Geek Boy's blog

Dear Hollywood

2009-12-26T15:07:00.003-06:00

Doc Searls has a great post about the hassles and stupidity involved with Hollywood's region encoding. Worth reading. As a bi-lingual family, we have this problem in spades. Finding Region-1-coded movies with German soundtracks that are appropriate for 3rd graders and kindergardeners is a challenge.

Fun little usability nightmare

2009-12-15T11:52:00.002-06:00

Just noticed this fun little usability problem with the phorum system at the U of Mn computer science department.Assume you really do want to cancel.Do you hit "cancel", or "ok"?

Fun in programming languages

2009-11-08T22:07:00.002-06:00

I'm taking a graduate-level programming languages class at the U of Mn. One of the problems in the current homework is to implement a binary tree (in C) that initially can hold ints, but can be genericized to hold anything. To show that it can hold anything, I'm implementing a data type for burritos.The crown jewel of this assignment is getting to write this code:typedef enum _burritomeat {veggie

Motorola Droid - WTF?

2009-11-07T09:20:00.001-06:00

The new motorola droid handset has a picture of a red glowing eye on the front. For the love of God, don't Motorola already know that technology with red glowing eyes never ends well?

People of Wal-mart

2009-10-19T19:52:00.000-05:00

I'm a bad person because I find these amusing.

Fun with float

2009-10-15T19:53:00.002-05:00

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what this C program prints as output? I'm running it on Mac OS/X 10.6.1 on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, but this should be IEEE-754-compliant math and return the same results on any processor you like that uses IEEE-754.#include int main(int argc, char *argv[]){ float basenum = 16777210.0; float num = 0.0; int counter = 0; for(counter=0; counter < 16

Mac OS and Win7

2009-10-15T15:38:00.004-05:00

Short post today.I'm generally a mac user, but I need to use windows from time to time. When I have to do this, I use either Vista or WIn7. Using XP feels awkward, and the longer I spend away from it, the less I ever want to see it again.So, I've been running Vista x64 on my main windows box, and recently attended a Microsoft event at which I received a copy of Win7 Ultimate. This was nice of

Songs in code?

2009-08-21T14:06:00.001-05:00

void tomsawyer() { try { assertequals(you.say(his_company), you.say(society)); } catch (mist) {} catch (myth) {} catch (mystery) {} catch (drift) {} finally { Runtime.exit(TomSawyer.WARRIOR); }}

Clojure talk

2009-07-21T23:15:00.004-05:00

Just got back from an Object Technology User's Group meeting, where Stuart Halloway spoke on Clojure. Whew - not sure I can get any more hyperlinks into that sentence!Clojure is a lisp that runs on the JVM. It's full of parentheses, like a good lisp ought to be, and it can be difficult to read for developers who are more familiar with C-derived or Coffee-based languages. However, like a lisp, the

Hanging out at #javaone

2009-06-03T18:08:00.005-05:00

I've been at JavaOne 2009 for the past few days. Lots and lots of great information, and learning a lot. Many of the talks I've been attending have been about alternate languages that run on the JVM - JRuby, Scala, Groovy, jython. Many of these languages solve problems that are difficult to solve given the constraints of the Java language, or at least are difficult to solve elegantly. Some of the

javaone 2009!

2009-06-01T12:59:00.002-05:00

I'm at JavaOne in San Francisco. I'll occasionally post updates to Twitter. Http://www.twitter.com/pclark

Confused about EIST/SpeedStep

2009-05-15T14:55:00.002-05:00

Intel SpeedStep is a technology that allows the processor to be underclocked when it's not busy. AMD has a similar concept called cool'n'quiet. The idea is that if the processor is slowed, it'll run cooler and use less power. If it's emitting less heat, then the building needs less air conditioning, and everyone is happy.We've got a bunch of Dell OptiPlex 745, 755, and 760 computers at work.

From the mouths of babes...

2009-05-13T15:25:00.004-05:00

A couple of days ago, Bea was annoyed that Laurel wasn't respecting her request for Laurel to keep her hands to herself. Bea complained to her mom "sometimes I think Laurel doesn't know what listening means".

Fun with Mail.app

2009-04-08T16:15:00.002-05:00

I love Mac OS/X Mail.app. The latest bit of love is this - the message list will tell you how many attachments there are in a message - for instance, "3 items".Unless there are too many for it to count quickly. Then, it just displays "lots":

Subversion and performance reviews

2009-04-05T19:03:00.002-05:00

Thought for the day - when writing checkin comments, consider that your audience might be your boss, reviewing your past checkins, while said boss is writing your annual performance review.

Hooray for time capsule 7.4.1 update!

2009-03-12T22:00:00.004-05:00

Apple has recently released an update for the Airport Extreme and the Time Capsule. I've got a 500gb time capsule, and for backing up over my wired ethernet network, it's great. Fast, efficient, and just what you'd want. It's slower than backing up to a firewire-800 drive, but my macbook air doesn't have a port for that.However, backing up over the wifi network was painfully slow. In fact, it was

It'd be cool if blizzards worked like this

2009-03-10T11:48:00.001-05:00

Great picture of a sandstorm coming into Riyadh. Wouldn't it be cool if Minnesota blizzards worked like that?

Mac Mini hack - apple disk ][ enclosure!

2009-02-24T11:58:00.000-06:00

Oh boy - this is beautiful.

Truly, news you can use!

2009-02-15T15:41:00.000-06:00

And the answer is, None. None more black.

Maskenball 2009

2009-02-13T20:30:00.003-06:00

Last week was the Maskenball fundraiser for the Twin Cities German Immersion School. My wife worked long and hard on it, and I'm glad to have her back. It was a splendid party. I'm not much of one for big events like this - as a friend recently commented in his "25 random things about me" response, "In a group of more than 5 people, I'll probably feel like the odd man out". True for me too.

New intel box

2009-01-04T16:44:00.004-06:00

I just finished up building a new intel-based box from parts. This is the first time I've tried to assemble my own, rather than buying a whole one. However, my brother has made several machines out of Shuttle cases, and they seem to work well. All the parts came from newegg - here's what I got:Shuttle SP45H7 barebones caseIntel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0ghz processor, 65 watts4 Gb Corsair DDR2 800

Gunpowder through the TSA security checkpoints

2008-12-29T22:21:00.001-06:00

Wonderful posting, Linked to by Bruce Schneier. Wow.

Last day in Germany

2008-11-11T11:53:00.002-06:00

I'm in Groß-Gerau, a bit southwest of Frankfurt. I recently finished up a workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl about the Data Documentation Initiative. Rather interesting (if you're in my line of work...).I'm now visiting friends, and I head home tomorrow. Somewhat bittersweet - I've had a great trip and I've quite enjoyed visiting people I haven't seen in months or years, but I also miss my wife and

Fun with IE6, SSLv2 and TLSv1

2008-10-23T14:07:00.004-05:00

Internet Explorer painA consulting client of mine has a website with some security requirements that mandate the use of encrypted communications. The site had been running on Tomcat 4 on a Win2K server machine, with no particular tuning of how tomcat dealt with crypto. We kinda just dropped in the server-side cert and ran with it, back in 2003 or so.We recently ran a nessus scan on the machine,

Running

2008-09-19T21:03:00.003-05:00

It's been ages since I've posted, so this is maybe not the deepest thing I've put up here.I had a great 5-mile run today, despite getting rained on at the beginning. I did 5-mile runs on monday and tuesday too. Thursday I got stuck cleaning up a user's computer (he managed to find a new virus that Symantec had only heard about as of thursday AM), and left work late, so I had to bike rather than