Admittedly, I’m not very good at coming up with names for things. If it were left up to me, the street in front of my house would simply be called, “The Street” and the street over by my friend Jeff’s would (at best) be called, “Jeff’s Street.” (It’s also quite possible that this other street would be called “The Other Street.”) But in some odd way, it’s still good to know that I’m better at names than some people.
For the longest time, my standard for poor naming conventions was a set of classes for managing the transitions between modules in a web application. The classes were named, “TransitionType1”, “TransitionType2” and “TransitionType3” which didn’t really convey much information about how they differed from one another. (The same developer was responsible for a set of login functions named “LoginType1”, “LoginType2” and so on up to “LoginType6.” By a not-so-amazing coincidece, that was also the order of the different types in the requirements, so it was slightly better, but still not particularly descriptive.)
Today I encountered the Holy Grail of interesting names. The names were completely descriptive, but still caused me to do a doubletake.
A blogging package I’ve been evaluating exposes a set of events you can capture for specialized processing as a user edits a post. You can’t capture the update event itself, but before and after the update, you can capture the delightfully named PrePostUpdate and PostPostUpdate events.
I’d love to be that creative with my own confusing names.
Old Computers
Technology is one of those things where for the most part, things don’t improve with age. The main exception to this rule seems to be the old-fashioned division by hand versus trusting certain bits of silicon. (Thus leading to the expression/warning, “Don’t Divide, Intel Inside.”)
A couple years ago, an acquaintance gave me a notebook PC. It was in working condition, it just didn’t have a hard drive. (The original drive had failed and he’d decided to replace the entire thing with an Apple Power Book.) I tried to get a new drive from Dell, but eventually discovered they were no longer available. So the computer sat in my guest room, just gathering dust.
I think the correct term here might be “pack rat.”
A friend gave me a talking-to the other day and I resolved to do a bit more follow-through on my plans to Disenclutter™ the place.
So this morning I sat down and typed up a description of the notebook computer, making it clear that there was no hard drive.
This is an older (6 years?) Dell Inspiron 3000 notebook.
The specs are:
- 233MHz Pentium MMX
- 143 MB RAM
- Swappable CD and Floppy drives (plus a cable allowing whichever isn’t plugged in to be connected to the parallel port)
- PCMCIA Network and modem cards
- Power supply
There is one catch: This computer has no hard drive. The original drive (3.2 GB, 2.5″ form factor) is no longer available from Dell and I haven’t had the time/energy/need to track one down elsewhere. The computer is otherwise in working order; you probably won’t be running Vista on it, but it should be fine for most word-processing or email tasks.
I then posted that description to the local Freecycle group.
The item was posted at 8:03 AM. Given the age of the computer, I didn’t expect there would be too many takers. In fact, I was a little worried some might accuse of me using the list as a means of getting rid of trash.
How’s that saying go? “One person’s trash is another’s treasure”? By 8:13 AM there were already seven people asking for the computer. Thinking that perhaps some had seen the word “computer” without reading the part about “no hard drive” I wrote back to the first one (for this stuff I figure it’s first come, first served) to make sure she understood that part. Yep, she’d understood that all along.
Evidently that computer still has some life ahead of it.
A Splash of Color
So it seems that Deutsche Telekom (the parent company of T-Mobile) has sent a “Cease & Desist” order to Engadget Mobile (a technology blog which reviews all sorts of mobile gadgets).
So what did Engadget do to incur the wrath of the phone company? Well, apparently T-Mobile feels they’re the only ones allowed to use the color Magenta.
Sheesh! What a bunch of Maroons!
The image below comes from Engadget Editor Ryan Block and if you feel so inclined, the hex color code is #ed008c.
And yes, it’s possible that despite all claims to the contrary this is all a hoax. If so, I’m not alone in being fooled. But I can’t help thinking that this goes perfectly with my own brightly colored antics.
(Evidently T-Mobile has claimed ownership of the color magenta in the past.)
Happy Holidays!
I think April Fools Day is my favorite holiday. Granted, it’s not a day that you get off from work (unless it happens to fall on your day off), but it is a day when people tend to take things a little less seriously.
For the past several years, my personal celebration of April Fools Day has involved some minor edits to the web site for the Shore Leave convention. For example, this year, Shore Leave is announcing the appointment of a new Web Maven, Ms. Sai Cadowlic.
I’d originally planned that particular modification for last year. April 1 fell on a Sunday that year and would have corresponded with the STAT club’s monthly meeting and given me a chance to see reactions on the day of the hack. Sadly, I instead spent that weekend at my aunt’s funeral and just wasn’t really in the mood to play the prank.
