Paul Kuliniewicz

I’m not saying it’s the best thing in the world for you. I’m just saying it’s the best thing in the world.

– Alton Brown

This Wednesday is the first official Ship of Fools show of the Spring semester. It’s at Shreve Hall and starts at 8:00 pm. And it’s free, so you don’t have the but-I’m-too-poor-and/or-stingy excuse available. (And let’s be honest, an hour of your time is worth far less than you think it is.)

In early March there will be two more performances at the dorms, one in Hillenbrand (sometime the first week) and one in Tarkington (March 9).

If you like seeing information about shows in a more calendar-like format, it just so happens that the new Ship of Fools events calendar is up. (Now with 85% less suck than the old one!)

So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

– Jamie Zawinski

If you’re ever trying to nail a child’s shoe onto a foot, don’t try to put the nail through the bottom of the heel, because it’s very hard to hammer the nail in there. The soles in those things are made of dolomite or something, I don’t know. Instead, put the nail through the back of the shoe. You’ll have much better luck.

Suppose I have a set of people who all have different times they’re available for meetings and such. I want to have a piece of software that will take their schedules and tell me the times when some subset of them are all available. I want it to be painfully easy for them to keep their schedules updated, because otherwise they won’t bother and then it will be useless. I need it to be web-based, since some jerks don’t use the same OS as the others do. I don’t want a full-fledged gr*upw*re package, because that’s massively overkill and way more complex than anything I need.

I just want one thing and want it done well: comparing schedules.

Does such a thing exist, or am I going to be forced to write it myself?

Bruce Schneier reports that collisions have been found in SHA-1, through an attack that requires 2⁶⁹ operations (instead of the 2⁸⁰ needed to brute-force it).

Here’s why writing a regular expression validate RFC 822-style e-mail addresses isn’t a good idea.

No wonder Perl detractors claim it’s executable line noise.

In the spirit of this recent post on rec.humor.funny, here’s a fun game to play with Google Maps:

1. Pick a city.
2. Pick an interesting word or words to look for.
3. Search for WORD(S) in CITY.
4. Be entertained at the search results.

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An update to version 0.1.5 of Rhythmbox Applet has been released. Changes include:

• Added Spanish (es) translation, contributed by Rafael Bermúdez. Thanks!

When you say that you agree to a thing in principle, you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.

– Otto von Bismarck

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters describes various biological problems that B-movie-style monsters would face if they were actually real. Read it, and you’ll be well-prepared for the next King Kong or giant insect attack.

A new version of Rhythmbox Applet has been released. Changes include:

• Added support for viewing and setting the current song’s rating. Ratings can be manipulated from the popup menu or (optionally) from a rating control in the applet itself.
• Added a Preferences dialog, to allow for removing the rating control from the applet.
• Fixed internationalization (i18n) of popup menu to prevent every translation from appearing at once.
• Various minor tweaks to make strings more HIG-compliant and make the applet look a little nicer.
• Additional minor bug fixes; see the ChangeLog for details.

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Does anyone know why television schedules invariably underestimate the length of a sports event by at least an hour? Networks have been airing all sorts of sports for years; shouldn’t they have figured out by now how long they normally last? Even when there’s no overtime, you always have to add at least an hour to the end time if you’re trying to record it.

is_computer_on()

Returns 1 if the computer is on. If the computer isn’t on, the value returned by this function is undefined.

is_computer_on_fire()

Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. If the computer isn’t on fire, the function returns some other value.

– BeOS Documentation (The Be Book: The Kernel Kit)

Guess which improv group has an article about them in today’s Exponent?

(Hint: Clues are hidden in the hyperlinks!)

Bonus points to the author for not making me sound like an idiot when he quoted me.