You Can Call Me Ray

Washington Post Word Play

2011-02-27T17:19:00.001-06:00

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus : A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxicaton : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy : Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti : Vandalism spray-painted very, very high

8. Sarchasm : The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis : A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon : It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido : All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.

And the winners are:

1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.

6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men

* Thanks to Becky for sending this to me in an email.

A Graphical History of the Internet

2010-08-21T10:07:00.002-05:00

(From MBA Online though I generally find MBAs rather useless.)

Via: MBA Online

Rescuing a Linux box

2010-02-04T13:24:00.003-06:00

If you have a Linux computer that boots up through Grub (like Ubuntu does) and you don't know the user names and Grub has the Recovery Mode entry in its menu then you may be able to regain control of the computer using the following steps. (Lots of preconditions but they are pretty common for Debian-based systems.)

Highlight the Recovery Mode option.
Press e for edit.
Highlight the kernel line and press e again.
Remove the ro single kernel parameters and append the line with rw init=/bin/bash.
Press enter then b to boot.
Wait for all the boot-up processes to finish.
Change the password(s) with the passwd command.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot.

Thanks to sisco311 in the Ubuntu Forums for that description.

This is looking interesting

2009-10-20T09:35:00.004-05:00

The new ebook reader from Barnes and Noble will run on Google's Android OS and appears to have access to Google Books as well as what you'd get from B&N. Definitely worth a look.

Now that the official intro is over we see it does WiFi, handles PDFs, MP3s and lots of graphics formats although the latter is kind of wasted on a monochrome screen. Unfortunately we'll have to wait until Nov 30 to see it in the flesh^H^H^H^H^Hplastic.

Ed Wallace's Backside of American History

2009-09-12T10:55:00.001-05:00

The first two volumes of Ed's fantastic history lessons. Things you didn't know about American history.

Backside Of American History Vol 1

Backside Of American History Vol 2

Thanks to Dennis Adair for providing a handful of Ed's stories captured off the net.

Political Tests

2009-09-10T13:52:00.005-05:00

Political Compass

The Advocates Quiz

Typology

The Nolan Chart

Chad Mitchell Trio

2009-09-05T15:56:00.002-05:00

Back in the day when I was a high school folk singer these guys were my favorites. Here's why I sang a lot of these in the 60s.

As you'll recall we had our own right wing wackos back then and the CMT had a little something to say about The John Birch Society. Of course like plagues of locusts things run in cycles and the CMT is still around to comment. The CMT also covered this little ditty but I didn't find their version.

As always there's lots of fun and games to be had on YouTube so check out Lizzy Borden, The Great Historical Bum and Super Skier. Don't miss a young Jim McGuinn playing backup for them.

YouTube search

Did You Know 3.0

2009-07-29T17:32:00.003-05:00

I posted version 1.0 here back in 2007 by its AKA, Shift Happens.

Experts Announce Agreement on the 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors - And How to Fix Them

2009-01-12T13:59:00.001-06:00

SANS Institute - CWE/SANS TOP 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

http://www.sans.org/top25errors/

Aegisub: If programming languages were religions...

2008-12-17T23:30:00.001-06:00

http://www.aegisub.net/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html

Mind Hacks

2008-11-22T23:18:00.002-06:00

http://www.mindhacks.com/

iSerenity - Environments

2008-11-22T14:39:00.002-06:00

http://www.iserenity.com/environments.htm

GSmartControl - Home / News

2008-11-10T21:18:00.002-06:00

http://gsmartcontrol.berlios.de/home/index.php/en/Home

j-Interop - Pure Java-DCOM Bridge

2008-11-10T13:19:00.002-06:00

http://www.j-interop.org/

HOWTO: Capture streaming audio for later » Communications From Elsewhere » Blog Archive

2008-11-01T11:59:00.004-05:00

http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/archives/2004/09/25/howto-capture-streaming-audio-for-later/

Geekitude

2008-09-03T13:39:00.004-05:00

71% Geek

Sorry but my daughter made me do it.