The original plan was to change the colors and add the background image of a certain hotel’s carpets. Giving the update another year to ferment allowed me to come up with the text announcing Sai and add the in-joke about her background as an interior designer for the hotel industry. (Said joke is a minor dig at what some consider to be the world’s ugliest hotel update.)
It’s not as clever as the time I announced Shore Leave was moving onto the Battlestar Galactica, but I doubt anyone’s going to be expecting such a broad palette of colors.
So what surprised me about it? It’s hard to make a web page look that bad.
Old Signature Block
Going through some old emails (in this case, March 25, 1997) I found this bit of ASCII art. I’m not sure whether it’s something I once used in my own signature, or something that someone else was using. Either way, I’m certainly not the one who originated the artwork. Regardless, it’s a pretty good graphic considering the medium. (This will probably be unrecognizable on a mobile device.)
___
___....-----'---`-----....___
=========================================
___`---..._______...---'___
(___) _|_|_|_ (___)
\\____.-'_.---._`-.____//
~~~~`.__`---'__.'~~~~
`~~~'
Hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt.
(Uh oh! They left Troi in command!)
Literary Meme
You should blame Marauder for this.
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal…along with these instructions.
To access any of the framework’s features, you need to know which namespace contains the types that expose the facilities you’re after.
(Who the heck keeps great literature – or even a comic book – near the computer?)
Checkpoint
During the course of any lengthy journey, it’s important to stop from time to time and find out where you are on the map. This allows you to check your progress and take corrective measures before you wind up hopelessly lost. Poor map-checking is how it once took me six hours (and a side trip to Delaware) to get to Ocean City while the rest of my group made the same trip in half the time.
I thought I had learned from that mistake, but evidently not. Today I took a few moments to find myself on the map and discovered that something has gone horribly wrong!
It’s been more than 2 1/2 years since I started Dividing by Zero. With so many internet success stories out there (Facebook sold for how many hundred million?), it seems reasonable that by now I should have one of the five most popular sites on the web, several million in the bank, a Porsche in the driveway, and a steady date with Jennifer Aniston.
That was the plan anyhow. Instead, my site is still largely unknown, though I do have the number one search result for chirping smoke detector; I only have enough money in the bank to cover my mortgage payment; and the car in the driveway is a Honda.
Still, I do have to admit, my situation could be a lot worse. The smoke detector thing is cool in its own way, I do have a car, and I can make my mortgage payment. And although I’ve never met Jennifer Aniston, at least I’m not getting drunken phone calls from Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.
The Presidency
It seems to me that it’s time to face facts: This Country Needs a Presidental Candidate.
The Democratic Party has done a tremendous job of shooting itself in the foot over the past year. Between the endless posturing over Michigan and Florida and the choice of candidates going to the superdelegates instead of the voters (Quite ironic that it’s called the “Democratic” Party, huh?), it’s not hard to imagine the voters defecting en masse.
Of course, the Republican side isn’t any better. I do somewhat like McCain’s willingness to compromise — most members of both parties seem to have decided that winning arguments without concession to other opinions is the only way to go — but between the awful state of the economy, the endless war, the wholesale erosion of individual rights in favor of business interests and still more endless posturing, well, I just have a hard time trusting the Republican party either.
If there was ever a time for a third-party candidate, this is it! I first mentioned this candidate two years ago, and the reasons for choosing him are as valid now as then:
He stands for:
- People
- Freedom
- Democracy
- and stuff
(Just try getting any of the other candidates to admit to that last one!)
Still not convinced? Check out his campaign video!
So remember: Vote Early, Vote Often and Vote Beeblebrox!
At Least I'm not the Bad Influence (this time)
I get the most interesting voice mails from Marauder. He apparently spent most of Easter Day with his girls. Nothing wrong with that (it certainly beats my Easter Day activities which largely consisted of putting off some housecleaning until early evening) and as part of his father-daughter time, he taught Evangeline how to use a magnifying glass to start fires.
The next sentence in the voice mail clarifies things a bit. What he was really teaching her was how to do wood-burning but she immediately saw the additional applications for this skill. He then quickly added that of course she understands that she’s not supposed to do this unless there’s a grown-up present.
But still, I can’t help thinking that Evangeline is developing a most interesting skill set. She’s already demonstrated a knack for opening locked doors. Now she has a method for covering her tracks.
Fortunately, this also means that her life of crime will be limited to daylight hours.
(It looks like Marauder is also starting to wonder about the skills he’s teaching.)
Front Yard (before)
This is what the front of my house looks like right now
If all goes according to plan, after next weekend it will look different and the mowing will be easier.