Tag: funny

Dear diary

It’s healthy to see some criticism on a friends blog. Discourse invariably involves dissent, and having friends take you up on your writings is a nice change from blogging into the void, “dear diary” style. I would expect to have more and more conversations over the blog instead of email. blog death matches as spectator sport? Deciding issues by a public poll? Spreading memes?
2002-12-20:

Quite a list for someone with major depression isn’t it. I missed out on a lot more than that party for someone who really wasn’t good for me! I read a lot more than I listen to music. I read a lot of diarists who also read my toothbrush chronicles and I find such comfort in that 😦 I didn’t want to do this because it seems to cut-and-dry but this is for people who don’t know me or haven’t read a lot of this diary so they know what’s going on : I didn’t want to give because it could all be taken. I didn’t want to buy any of them but that didn’t stop me from staring at em and wondering who the heck thought up this stuff. It didn’t stop me from getting this wacky record player.
There seems to be nothing that will stop me from protecting the earth and my furry friends. There seems to have been some confusion about my probation 😉 There’d have been some serious fisticuffs if he had done that. I’m so glad i wasn’t there i would have told her lady you have some serious issues and need help. But you didn’t and i would have rather you walked away than destroy every last memory even the good ones they’ll be tainted now like our marriage was it just this once dillon. Normally i would have felt really bad but he looked like he had been hit before.

2004-11-10:have your diary entry written

useless

If you spend any amount of time on the Net, you quickly realize one thing: People have WAY too much free time. They’re out there creating scores of the most peculiar, odd, amusing sites you can imagine. These are some I’ve come across.

Relationships and Open source

I had a strange, yet funny conversation with a female friend today. Can you tell she is a geek?

purplegreen: let me ask your opinion about a male behavior…
purplegreen: popped just right now onto my operand stack 🙂
purplegreen: there is a guy
purplegreen: simon is a friend of his, that’s why i know the details
purplegreen: listening?
Gregor J. Rothfuss: yes
purplegreen: thnx
purplegreen: well, he has been single for a while, but he’s handsome, ghee
purplegreen: well, he met a girl who was sort of crazy for him
purplegreen: and it happened that he met her blabla
purplegreen: fact is that there is something going on, but he doesn’t tell his friends
purplegreen: and you don’t see anything in public
purplegreen: no holding hands, no kisses
purplegreen: no nothing
Gregor J. Rothfuss: interesting
Gregor J. Rothfuss: intriguing
purplegreen: but they come together and go together
Gregor J. Rothfuss: i kinda like that approach
purplegreen: what is going on?
Gregor J. Rothfuss: hehe
purplegreen: simon says they are sleeping together, but it’s nothing to write home about….
purplegreen: still i think it’s strange
Gregor J. Rothfuss: maybe they don’t want to deal with idiotic friends who want to offer “advice”
Gregor J. Rothfuss: i could see that as a problem sometimes
purplegreen: ahhhh, come on
purplegreen: there’s no advice needed
purplegreen: right now it’s about the fun
purplegreen: why not tell his best friends
purplegreen: why not show a bit in public
Gregor J. Rothfuss: well, why tell him?
purplegreen: they are friends
Gregor J. Rothfuss: i don’t tell all my trivial stuff either
Gregor J. Rothfuss: if its fun its prolly trivial
Gregor J. Rothfuss: by telling others you make a big deal out of it
Gregor J. Rothfuss: which it maybe isn’t
purplegreen: for her it is – i can tell
purplegreen: she not the kinda – fun – girl
Gregor J. Rothfuss: serious romances are not fun
Gregor J. Rothfuss: at least, i wouldn’t call them fun
purplegreen: well, when romances aren’t fun, so what’s the deal in getting started?
Gregor J. Rothfuss: romances are
Gregor J. Rothfuss: wrong word
Gregor J. Rothfuss: love interests are not fun
Gregor J. Rothfuss: fun is too light hearted a term imo
purplegreen: it’s not really fun to get into the analyze und entwurf phasis… afterwards it should be fun or you better get out
Gregor J. Rothfuss: implement
Gregor J. Rothfuss: is fun
Gregor J. Rothfuss: prototyping
Gregor J. Rothfuss: is fun
Gregor J. Rothfuss: throwing exceptions
Gregor J. Rothfuss: is fun
Gregor J. Rothfuss: refactoring
Gregor J. Rothfuss: is fun. NOT.
Gregor J. Rothfuss: man, i’m reading my first chapter
Gregor J. Rothfuss: and it sucks rocks
Gregor J. Rothfuss: i’m rewriting it
purplegreen: to make your source code open -> is not fun
Gregor J. Rothfuss: i must have been smoking crack
Gregor J. Rothfuss: hehe
purplegreen: aha
purplegreen: are ya 🙂
Gregor J. Rothfuss: maybe they should copyleft their relation
Gregor J. Rothfuss: maybe they do not want others being able to modify it
Gregor J. Rothfuss: ahem.
purplegreen: i don’t want it to be modified by anybody but me
purplegreen: sure they can send patches
purplegreen: but i might not apply them
Gregor J. Rothfuss: i was going to say that
Gregor J. Rothfuss: LOL
Gregor J. Rothfuss: we are twisted
purplegreen: i simply love to explain life in it terms
purplegreen: it just suits perfectly
purplegreen: i feel like a cvs repository
Gregor J. Rothfuss: word!!
Gregor J. Rothfuss: you are a geek
Gregor J. Rothfuss: welcome.