The LHC rap

2008-08-13T22:59:00.004-05:00

The real history of the personal computer

2008-08-12T14:06:00.002-05:00

A friend sent me a link to an excellent recounting of the real roots of the personal computer in an article on the Computer World site. In the article, Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer, Lamont Woods recounts the creation in San Antonio of the CPU that would eventually become the Intel 8008, the primordial ancestor of the hearts of the vast majority of today's personal computers. The similarities between what happened with CTC/Datapoint -- Intel interaction related to computer hardware and the Digital Research -- Microsoft interaction related to software struck me as I read this piece. It even continues with a couple of the people involved with these creations, Tim Patterson and Federico Faggin, although Faggin got the far shorter end of the stick from Intel than Patterson did from Microsoft.

Roll your own tag clouds on Wordle

2008-07-26T19:21:00.003-05:00

Here's a little something my daughter turned me onto from her blog. I guess most people would recognize a "tag cloud" if they saw one but they might not know it by name. There's a web site called Wordle that will let you easily create your own custom tag cloud directly using the text in the RSS feed from your web site. The result for this blog looks like so:

Links to miscellanious interesting stuff

2008-07-22T21:13:00.003-05:00

This is a little cubby hole where I'll squirrel away links to things that look like they may be handier tomorrow than they are today.

stackoverflow: Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers — regardless of platform or language.
Pencil: About all I can say is WOW! With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package.
Jackcess: Jackcess is a pure Java library for reading from and writing to MS Access databases. It is part of the OpenHMS project from Health Market Science, Inc..
Processing.js: John Riesig has ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the Canvas element and the demos on his blog are quite remarkable.
JNode.free(your Mind): Open source, free, Java-based operating system. I've wondered about the utility of such a thing in the past but I'm still not sure that, outside of use on smart phones, this is anything more than a chess-playing dog. The big problem with the concept is that regardless of the portability of the application layer you still have to have a native code kernel that locks you into a specific processor familiy -- in this case Intel. Sure you can move it around by porting the nano-kernel but that doesn't totally free up your choices if you want complete portability on a USB stick.
BeanKeeper: Yet another object persistence layer. This one claims to be extremely easy to use with only three classes to learn.
CorneliOS: CorneliOS is an easy-to-use and cross-browser "Web Desktop Environment", "Web Operating System" or "Web Office" and comes with a set of cool applications.
Apache Roller: A full featured blog done in Java
Vayala (Google Code): Vayala is a multipurpose chat client for developers. It offers a platform and an easy to use Eclipse plugin. Based on multicast technology each client is automatically connected to one network of chat client without a central server or much configuration or installation effort. You add the Eclipse view and you are connected to your colleagues. In addition to basic chat functionality you can also exchange files, graphics and much more.
JSmooth - Java Executable Wrapper: JSmooth is a Java Executable Wrapper. It creates native Windows launchers (standard .exe) for your java applications. It makes java deployment much smoother and user-friendly, as it is able to find any installed Java VM by itself.
walterzorn.com: Some very nice looking Javascript libraries for drawing images and doing DHTML stuff
Smashing Magazine: A great gathering of web and graphics resources, converters, tutorials and stuff
Cheap Silk Screen Tutorial: Cool, cheap and easy to do.
Streamripper: Record streaming media off the Internet
Using PHP with Tomcat
Notepad++: One of my favorite editors is SciTE. This uses the same editing engine.
Geany: Another cool editor based on the Scintilla editing engine like SciTE and Notepad++
Wiki on a Stick: Amazing little one page fits all wiki
Roma: Create a full working application in short time writing only POJOs! Roma will render your POJOs as Ajaxed Web Pages, will store your business POJOs in the database, etc.

Why I'm Voting REPUBLICAN

2008-06-16T20:48:00.002-05:00

I Will Derive

2008-05-24T14:04:00.004-05:00

One of the funniest things I've ever seen in the way of geek music satire!

Ok, the top of the wish list

2008-04-16T21:50:00.004-05:00

So if anyone's looking for that perfect "get on his good side" thing for me then here it goes. A little while back ASUS created a very small PC called the Eee. Well they're back with the upgraded version and this review of it says, "Bring it on." For the same price you can either get less storage and Windows XP or 20 Gig of storage and Linux. I'll take the latter.

