Satya's blog - 2004/09/

"You know what's not a healthy choice? Healthy Choice! Oh, and Lean Cuisine is a bit too lean -- by not being there." Said because of the blandness and small quantity of ready-made meals.

"This short film was the first to win an Academy award for its production house in 1944. It featured a pianist's titanic efforts to perform the difficult Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2[ Franz Liszt] in the face of opposition by his lifelong foe. Name the film."

That was the clue. Hungarian Rhapsody should have tipped me off, but didn't. The pianist's name is Thomas. His "lifelong foe" is Jerry. The "short film"? Gur Png Pbapregb. ( The Cat Concerto )

(The text in the brackets above has a style: background-color: #ffffff;color: #ffffff. This should render as white on white. If it does not, too bad. If it does, either transcribe the rot13 "Gur Png Pbapregb" or select the white-on-white text. Many browsers cause a selection to be rendered in a fixed contrasting color scheme, making the text visible.)

http://www.tnx.nl/php articulates nicely what I've felt is wrong with PHP. Thanks to bluesmoon aka Philip T. for the link.

In all the excitement over Frances (poor Florida, third time in 6 weeks), I forgot to mention these sites:
http://bfs.itlab.musc.edu/weather/
http://monitor.admin.musc.edu/~cfs/provost/weather.html

The first one is what I did, the second is what my boss did. Between us, we have everything covered. I need to publish the perl and cron scripts that do this stuff.

amblin is running an nvidia kernel update, and tofu and amblin had an argument about how it'd be so much easier to apt-get it, something about management. So I trolled and said "Well you shouldn't use Debian anyway. Use windows and yourcomputer will manage itself... there are thousands of people out there who will manage it for you." To which amblin says "is that original or did you make it up?".

... you had to be there.

How well can you guess? http://roughly.beasts.org/ My answers

I've been meaning to post this:

I couldn't get through Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn because *I could not read one quarter of the book*. Okay, I get it that Bascule thinks and speaks in a weird way. I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO RE-LEARN HOW TO READ! It got too slow and painful so I ditched the book two-thirds of the way through.

Besides I was confused. Are they in a big giant house? Are they tiny things in a regular sized house? Are they in a house or all over the Earth? Is this fantasy or future science fiction? What is going on?

[satyap@gort]~$ dpkg -L bins|grep satyap$
/usr/share/bins/templates.satyap

Yay!

search.yahoo.com search results pages look suspiciously like google search result pages.

I find it interesting that there are two physical quantities that we cannot control: time and gravity. By gravity I mean the curvature in spacetime introduced by matter, and not acceleration. Though (I think) relativity says they're the same thing, I think they're not -- you can't produce artifical gravity except by acceleration.
This babble brought to you by my hungry brain.

Prompted by http://www.livejournal.com/users/bluesmoon/116288.html where bluesmoon poses the question: "What liner are you?
When using instant messaging, are you someone who'll write an entire paragraph before pressing enter, or do you press enter after a single line is written?"

I do one-liners, but I disagree with Mr. Chitnis (hey, I know that name from the Linux-on-a-PCQ-magazine days). I'll happily type an entire paragraph, one line at a time, so each line gets sent as soon as it's typed. That stops this syndrome:

*type*type*TYPE*Type*tYPE*
::user at other end taps fingers, looks at watch, sighs, gets coffee...:: *type*TYPE*ENTER*
::user sits down for a long read, I get coffee and take a bathroom break while user reads and types big response::

By going line-at-a-time (I should say fragment at a time), you prevent this and also allow asynchronous interleaving -- but all participants need to have the kind of mind that can follow 3 or 4 threads. More, if you're talking about more than 1 subject. This multi-threaded thought process is very hard for most people. (pot-shot) Especially those who top-post or even bottom-post and trim *nothing*.

www.bloglines.com is kinda cool, but I prefer something that runs locally. Maybe. I think that's why I don't like it so much.

Then again, I have a number of RSS feeds and other things (I get bank data in my email. WWW::Mechanize and HTML::TableExtract rock), and each feed is treated differently. I should say, I have sets of feeds that are treated differently. For example, my weather page is generated off a feed from NOAA plus several websites (i.e. HTML pages). On the other hand, the afore-mentioned bank scripts send me email. Some of them generate a web page and one generates RSS. A number of news feeds come to me on Jabber IM.

Point is, I don't have a good one-stop shop for RSS. I need something that can aggregate my feeds on one page (Sage, a Firefox plugin, is good but doesn't cache), and then I can set my home page to link to that page along with everything else. Guess that's my weekend project -- except it won't take a weekend so I'll do it tonight.

I've blogged a LOT this month.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/satyap

At my workplace, the mail server renames certain attachments to avoid auto-executing viruses, probably by making foo.jpg -> foo.jpg.abc or something. I suggested a renaming scheme like so: bmp > jpg, jpg > xls, ppt > gif, xls > bmp, gif > zip, zip > ppt, exe > hqx, pif > doc, com > exe, doc > hqx, hqx > pif, and jpeg > html.