I don’t know if anyone has been paying attention, but there’s been some interesting background music being played at the Olympic games this year. In the beach volleyball games, in between points, they played Naruto theme music a couple times. And just now, as NBC introduced the men’s basketball gold medal match, they played theme music from The Prince of Egypt.

Congratulations to Michael Phelps on winning his eighth Olympic gold medal and making everyone at NBC wish they could have his baby.

via patrickmoberg

My desktop is like my room.  Usually I keep it pretty clean.  Then at some point a switch goes off, I suddenly don’t care anymore, and junk ends up all over the place– random media files, shortcuts, readme files to programs I don’t remember installing, etc..  I can tolerate this state for a while before I get fed up and go on a cleaning rage.  I’ve just now completed one such cycle, having spent a large part of the day cleaning up my desktop.

It’s funny how software preferences and opinions on sensible computer usage evolve over time.  For example, I used to think blogs were the most retarded idea and that “bloggers” were those who had failed at life.  Now look at me.  Pretty sad, huh?  Then there’s the view of Windows Media Player users as misguided souls who need to be shown the light (e.g. foobar2k–in right screenshot–, mplayerc, VLC, etc.), similar to the perception online bourgeoisie now have of people who still use IE.

But even software choices that used to reveal technical savvy are being corrupted.  My favorite text editor for a long time, UltraEdit, seems to be killing itself by becoming bloated with more and more useless features while failing to fix existing bugs.  Still, I prefer it over the alternatives like TextPad, Notepad++, etc, although not by much anymore.  My new love is AutoHotkey, which allows you to create macros and assign them to global hotkeys.  I can now automatically launch PuTTY, login, start a shell, and cd to my project directory with a single key, and I’ve also configured a macro to perform KDE-style moving and resizing of windows (ALT+leftclick anywhere in window to move it, ALT+rightclick to resize it).  How sweet is that?

I finally got around to installing Firefox 3 on my laptop just now, and have spent the last several minutes trying to figure out why my userchrome wasn’t working like it did in 2.x.  I’m used to having all buttons, menus, and the address bar on a single line at the top of the window, so that I have more vertical space to display content.  However, that means I need to cut out unnecessary menu items like the Help, View, Edit, History, and Bookmarks.  (I use the collapsible All-in-One  Sidebar add-on for all that functionality.)  Anyway, after installing FF3, the Bookmarks menu came back.  I checked my userchrome.css file and it was the same as before.  Then I googled for at least 5 minutes before I found a user comment that mentioned FF3 had changed the css name for the Bookmarks menu from #bookmarks-menu to #bookmarksMenu.  Ugh, why?

So I’m watching the opening ceremony for the 2008 Olympics, and during a break I see a commercial for a car that advertises “MP3 connectivity.” Does that sound wrong to anyone else? MP3 is a file format, not a hardware specification. Say I have MP3s on a hard drive, is that compatible? No. They should say “audio jack connectivity.” The car itself doesn’t have any hardware or software specifically designed to decode MP3 files (unless they were talking about an MP3 CD player, and they weren’t.)

And then there’s another commercial that touts “IPod compatibility.” Okay, that’s a bit more accurate, but still, that’s like saying, “this CD player can play Soulja Boy CDs.” Soulja Boy isn’t the only music artist on CD out there, and the IPod isn’t the only portable music player with an audio jack connector out there.

I’m writing a web application that requires me to use PHP to output Javascript code, and one of my lines is the following:

echo “fund.Data={$ydata};\n”;

This caused a Javascript error, which didn’t make sense to me until I realized that the squiggly brackets weren’t being printed, so the output was actually:

echo “fund.Data=$ydata;\n”;

This was strange, because squiggly brackets aren’t the type of characters you normally escape in a double-quoted string.  However, if placed around a variable name, they apparently mean something special and aren’t printed.  So in the end, I just broke up the string:

echo “fund.Data={” . “$ydata};\n”;

And that worked fine.

… you see smiley faces in your regex expressions.

I’ve written 2,104 lines of PHP in the past 48 hours. It may not be the most efficient code, and there are a good number of comments in there, but for someone who’s not really a programmer, that’s still kind of a lot. And no, I don’t think writing tons of lines of code is an accomplishment, let alone a measure of coding ability. On a good day, you delete lines of code. So, basically, I’ve had a terrible past two days. :\

BTW, I’m not sure what they’re called, but the one-liner if/else statements (i.e. $a = ($b > $c) ? $b : $c) are a great space saver.

I just finished reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, which I must say is one of the more enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time.  It revolves around cryptanalysis during the WWII era and various top secret Axis codes concerning a German-Japanese conspiracy.  With three major story lines developing in parallel– one from the POV of an insanely brilliant American codebreaker (personal friend of Alan Turing), another with a US marine involved in numerous highly secretive and dangerous missions, and a third with a present day silicon valley entrepreneur who stumbles across the aforementioned top secret codes from WWII– there’s plenty of interesting plot developments and suspense to go around.

While Cryptonomicon has all the makings of a great high tech hacker thriller, there is one overall issue I had with the book.  Although the author apparently knows a great deal about cryptanalysis (he provides satisfying details regarding the theories and mathematics behind various code schemes), some parts of the book come across like a story about hackers written by a non-hacker.  For example, in one section, Randy Waterhouse– the modern day hacker– is tyring to anonymously wipe data from a server before the feds get to it.  So, according to the book, he types in:

telnet laundry.org

(Laundry.org is an anonymous proxy.) The author then goes on to say:

[Randy] logs onto laundry.org using ssh– “secure shell”– a way of further encrypting communications between two computers.

Then, when logged into laundry.org, Randy types:

telnet crypt.kk

Okay, so who in their right mind would use telnet for security-sensitive activity? And the fact that the book says he types “telnet server.tld” and then “logs onto server.tld using ssh” simply does not make any sense. Randy, or any hacker worth two cents, would instead have typed:

ssh laundry.org
ssh crypt.kk

There are other incidents in the book that remind you, if you actually do work in some of the high tech fields discussed in the book, that this is written by someone outside said field. At least that was the case for me when it came down to topics on telecommunications and, to a lesser extent, “hacking” (I hate that term). That issue aside, however, this has got to be one of my favorite books in recent history– a worthy high tech intellectual thriller that makes The Da Vinci Code look like a third grade picture book.

First of all, let me say that I never signed up for DirecTV. It’s one of the mandatory “features” provided by my apartment, along with the four unique home phone numbers that I never use. So, there I am watching the Euro 2008 finals between España and Deutschland when, shortly after Spain scores her first goal, the TV goes blank, and all I see on the TV for the next 30 minutes is “Searching for Satellite Signal…” Later the signal would come back, but only sporadically, making it impossible to watch. So, I basically watched the rest of the match on justin.tv. The lesson to be learned here is, don’t buy DirecTV service unless you’re willing to risk losing your broadcast signal at the most inopportune times.

Anyway, as I’m typing this now, I’m still listening to the hyper Spanish commentators on the Internet stream which, I assume, is coming from a Spanish source (ya, there are Spanish commercials coming on now). Man those Spaniards are crazy about their football. I’m glad Spain won. Their style of play was a lot more entertaining to watch than that of the Germans.