Awww Mom,
Why can't I have a blog?
Everyone else is doing it...

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Wednesday, April 30, 2003

In addition to exposing the fraud of certain American corporations in their quest to import foreign software and hardware labor using the false claim that there's a shortage in this country (some companies just don't want to pay Americans, they'd rather hire foreign imports and work them harder as a form of captive labor for five years until they earn their green cards - often deliberately delaying the process to extend the length of indentured servitude) in the software development field, Dr. Matloff also has a bitchin' little set of tutorial pages right at the level of college CS and professionals alike.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/unix.html

[more]

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 02:28 PM PST [Link]

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Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Off the web, somewhere strange...

There's a joke about the Clintons: Bill and Hillary are driving through Arkansas and Hillary mentions "See that guy pumping gas? Back in high school, I dated him.". Bill replied "Wow, imagine that! If you'd married him, you'd be married to a gas station attendant", and Hillary replies "No, if I married him, I'd still be married to the President of the United States".

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 02:09 PM PST [Link]

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Friday, April 25, 2003

What about Big Toe? No wait - that's a TCP/IP Offload Engine - don't you love it when acronyms get subsumed into other acronyms?

The ARM (Advanced RISC Processor - there's another embedded acronym) processor has a subset of its instruction set compressed from 32 to 16 bits, allowing a smaller footprint in memory and thus lower cost devices. What do they call this small ARM subsidiary? Why, the Thumb, of course!

http://www.arm.com/armtech/Thumb?OpenDocument

I don't think that THUMB is an acronym for anything ARM specific, just punny.

And I suppose they'll write all their failure/error handlers to the "Bird" interface - for the middle finger that device drivers like to flip at each other and the hardware.

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 02:07 PM PST [Link]

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Tuesday, April 15, 2003

Chervil!

I know no one cares about this but me, but so what. It took almost a month, but my curled chervil seeds finally sprouted! I had given up on the damned things. Now I have two tiny chervil seedlings. After I had given up on the first chervil seeds I planted, I soaked some chervil seeds in water for two weeks. Finally they sprouted - it's almost impossible to tell, you just have to examine them closely - and I was able to plant them. Those will probably take a month to surface too.

What a finicky little seed! If you haven't already guessed, curled chervil is french. Typical, difficult, picky, late, annoying, French.

With my luck, when it gets tall enough it'll surrender immediately and die. But if not, I'll have most of the ingredients for an Herbes de Provence. After all, as pathetic, whiny, yellow, and back-stabbing as the french are, they can still cook, and for that reason alone they shouldn't be nuked, no matter how much their behavior demands us to do it.

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 03:54 PM PST [Link]

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Monday, April 7, 2003

Success!!!

Geraldo was indeed booted out of Iraq by the Pentagon!

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/04/07/sprj.irq.war.rivera.ap/index.html

So much for the "rats" who he claimed were trying to make him look bad. Geraldo can do that all by himself.

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 02:35 PM PST [Link]

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Thursday, April 3, 2003

Linking Hell

So I'm trying to find a missing symbol and match it to the proper library so I can include it in my Makefile, and when I run 'nm' on the directory, it doesn't tell me which file has the right symbol! So, I wrote a script to do it. It's a Bourne Shell script since the system I'm on is ancient and annoying, but that also means this should run anywhere.

Make sure you strip out any ^Ms before you run your script! Unix hates ^Ms.
[more]

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 11:21 AM PST [Link]

I never thought I'd hear of this ever again - one could get away with streaking at Cubi Point, but certainly not in the US. This smells a great deal like an April Fool's joke, but has none of the traditional hallmarks - the dates are off, no joke names, and given the propensity of aviators of all kinds to blow off steam in aggressive ways, this is right in line and about par for the course. Perhaps he had been ballwalking earlier and decided to take it to its logical extreme? Who knows what alcohol induced lapse of judgement caused this incident. A guy can't streak in public, but he can assault women all he likes and no branch of the service will ever meaningfully respond. He should have stuck to pinching bottoms.

Nation: Army commander loses job after streaking on base

http://www.nandotimes.com/nation/story/839056p-5900929c.html [more]

Posted by SpasticMutant @ 08:44 AM PST [Link]

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