Tag: Software

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Greek Cups of New York

This is a short follow-up to my two older articles, New York in a Cup and NYC’s Syntactic Sugar.

The shelves in my cubicle are currently hosting an small exhibition called “Greek Cups of New York”. I collected these cups over a period of a few months (unfortunately these days most bodegas serve coffee in cups marred with bank ads). I took the cups home over the weekend to take some pictures.

Here it is in all its glory, Sherri Cup Inc, Anthora, the cup that started it all.

And here are some of the ripoffs that I could find. Evergreen diner actually has a custom cup with the pre-911 skyline. It’s my favorite.

[Update] CRAP. By pure coincidence NYT has an aricle about a guy with a humongous collection of these cups the same day I finally got around to posting about my own tiny collection. Damn, it’s so fricking hard to be even semi-original (I learned about the history of the cups from another website as well).

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TT: Nerdcore

New on Monzy.com: it’s the rivalry of Persian Computer Science Gangsta Rappers. Nerdcore will never be the same. I say MC Plus+ should really bust a cap (apparently three is no clear consensus on the origin of this slang expression) in Monzy’s ass, at the very least for not using named A-tags or any other kind of advanced technology that would allow to link to individual articles. Yo.

(In related news, my Russian-speaking readers might enjoy this awesome birthday greeting)

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Another good photo over at travisruse.com. The number on the train is the unit number that uniquely identifies the car. This train is an R46, since they have unit numbers in the 5482-6207 range.Using nycsubway.org you can even tell if the train you were riding in was involved in a major accident. I mean to write a little palm OS app that will take a unit number and give you some info about the train, but I’ll probably never get around to that.

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Public service announcement. Have you backed up all your digital photos? By the way, Picasa 2 has an awesome backup tool.

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TT : Misc

Wow, who knew. According to Wikipedia, the order of the Teutonic Knights exists today as a charitable organization (they don’t seem to have a website though). It even has a grandmaster – one Bruno Platter. And I thought that Alexander Nevsky got rid of them completely. Or at least the Soviet era cartoon that I’ve seen made think so, because my education in that period of Russian History never progressed much further than that.

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I noticed that at home I mostly use Outlook as a very slow and crappy spell checker for my blog. I only keep it around because of the spellchecker and because Gmail does not have an import feature. I tried importing with Gmail Loader, with the whole crappy export to Firebird thing, but that messes up most Russian emails and does not set the dates correctly. Why Google does now provide an import utility is beyond me – it would have completed lock-in for so many users. Also, I wonder, what’s the best software spell checker that money can buy?

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Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters presents : Microsoft’s famous (mentioned in Microserfs and the Joel’s rant ) Ship-It award throughout the ages. I wonder if I could buy one of these on eBay :)

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Do You Remember the Fear?

By force of an old habit I read Livejournal blogs through the website instead of Bloglines. I immediately regretted that because once again almost made a mistake of writing about a private post. Livejournal marks private posts with little locks, and I once very stupidly discussed some non-public information about an LJ user without realizing that it was from a locked or “friends only” post. Eeek, I cringe just remembering that. Anyway, this time I got permission to post about this (even though I will try to keep away from “locked” posts as much as possible). Upc747 was very kind to let me use this photo of an old newspaper that he took:

The Soviets are gone, but Iraq and Iran are still troublesome. And you know what? I’ll take the War on Terrorism over the Cold War. It seems like all the Generation X-ers and Boomers suddenly forgot the terrible, paralyzing fear of the global atomic war. Not the fear of North Korean or terrorist nukes or conventional attacks, but the dark gut feeling, the stomach churning certainty that the Soviet Union and the United States will annihilate the entire world in one final showdown.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at seven minutes to midnight in 2002. It seems that in the years when the clock was at 9, 10, 14 and even off-the-scale 17 minutes everyone seems to have forgotten all about the fear of World War III. Do the people that say that the world at the turn of the new century is crazier than before remember the ominous 1984, when the clock stood at three minutes to midnight? The time when few people thought that the arms race will result in the collapse of the Soviet Union, but almost everyone was certain that the end of human race in nuclear inferno was almost assured?

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Deadprogrammer.com is Moving

Once again instead of writing something good for you to read I am changing my blogging software. Movable Type was a little better than Livejournal, but looks like WordPress is the right tool for me.

It will take some time for me to fix the feeds, lins, etc, so bear with me for a while.

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Web Archeology.

While looking for some hardware in my junk pile I unearthed a stack of Zip disks with old backups. On them was a reasonably complete copy of the long lost “Dead Programmer’s Cafe” circa 1996-1997.

I think this was the first version of the logo, back when I hosted my site at silly.com, my first Internet provider. My High School buddy helped me get an account there for which I am forever grateful. Believe it or not, but a shell account cost about 4-5 bucks a month and you could even do web browsing with Slipknot. Far out.

