Satya's blog - 2004/02/

pterry mentions something called a "Mandala", which sounds a lot like the Hindi/Marathi word "Mandal". The way he describes it, it sounds like a computer that re-caculates the universe... much like the computer described at http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/technology/strange-attractor.html (referenced at 2004/02/24#strangeattractor ).

I'm reading Terry Pratchett's _Thief of Time_ in which he writes: "Here are people that know that there /is/ no steel, only the idea of steel." It's footnoted with this: "But they still use forks, or, at least, the /idea/ of forks. There may, as the philosopher says, be no spoon, although this begs the question of why there is the idea of soup."

That's a clear _Matrix_ reference. Also note that "begs the question" is used incorrectly.

Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Goblet in Azkaban's Chamber of Secrets.

I need sleep.

This is the sort of thing I used to read sometimes:
http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/technology/strange-attractor.html

A must-read: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/errors.html

This is addictive: http://page.freett.com/eyezmaze/index.html

And the correct order (ROT13) is: fha oybpx zbhagnva rtt ynqqre cvcr ebgbe uheevpnar trnef qvfu ebpxrg fperra

Pretty good flash games around. The best is MOTAS[0], and Takagism[1] is just frustrating.

[0] http://www.albartus.com/motas/
[1] http://www.datacraft.co.jp/takagism/index_e.html

All those ports are actually listening on 0.0.0.0 but the hosts file maps www.doubleclick.net (and others) to 0.0.0.0 and the OS happily looks up the hostname. Grr.

And XP happily hides the hosts file deep inside windows\system32\drivers\etc.

I still want to know why XP is listening on all these ports.

So I run netstat on wintermutex, and see a couple of suspicious connections. Okay, they're all suspicious -- doubleclick.net? WTF? Anyway, one of them connects to code -- the main department web server at work. After a few minutes, I realised duh! it's also the jabber server.

That still leaves the connection to h183n2fls32o841.telia.com . Anyone know what that's about? And this:
TCP wintermutex:1067 localhost:1068 ESTABLISHED
TCP wintermutex:1068 localhost:1067 ESTABLISHED
TCP wintermutex:ftp-data www.doubleclick.net:0 LISTENING
TCP wintermutex:ftp www.doubleclick.net:0 LISTENING

WTF?

Spolsky on interviewing programmers: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html . I don't agree with all of it, but most of it makes sense. The ITLab didn't use any of this.

I'm reading Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant[0] and Leonard of Quirm (apparently => Leonardo da Vinci, which makes Quirm=>Italy I suppose) has invented Espresso machines. And the Enigma device.[0] Only he doesn't call them by their regular names, and ... well, it's funny.

You had to be there.

Um.


[0] Not going to link it. Go look at Google.

We went to L.A. for two days. Left on Saturday, returned Monday. Drove around PCH and Sunset, looked at USC, went to the Hollywood Wax Museum. Saw a New Zealand airlines aircraft at LAX -- with a big Lord of the Rings mural on the side, including pictures of Aragorn and Legolas. Sheesh! At least the return flights were all on schedule. The Charlotte-LAX flight departed two hours late because we had to wait for the LAX-Charlotte flight to get in due to aircraft trouble.

This week's meme at the ITLab[0] is Fanta Shokata[1]. So here's mine, based on Sluice:
http://www.fanta.dk/showmovie.asp?mid=501A0434-381A-47F5-BF13-E09F0CE90DA5

[0] http://www.itlab.musc.edu
[1] http://www.fanta.dk/

Even the Mars rovers, _Spirit_ and _Opportunity_, have blogs: http://www.livejournal.com/users/spiritrover/ and http://www.livejournal.com/users/opportunitygrrl/. I didn't know NASA's rovers had personality! _Opportunity_ is female, apparently.

PHP has too many functions. I was looking for ways to tell if a file is a symlink, and it turns out there is a function called filetype(), which returns the file type: link, file, dir, etc. Turns out there are functions like is_link(), is_file, too. That's just crazy.

The left Ctrl key on my keyboard has been feeling extra "clicky", hard, and generally "ugh" all day. It doesn't quite contact sometimes. So I popped it off, and found a piece of plastic wedged under it. Took that out and it's fine. Yay! Time to clean the keyboard.

In the meantime, this DIP program refuses to work! It's either me or the mail server, and it's not me.