekule seeing the worm Oroborous and understanding the benzine ring; Chief Sitting Bull seeing soldiers falling upside down and predicting victory of the Little Big Horn, Hitler seeing the trench engulfed in molten lava in his dream and leaving it thus saving himself, Julius Caesar having a dream in which one website that will be left unnamed says “his mother appeared” and then “taking” Rome, etc.

Over the weekend I was reading Igor Sikorsky, His Three Careers in Aviation by Frank DeLear, and in it was an example of a forshadowing dream that I haven’t encountered before.

The book says that when he was 11 years old, Sikorsky had a dream in which he was standing in a narrow passageway. There was a bluish light overhead and the floor with a fine carpet under his feet. The floor was vibrating, but for some reason he immediately realized that it wasn’t a train or a boat, but a flying machine. He walked through to a door that led to a richly decorated lounge and then woke up. Since he was born in 1889, this would make it the year of 1900 when he had the dream. The Wright Brothers flight was three years away.

Years later, in America Sikorsky was walking through his latest design, the S-40 plane and was struck by a sense of deja vu. There it was, bluish light of fluorescent lamps overhead, the vibration and the fine carpet and even the smoking lounge at the end.

(the photo is from Igor Sikorsky, His Three Careers in Aviation) by Frank DeLear

Next in my reading queue: John C. Wright’s The Last Guardian of Everness – a fantasy that deals with dream worlds and such. Figures.

Posted on

The Ugliest Building In Brooklyn

Inspired by Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month, which currently features Frank Gehry’s Museum of Tolerance  that looks like robot’s puke ,  I decided to start my own section on architectural monstrosities.

Behold – The Six of Diamonds Building.

Just the first look at it puzzled me immediatly. Is this a residential or a commercial building? How many floors are there in the structure? What is the function of the small square windows on the facade?  Is there a windowless torture chamber on the top floor beautified with the green diamonds? It seems like pepto-bismol would have been a better choice of color, but then that’s probably what it was before fading out.

Posted on

WML : Screw You, Computer Hardware Manufacturers!

Continuing with the screw theme, let me share with you another piece of fastener lore that I’ve learned over the year. As any person who ever cut her hands on ragged edges of cheaply made computer cases knows, when you buy a filthy overpriced little baggy of computer screws there’s a weird and confusing variety inside.

Here are the most common, left to right: chassi screw, cd-rom screw, floppy screw and hard disk screw. Now here’s the confusing part – The hex headed chassi screw is a bit bigger than the very similar cd rom screw. But the soft metal of computer components makes it possible to use it to fasten everything – floppy drives, cd roms, hard disks. It is the most useful screw of the four. I get the feeling that the hard drive screw is just a tad bigger, which makes it almost as useful, but it will get stuck if you try to attach a floppy drive with it. The cd rom screw and the floppy screws are next to useless – without knowing the proper type of screw to use, most people already embiggened the holes with chassis screws, and the little cd rom screws end up pretending to go in, but then falling out. They end up filling up all the useful space in the little box where I store my accumulation of computer screws.

Since I mostly buy cases with motherboards already mounted in them, I am not going to delve into the whole plastic vs. metal motherboard standoffs. I’ll just mention that the metal ones sometimes cause shorts by themselves, and plastic ones are sometimes not strong enough to prevent shorts from flexing. There, I said it. Now I’ll merrily continue my screw rant.

But at least the computer screw weirdness makes peoples life harder not on purpose. But some fancy pants computer (cough Hpaq cough) and consumer device (cough TIVO cough) manufacturers use torx screws and tamper proof torx screws. For that exact reason I own a whole bunch of torx screwdrivers. That is a bit sneaky.

But not as sneaky as the hardcore tamper proof screws made by Tamperproof Screw Company of New York:

Snake Eyes®, which I see a lot in elevator button panels, Tri-Wing® that I hear is used in GameboyTM devices, OpsitTM, which is which is built to make mockery of the holy mantra of “Righty Tighty, Lefty Loosey” – it tightens conterclockwise (just like MTA lightbulbs). Тhere are other weird things like philips or torx screws with a pin in the middle and one way screws.

Also there seem to be a whole bunch of Pozidriv screws around. I think that the last cam out fiasco that I had was caused by me trying to use a Pozidriv bit on a Philips screw or the other way around. It’s very hard to tell them apart. Luckily I had screw drill out set similar to this one. It works ok on easy cases, but for every screw that I remove with it there seem to be a couple where I end up just completely breaking down the head of the screw leaving the rest under surface.

Wow, it looks like Philips screw company has special aerospace screws, like this wicked looking ACR Torq-Set. I would be way cool to get a box of those.

This is just like one of my favorite Russian sayings – “Ð?а каждую хитрую жопу еÑ?Ñ‚ÑŒ хуй Ñ? винтом. Ð?а каждый хуй Ñ? винтом найдётÑ?Ñ? жопа Ñ? лабиринтом”.