The Thoughts of Lamdar

How are we supposed to have fun late at night if this phone blocks our friends from drunk dialing?  It says it can save dignity, but I say it’s just taking away a source of drunken entertainment.

Microsoft is always quick to point out that they eat their own dog food, so I guess this means they don’t even consider their search to be a usable product.  The worse thing is that the numbers say Google is about 50% of the search market now, but if you look at searches originating from inside the MS domain that number shoots up to 66%.

Since I’m getting old and forgetting a lot of stuff now, I’ve gotten into a little note taking kick.  Lamdar, with my stock thoughts is still a work in progress, and I’m also trying to start taking programming notes too.  A lot of stuff will just be basic functions and things that I found and don’t want to forget, but I’ll also try to make guides on more substantial things that I don’t want to relearn like data binding or php image manipulations.  Yes, I know it’s another ugly default template.  Umm… less creativity = more technical skill?  At least that’s what I like to tell myself…

They sure don’t make viruses like they used to.  Fortunately for those hit by this extortion virus, the makers haven’t heard of one way hashes so the password to unlock your hostage files was sitting right there if you looked in the code.  They must be the same types of guys that permanently leave the combination sticker on the back of their combo locks.

What happens when you have a bunch of repressed nerds that take movies too literally?  You get the nerd fight club!  I guess the disappointment of Quake 4 forced them to turn to real life butt kickings.

I thought I was pretty nerdy, but this is beyond anything I’ve done.  To spare you from actually listening to them, here’s a line from one:

“So show me respect before i remove you in log n time,
cause you know my trees are balanced all the time.”

Wait a second, did he just rhyme “time” with “time?”  I guess (skills.computerScience != skills.lyrics).

I don’t want to make fun of this because I don’t want mafia bosses trying to kill me, but I think these guys really really need some help with their security.  I think even I could have cracked a substitution cipher like this when I was a little kid after I got a free decoder ring in my Honeysmacks cereal box.  “I hate 2-15-2.  He’s a poopie head.  Don’t worry, they won’t be able to figure out who we’re talking about.”

The next time you pull up to a drive thru, you may be ordering from someone in India.  It’s only a matter of time before they eliminate all of the people from the loop, making drive-throughs just a fancy vending machine.

Everybody has seen those nice pairs of Abibas shoes or Folex watches in Chinatown.  You know what I’m talking about, the kind that are hidden at those little shops and cost about 1/10th the price of their similar sounding counterparts.  Well, watch out for the RedBerry now.  The thing that makes me laugh about this one is how blatent it is and how high up the shadiness goes.  Hmm… RIM, you want to launch the BlackBerry in China?  First you need to get all these permits and sort out these government regulations that will take just long enough to allow us to launch the RedBerry a month before you.

I don’t know whether to applaud this or berate it.  On the one hand, it’s quite impressive and the students probably learned a lot about making a huge project work from beginning to end.  On the other hand, they wasted the gym for a whole year.  Ok, I guess the good outweighs the bad by a little bit.  I wish my school did something like this instead of the standard eighth grade egg drop project.

I really like OS X, but it kills me everytime someone’s reason for liking it is that it’s a lot more secure than Windows.  The only reason there weren’t many widely publicized security holes in OS X is because not enough people had Macs for it to matter.  Now that Apple is picking up a little bit of steam it seems like the number of exploits is ramping up at the same rate, as shown by the severe safari security hole and the hacking OS X constest that was up for 30 minutes.  Hopefully if you’re running OS X you’re not just running the default installation and thinking you’re safe.

I really like this new real estate site that shows prices for houses overlayed on dynamic maps.  No idea how accurate the prices are, but the site got a lot of publicity (including a cnn main page link) so I’m hoping the mainstream press will let us know if it’s really far off.  I’m sure it will get a lot of bashing from the NAR regardless.

Looks like a subscription to the Microsoft computer health software, OneCare, is going to be $50 a year.  Is it just me or does it seem slightly shady to make people pay for security issues that shouldn’t be there in the first place?  On one side, they’re claiming that Vista was built with security as the first priority, but on the other side they’re saying you need this other software to actually make it secure.  Shouldn’t a firewall that’s usable by the target audience be something that’s included?

This post is dedicated to my friend, stubby.  He definitely would have liked to know that this exists.

Due to Google Desktop being incompatible with certain things that I need to run, I recently had to find an alternative. The thing I liked about it was that it kept the main things I’m interested in (mail, stock quotes, and rss feeds) on one easy sidebar. Thinking back, I remembered trying out the Yahoo Widgets after they bought Konfabulator last year, but there weren’t many useful widgets at the time. For those who don’t know, Konfabulator was basically what Dashboard on Macs was based on. It creates a simple framework that allows developers to create widgets that sit on a users desktop and do pretty much anything you can think of. Anyway, I decided to give Yahoo Widgets another shot since it looked like there were a lot more available now, and this time I decided to look at the framework a little deeper. It turns out widgets are amazingly simple to create or tweak so now I have exactly what I wanted and I’m planning on creating some other things I’m interested in. The only downside is that it’s a memory hog, chewing anywhere from 5-20 megs of memory per widget so unless you have a decent amount of RAM you probably don’t want to run this. Anyway, I think I see what all the hype about WinFX and Avalon is for and if Windows Vista doesn’t come out soon or if Apple ever fixes their threading/concurrency problems, I might have to think about getting a Mac too.