Shift Happens

2007-09-01T17:16:00.002-05:00

Anti-bother links

2007-06-13T13:21:00.001-05:00

Here are some handy links to get off various mass marketing lists.

Engineering Web Pages

2006-04-05T01:10:00.001-05:00

Introduction
I hang around a web-centric forum called WebDeveloper.com, which is run by Jupiter Media. To a large extent I try to answer questions and assist folks in creating web sites in the manner considered the best practice in the 21^st century. As an adjunct to that I've considered writing up a tutorial describing my particular take on page construction. If I can pull it off within the confines of Blogger then that's what this article will eventually be.

I want to thank Cheval, another member of WebDeveloper.com for allowing me to use his basic design, code and image as a starting point. One of the hardest parts of doing something like this for me is coming up with a test design in the first place. Eventually the raw material from this project will be attached to a message in the original thread at WebDeveloper.

Recurring Themes
There are a couple of ideas that drive modern software development. First, that software development is an engineering practice more than it is an art or craft. In a nutshell, engineering is the consistent application of a set of standard techniques to solving problems. You recognize a kind of problem and you know what subset of all the tools you have available will best help you solve it.

The second idea is separation of concerns. In the case of web site development that comes down to separation of content from presentation. (Ok there is the third concern of behavior but we're ignoring that for now.) Content is expressed in a structured way in HTML. A web page is a structured document. The presentation of the content is handled by Cascading Style Sheets, CSS. CSS describes how the HTML content will look.

What have we got here?

Let's kick this off by looking at the original design and implimentation. It's an about page for a club and a single image formed the basis for the page. Visually, it has a banner, a nav bar and news section in a left column and a large content box to the right.

The initial implimentation was to use the image as-is with area tags and onclick handlers for the nav links. A couple of overlaid, absolute positioned divs formed the News and Content areas. Had this been worked up in old school fashion using the Adobe/Macromedia set of tools then the design image would have been sliced-n-diced into a dizzying array of unintelligable table cells and the site maintainer would have to revisit the complete design/construction cycle to do something as trivial as add another link to the nav bar. As it was the page sort of worked but those News and Content divs were misbehaving and that brought Cheval to the forums looking for help. Instead of patching around the problems I recommended he just go ahead and do the page "right" (and I reserve the right to define right the "right" way).

Content is King
Old school 20^th century thinking starts with looking at the design and imagining how to write HTML to make a page that looks like that design. In other words, the trick was to code the presentation of the page in the HTML that also encodes the information (content) expressed in that page. Here in the new millenium the first thing we do is look at the design and imagine what the structure of the content should be on that page. When I looked at the test page online, here's what I saw.

I saw headings, paragraphs and a list of links -- the semantic structure of the information presented on the page. Here is one way of marking up the page with semantic, structural HTML.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript">
<meta name="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<title>Walled Lake Central Equestrian Team</title>
<style type="text/css">
html, body {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0;
background: #fff;
color: #000;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 1em;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
<h1>Walled Lake Central Equestrian Team</h1>
<div id="nav">
<h2>Navigation</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="/about.html">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/calendar.html">Calendar</a></li>
<li><a href="/contacts.html">Contacts</a></li>
<li><a href="/join.html">Join</a></li>
<li><a href="/links.html">Links</a></li>
<li><a href="/members.html">Members</a></li>
<li><a href="/paperwork.html">Paperwork</a></li>
<li><a href="/pictures.html">Pictures</a></li>
<li><a href="/results.html">Results</a></li>
<li><a href="/rules.html">Rules</a></li>
<li><a href="/news.html">Old</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="news">
<h2>News</h2>
<div>
<h3>News!</h3>
<p>Please view the calendar for new fundraising
opportunities. You should have all gotten this email too!
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="content">
<h2>Content</h2>
<div id="inner">
<h3>Welcome!</h3>
<p>The Walled Lake Central Equestrian Team is devoted
to learning and having fun.
Here the riders compete is saddleseat, western,
and huntseat classes.
There are also jumping and timed events.
The competitions encourage a cooperative, democratic
process of fair and good horsemanship.
</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

And that produces this not so exciting but quite understandable and almost totally unstyled result. From this point on there should be no need to touch the HTML again. We've got the content down and now the job of presentation begins. It also means that the only code snippets I'll need to include from now on will be styles. That is they'll be part of the embedded style sheet at the top of the page.