Microsoft Security

Security is the new number 1 concern for Microsoft. The repercussions of this are still some time off, but the Windows is insecure jokers will have to look elsewhere for amusement. Security has so far been the domain of anal-retentive folks, and was not exactly hot. Maybe we can finally move away from crappy pointer-based languages? Yeah, one can hope.
2003-08-23: Very interesting perspective on the security of DCOM after last week’s worms:

Microsoft has made some pretty strong claims about the improved security of our products as a result of these changes. And then the DCOM issues come to light. Unfortunately, it’s still going to be a long time before all our code is as clean as it needs to be.
Some of the code we reviewed in the DCOM stack had comments about DGROUP consolidation (remember that precious 64KB segment prior to 32-bit flat mode?) and OS/2 2.0 changes. Some of these source files contain comments from the 80s. I thought that Win95 was ancient!

2004-02-17: You’ve got to hand it to these guys that they have sense of humor.

2004-06-24: Turns out Microsoft really means it this time. I had an older SQL Server 2000 running that stopped working after the update. Turns out XP detected the missing service packs for MSSQL and disabled TCP access on the default MSSQL port. Commendable, although the error message could have been displayed more prominently (maybe as part of the new security center)
2007-11-30: Microsoft continues its old lies about security. Why do they bother? Their products have become better, why piss into their own well?

Do people in charge of security strategy at Microsoft really believe that aggressively concealing the count of fixes that do make it out makes a product more secure? Shouldn’t they be trying to fix more bugs, rather than writing reports that would “punish” them for actively improving the security of their users rather than hoping that defects aren’t found by someone who they can’t keep quiet?

XML hidden powers

a recent article made me feel guilty about hyping up XML. ed dumbill goes after all of them with

HyTime Award for Specifications with Secret Hidden Powers
Dave Winer’s OPML
Most Technically Deficient Initiative Kept Alive by Marketing $
UDDI
Lazarus Award for Seemingly Doomed Yet Surprisingly Persistent Initiative
XLink

Security by nudity

Tom Friedman, the guy who wrote “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”, is proposing a novel solution to airline security: fly nude.

If everybody flew naked, not only would you never have to worry about the passenger next to you carrying box cutters or exploding shoes, but no religious fundamentalists of any stripe would ever be caught dead flying nude, or in the presence of nude women, and that alone would keep many potential hijackers out of the skies.

nice solution, you think. well, nudity can also be a new style of terrorism:

The womenfolk were so embarrassed by the nudity of the well-built men that they ran away from their homes giving a free hand to the robbers to decamp with their valuables.

what gives?

Linux on the desktop

Some Open Source advocates are serious when they suggest that Gnumeric is a valid Excel contender, or that the Gnome Desktop “is just as easy to use as the Windows Desktop”. These people suffer from their very own reality distortion field, as Larry Augustin, founder of VA Linux, points out:

I recall a discussion (not on this list) some time ago where a group of people were arguing that Gnumeric was a replacement for Excel. I was appalled. They were arguing about Excel vs. Gnumeric features. They were arguing about reading and writing Excel file formats. They didn’t understand why Excel users complained when they tried to use Gnumeric. The prevailing opinions were that users were just not willing to learn to use something different.

I finally asked the question, “Can Gnumeric do pivot tables?” I go the response, “What’s a pivot table?” My point was proven. The Gnumeric advocates didn’t even understand the technology they were trying to replace. I can hand an Office power user an Excel spreadsheet with 1000s of names and addresses, and with a few point and click operations, out come pages of stick-on mailing labels. How do you do that with Gnumeric? I’m willing to bet that few or none of us on this mailing list have that level of proficiency with MS Office or Excel. If we don’t know what it can do, and we don’t know what people do with it, how can we replace it?

2002-12-12: Arrgh. I now remember why I made the conscious decision in 2000 to no longer run Linux on the Desktop. It’s just a waste of time to get all the silly library dependencies to work. Decided to give it a try at the office over VNC, such as to not have to screw up my machine. Turns out I have to spend a day resolving install problems and other shit, not exactly what I consider relevant activities. I will gladly leave that field to slackers that want to feel leet. I will likely export my sources over samba so that I can work on them from Windows 2000 using Eclipse.
2008-01-03: Hopefully, 2008 is the year of online apps, instead. having spent a day to decrapify a XP machine this holiday, it was refreshing to see how much non-savvy users like some online apps.

I think that was it, though. Everything else “just worked,” including opening all their Microsoft Office documents — word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations — in OpenOffice.org, connecting to their wireless network (served by an Apple Airport Express, natch), and of course playing Mahjongg (part of gnome-games). I know the wireless thing isn’t a fair test, since I’d already thoroughly tested their hardware for Linux compatibility and had been running Debian on it for 18 months. Still — different Distro, clean install, no driver problems. Thanks, Canonical (and Debian, and all the upstream driver hackers). And thanks to Sun and others for reverse-engineering Microsoft’s proprietary formats and building a free office suite that even my mother could love. Kudos all around. 2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop. My parents’ desktop.

2008-01-30: Best troll of recent memory

Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me. It’s just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer from start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of Windows. Not possible. I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.