Satya's blog - 2006/04/

A few days ago I was on the phone to someone's custoemr service while the kid was bawling in the background. They said "Is everything alright?" and I came back with a yeah, sure. Missed a chance to say "Yeah, we're fine, we're alright, how are you?" like Han Solo in Star Wars.

The movie, _Hackers_, sucks. The computer depictions are typical Hollywood: flashy but wrong. The social engineeering aspects are correct: guessing passwords, shoulder surfing, etc. So's some of the phone phreaking stuff, as far as I know.

The weirdest thing is that Angelina Jolie's character looks just like Jolene Blalock's in _Star Trek: Enterprise_. Same eyes and hair.

And a reference to Aho, Sethi, Ullman's Dragon book (compilers), which is cool.

Last updated: Apr 23 2006 18:32

I went to the US Naval museum at Patriot's Point, Mt. Pleasant again. Got a couple of gooood pictures of the F14 Tomcat they have there:

Then there was this picture of the flight deck, with the harbor in the background:

Actually, that picture was taken by my sister-in-law from the Island (of the Yorktown) and she had the camera at a 45 degree angle to get everything in the frame. I rotated it and clipped some of the unimportant bits (horizon, bits of deck) in the Gimp.

As usual, pictures link to the big versions.

Last updated: Apr 14 2006 18:46

Heard today: "Put half a cat-ful of Dettol in the rinse cycle."

I use vim, a modern version of the popular *nix editor vi. It rocks, and here's one more reason why. On a slow link, while editing text, it's hard to jump around using the cursor keys as I'm never sure just how many times I hit the right arrow and up arrow and so on. So I'm not sure where the cursor is going to end up when the link catches up to my keystrokes. Well, with vi I can use the motion keys and the multipliers to explicitly command the cursor: 4j^istuff, which says move down 4 lines, move to beginning of line, insert "stuff". And I don't care where the cursor is in between. This isn't very clear, is it.