Colorize it like Ted used to do
The next thing on our plate is to set the colors and sizes of the structural divisions of the page. It's a lot easier to get these things right quickly if you use Firefox with the ColorZilla and MeasureIt extensions installed. The blue-ish page background color has a value of #3153d8 and the sort of golden background of the content sections is #c58933. After determining the size of the divs that form the wrapper and content areas the stylesheet is updated like so.

html, body {
margin:0;
padding:0;
border: 0;
background:#3153D8;
color:#000;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 1em;
text-align: center;
}
div#wrapper {
width: 700px;
margin: 0 auto;
border: 1px solid black;
}
div#nav, div#news, div#content {
background: #C5B933;
}
div#nav, div#news {
width: 170px;
}
div#content {
width: 475px;
}
h2 {
background:#3153D8;
}
h3 {
}

Along with sizing everything there is the matter of centering the overall page (which is contained withing the wrapper div) in the browser window. The div#wrapper style of margin: 0 auto; should do that nicely but to slap training wheels on for Internet Explorer we'll put text-align:center; on the body (the container of div#wrapper). This produces the following result in IE and Firefox respectively.

The difference is because IE mistakenly centers block elements like divs when given the text-align:center style. Believe it or not you just get used to fixing little messes like that as you go. It's also a good example of why you should use a standards compliant browser as your primary preview tool then tweak the layout for IE's problems.

Now push 'em around a bit
With the background colors and div sizes in place, now there's the little issue of putting the divs in the right positions on the page. We'll use float positioning on the Navigation and News divs to put them on the left side of the page. (If you do them one at a time you'll see why the clear is in there.)

div#nav, div#news {
width: 170px;
float: left;
clear: left;
}

Now that's begining to look a lot like the original design if your eyesight is anywhere as near as bad as mine. There are a couple of other positioning and coloring tweaks that we can do with both the divs and the headings, which haven't been touched yet. Let's give all the div headings a background color so they will show off their placement better. Right now they're the same color as the page background. Eventually the backgrounds will become images but that can wait until near the end.

The other adjustment we'll make in this pass is to put some padding on the wrapper div to space the other divs away from the wrapper border. Hey, everybody needs a little space. In this case I think about 10px will do the job. (We use padding on the wrapper instead of margins around the contained divs to avoid a margin doubling bug in IE.) The news div needs a little top margin to separate it from the navigation. So here's the next set of CSS adjustments and the resulting page.

div#wrapper {
width: 700px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 10px;
border: 1px solid black;
}
div#news {
margin-top: 10px;
}
div#content {
width: 475px;
}
h1 {
width: 720px;
background:#aaa;
}
h2 {
background:#aaa;
}

But that nav bar looks so wrong
Now to make that unordered list of links into a real navigation bar...

Your Senator Needs an iPod!

2006-02-01T23:33:00.001-06:00

Here's a PAC trying to show our legislators what we're losing as the RIAA/MPAA continue attacking our right to use what we own.

For background on the Broadcast Flag see "Would it be too much to ask for a little debate before you blindly approve government-mandated content protection?" "No, I don't think calling it 'the grand old broadcast flag' will help," "And we would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you meddling EFF kids and your Action Alerts," and "Broadcast flag law found during body cavity search of Hollywood lobbyist". Thanks, Good Morning Silicon Valley!

Google decides a little evil is good for you

2006-01-30T21:31:00.001-06:00

I guess everyone has heard that all the search companies are rushing to see who can bend over the farthest for the Chinese government but here are a couple of searches that make it crystal clear just how bad it is.

Search images for "tiananmen" on the non-Chinese Google and this is what you get.

Search images for "tiananmen" on the Chinese Google and you basically get a load of vacation pictures and postcards. Note that since this link takes you to the Chinese Google, feel free to try some good queries of your own and post the results here in comments.

Software Patents

2005-12-30T11:49:00.001-06:00

To paraphrase an old adage: Those that can, do. Those that can't, license patents.