The logo represents an alpinist scaling a Cray machine.

This is a later version of the splash page when the site was hosted at akula.com . All the cool pages back then had black backgrounds and neon or chrome Photoshop effects.



Later an espresso cup made an appearance on the coffee page and on the splash page together with an IBM card punch.

These webpages served me well. A girl who lived in my neighborhood found my first homepage and sent me an email. We got married a few years later. Her friend learned that I knew minimal HTML and helped me get my first web job. Information Superhighway is great and the future seems to be indeed bright enough to require sunglasses. Thank you, Eugene, Julie and Senator Gore!

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Creative Time Wasting 404

Dear readers, let me vent some useless thoughts about HTML and share the fruit of my procrastination with you today.

It occurs to me that HTML code has finally become a third rate citizen of the World Wide Web. Back in the day, there were horrible WYSIWYG editors that mangled poor HTML, raped it by adding their own non-HTML tags and in general produced bloated and unreadable mess. They still exist today. But now most sites are script generated, so rarely do you see clean, beautiful and handcrafted HTML code when you view the source.

One of the worst offenders is Microsoft, of course. It gave FrontPage, an unholy product of a dying company called Vermeer Technologies (I’ve read in this book that the price of FrontPage was huge and number of copies sold – miniscule) an eternal life as a part of the Office Suite. Other Office programs always produced horrendous HTML. And now, they don’t even want developers to touch HTML directly. They added extra layers – Server Controls (again, plans for VTI extension and FrontPage come to mind) and Web Forms to isolate them from the language that can be learned in 20 minutes and mastered in a few years.

I can’t say that positive things did not happen. For one, fewer people write in old skool all-caps HTML tags. All lowercase tags are so much more readable.

Also now it’s probably safer to put little Easter eggs and funny notes in HTML comments. Are there more of those around? I don’t know. But the oldies but goodies are still out there.

Famous hacker JWZ’s enigmatic page contains this haughty comment:
<!– mail me if you find the secret –>
<!– (no, you can’t have a hint) –>

Smarter people than me tried, but failed to find meaning in in the 404 lines of what seems to be a hex dump. Former Livejournal user mcgroarty, for instance, wasted a good chunk of his time on this. Where is his blog now, by the way? Does anyone know?

What I noticed though is that the page is not static as mcgroarty probably assumed. It changes with time. More than that, it seems like it is not the same data – it probably cycles through different files. You can clearly see that if you look at http://www.jwz.org through the wayback machine. Meanwhile you can see the old design featuring the Jamie’s cool terminal graphics likeness. You can see the old design get resized, then get replaced with the 404 line nightmare. Then “mail me if you find the secret” gets added. Enough people send emails and JWZ, always eager to save some time, adds “(no, you can’t have a hint)”.

Are these 404 a cruel joke – meaning not found?

I suspected that the 404 lines show chunks of the old green image that I mentioned, or are generated from web collage. When I looked at the famous animated compass gif (the one that replaced the Netscape diddler when you typed in about:jwz or went to JWZ’s old homepage in Netscape 1.1 and some other early Netscape version I think) I found another hidden message from JWZ:

“You have a lot of free time on your hands, don’t you?
Tell jwz@jwz.org that you found the secret message!

http://www.jwz.org/
about:jwz

“Some people will tell you that slow is good — and it may be, on
some days — but I’m here toò tell you that fast is better. Being
shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out
of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
”

Oh, Jamie, I have very little free time. But whatever free time I have I usually end up wasting on stupid things.

This does not seem to be the solution to the 404 line homepage puzzle, but the heck with it.

Russian-speaking readers can entertain themselves with reading comments over at tema.ru. There are a couple of hints of hidden links, a few sprinkles of profanity, showing off about Photoshop mastery. Outstanding advice to journalists that was there in the earlier version is gone. I also remember seeing a completely blacked out page about his photo equipment there (you needed to do control-a trick to see it) in a very old version of the site. http://www.design.ru has its share of rowdy commentage.

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The Codename of a Rose

One of the many things that I find endlessly fascinating are software product codenames. You might remember my old post about Talisker – I owe the discovery of my favorite scotch to a Microsoft codename. I was planning to put together a list of all the codenames myself, but as it is typical of me, never got around to it.

Recently I was reading “I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year With Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier” and came up upon some Microsoft codenames that I did not know about before, such as Merlin for Microsoft Encarta. The book is full of interesting MS trivia, but unfortunately I seem to have misplaced it.

I decided it was time to put together that list of codenames, but it seems like since I wrote that post a list like that was put together by somebody else. He heh. Netmeeting’s codename is “Oprah”.

Sadly enough I never worked on a project that had a codename. I did come up with some myself, but many of those were unprintable.