Category Archives: Geek

Amen, brutha…

Beyond The Summit: No, I can’t fix your computer!

“Dude, my computer’s busted, can you fix it?”

“Hey, do you know why my computer won’t boot up?”

“I keep getting this error message, what’s the deal?”

Have you heard any or all of these before? Well I have, and if you have a job in computers or are a student in computer science/engineering, chances are you have too. I spent a good part of my college years trying to help people with their computer problems, but then I realized something…I am not a computer repairman. I am a software engineer (with a degree in computer engineering), so I spent my college years learning algorithms, design principles, programming, web development, architecture, etc. I did not spend my time studying computer diagnosis, network troubleshooting, virus prevention/recovery, Windows specifics, nor anything associated with computer repair. So get it through your head, I can’t fix your computer!

Times New Roman has been dethrowned! And it’s about time…talk about lousy font faces…

Times New Roman: it’s the Coke, the Kleenex, the Xerox, the Cheerios of typefaces. Times is a given. It’s natural. It’s expected. No one would ever look at a paper or article or memo and say, “Ew, why’d you choose Times New Roman?” Times is so ubiquitous that it’s invisible—it’s the Mao-poster of types.

How’d Times reach such saturation? Simple. It’s the default font on the world’s dominant word-processing program, Microsoft Word.

But no longer. . . .

Earlier this year, Microsoft released betas of Office 2007, and the first thing reviewers noticed, besides the new interface, was that Times New Roman had been deposed as the default font with something called . . . Calibri?

More at fadtastic.

From scifi.com:

SCI FI Channel announced the development of Caprica, a spinoff prequel of its hit Battlestar Galactica, in presentations to advertisers in New York on April 26. Caprica would come from Galactica executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, writer Remi Aubuchon (24) and NBC Universal Television Studio.

Caprica would take place more than half a century before the events that play out in Battlestar Galactica. The people of the Twelve Colonies are at peace and living in a society not unlike our own, but where high-technology has changed the lives of virtually everyone for the better.

But a startling breakthrough in robotics is about to occur, one that will bring to life the age-old dream of marrying artificial intelligence with a mechanical body to create the first living robot: a Cylon. Following the lives of two families, the Graystones and the Adamas (the family of William Adama, who will one day become the commander of the Battlestar Galactica), Caprica will weave together corporate intrigue, techno-action and sexual politics into television’s first science fiction family saga, the channel announced.

On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00,
the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

Obviously, it will actually happen twice that day (AM and PM).

Who knew you could have so much fun with corn starch?

Very very cool.

This cool list shows the significance of EVERY number from 1-9,999 — Such as 3025 is the sum of the first 10 cubes, or 18 is the only number that is twice the sum of its digits.

read more

#!/bin/sh
#The Unix Guru's View of Sex
unzip;
strip;
touch;
grep;
finger;
mount;
fsck;
more;
yes;
umount;
sleep;

I’ve modified the *excellent* SpoofStick extension for Firefox to now find and label any homographs detected in the current URL. This should hopefully be a help until the Mozilla folks fix IDN support.

Install Updated SpoofStick extension

Test the extension by visting the Shmoo IDN exploit page and click on the fake Paypal links.

I plan on forwarding my code changes to the SpoofStick developers – they’re free to use my code as they see fit.

Update: I’ve been Boing Boing‘d! (hi, everyone)

Update: note that the extension’s appearance has not changed from the original version. Please direct any requests for look and feel changes to the original developers.

Update: Yes, I know it’s very “English-centric”.

Big update: The official version of SpoofStick now supports IDN checks. I recommend that everyone uninstall my hack and install the official version.

Wow – how cool is this? Paratsone Studios offers a line of Hiëronymus Bosch action figures!

Review of The Last Starfighter: The Musical:

1982. Atari Games, to celebrate the creation of their Atari 2600 Pac-Man Game (which, I might add, was one of the most pathetic, slapdash, slipshod piece of programming ever to churn out of a development studio) held a massive “Pac Man Day” in Citicorp Center in New York City. Being a confessed “Pac Maniac”, I couldn’t resist. To complete the picture, you have to know that I had that great uncontrolled 11-year-old hair of unequal length, and an old army fatigue jacket with a “PAC MAN” t-shirt transfer on the back. Now, it was me and literately THOUSANDS of kids jammed into the inadequately-planned celebration area at the Center, with all of us vying for places to stand and have fun. They had the contest, which only had maybe a dozen of us actually show enough nerve to go up on stage, and due to a REALLY LOUD chomping sound, I placed somewhere around third. Of course, this is up to dispute, because the place essentially turned into a riot (I can still recall my father up on a balcony, screaming at me to stand against a wall so I wouldn’t be stepped on) and they generally just THREW stuff into the crowd, but I was third.

This is a memory I will hold dear until all of time. It was not a depth. It was a pinnacle. It was a heady, breathless moment in time in which my own fannish interest in something led me to a situation, a unique situation, that could barely be explained to others without sounding truly off-the-wall, absolutely beyond saving. And like many such unique events, you hold a fear in your heart, beyond the memory, a fear that as time goes on you will not feel such things again.So, as I sit here typing these words to you, I know I have achieved something of equal, deep geekdom. I have attended an off-broadway musical based on The Last Starfighter.