Free food with strange people

2005-12-21T13:36:00.001-06:00

Not much else to be said. ;)

Except that every one of these ex-coworker has been brightsized* since this picture was taken.

*brightsized: Had enough sense to leave the company; Dilbert

I knew I'd seen that guy somewhere before

2005-11-26T00:30:00.002-06:00

No further comment required.

Internet History

2005-11-25T12:20:00.001-06:00

Are you interested in knowing how we got from point A to point B as far as the underlying networking that is the Internet came to be? If so then check out Hobbes' Internet Timeline and see not only the technology but some of the business artifacts of this most important communications system. Included are such things as this drawing of the what the Internet looked like in 1969; three different types of computers on four major university campuses. Thirty-five years later, IBM is the only one still in business.

Nothing Says Christmas ...

2005-11-22T14:34:00.001-06:00

You gotta luv those cats at Guitar Center.

Heard on Boston Legal this evening

2005-11-01T21:54:00.001-06:00

First they came for the Communists
but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists
but I was not one of them, so I did not speak out.

Then they came for the Jews
but I was not Jewish so I did not speak out.

And when they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.

Martin Niemoeller

Is the end of Compuserve near?

2005-09-29T22:33:00.001-05:00

The old CompuServe* as we knew it went away about a year ago, replaced by a Prospero CMS site that looks and feels like every other big community site on the web. Today the graphic banner at the top of the pages became the Netscape banner. I know both these sites are now essentially hosted on the same (cluster of?) servers with different URLs producing different content so this could just be a CMS screw up OR it could be CompuServe's last gasp.

*If you click that link, pointing to www.compuserve.com, then examine where you wind up, you'll see CompuServe is now joined at the hip with Netscape.

Hands on security training

2005-09-17T15:52:00.001-05:00

It's at least very hard, if not impossible, to learn how to recognize security problems in applications without seeing what they look like. Knowing how they work (what the vulnerability is) is all well and good but the practical aspect of seeing what caused the vulnerability is, to steal a phrase, priceless. To that end the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has created a demonstration application called WebGoat. Why do that? Well OWASP believes that although there are plenty of live applications out there you could learn on, it isn't really advisable or ethical to attack an application without permission, regardless of your intent.

What does WebGoat do? Here's part of the description exerpted from the project home page.

WebGoat is a full J2EE web application designed to teach web application security lessons. In each lesson, users must demonstrate their understanding by exploiting a real vulnerability on the local system. The system is even clever enough to provide hints and show the user cookies, parameters and the underlying Java code if they choose. Examples of lessons include SQL injection to a fake credit card database, where the user creates the attack and steals the credit card numbers.

IE User Interface Designer Switches to Firefox

2005-09-15T23:34:00.001-05:00

The gentleman who did a lot of the user interface design for Internet Explorer versions 1-5 has switched to Firefox. He bares his soul on his blog as the Bill and Steve Experience shake out another double handful of Tums.

Microsoft Ain't Google

2005-09-14T21:59:00.001-05:00

One quick question from a CNET interview with Bill Gates can give you a good feel for what Microsoft is not.

CNET: So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point?

Gates: Well, we don't know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.

I wasn't sure what he meant by that so I went to the Google corporate info site to see what the basic principles are they espouse, with which I guess we can assume Microsoft disagrees. Under "Corporate Philosophy" I found these Ten Things (4 and 6 could be the problem) or I could see Microsoft having a problem with all of Google's Software Principles.

Of course it could lay right in the first line of the Company Overview, "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Microsoft's view is almost identical but the phrase, "only to people running Microsoft software on computers running Microsoft operating systems" would be appended.

Nothing More Need Be Said

2005-09-13T22:58:00.002-05:00

Yes, Bush is one of the worst disasters to hit the US but that's not breaking news to anyone in the US.

The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security

2005-09-09T10:37:00.001-05:00

Here's an excellent article by Marcus Ranum about a number of seemingly logical mistakes we make when thinking about strategies for improving the security of our systems. I'll just whet your appetite with the high level. Here are Ranum's six dumbest ideas.

Default Permit
Enumerating Badness
Penetrate and Patch
Hacking Is Cool
Educating Users
Action Is Better Than Inaction