Al Hoang

Telemarketers definitely annoy me. However, the one thing I find really annoying is when organizations that call looking for donations from people phrase their opening in such a way that they already assume you are going to donate for their cause. Huh? First off, I don’t even know what you’re pitching let alone WHY I should be donating to you.

I find that psychology utterly disgusting. I understand the mentality behind why you do it. Most people tend to be nice people and won’t say no to helping people most of the time. When I see an entity take advantage of this instinct the way that these organizations looking for donations do it just aggravates me. It’s like they’re pushing the limits on most people’s good natured side. And after constant barrage of this for years you wonder why people get so unfriendly to strangers after awhile….. *sigh*. So I want to thank all of you telemarketers for basically making it that much harder to be a nice person.

Kudos to BoingBoing for this link. It’s an account of the last days of the 2d animation department at Disney. In many many respects this is a sad thing to hear. I grew up watching cartoons way before 3d was popular. I like 3d animation but to me it’s just another medium for animation artists to use. It saddens me to think Disney fell to the hype of 3d and toasted their 2d department. Are there any studios left that still respect doing 2d art in the U.S.? I know in Japan many of the anime studios have moved to using computers to help the production process but many of them look the same 2d as ever.

Update: I should update my comments on the 2d death. It seems that Disney stopped
their traditional 2D department and forced them to move over to computers. Disney also wanted to thin the numbers that made the transition. Amusingly, their efforts to try to whittle down the numbers so they could have a smaller staff backfired as many of the animators jumped right on to the new toolsets in the boot camp that was offered (gee… now that’s a surprise. Give a carpenter a power hammer and guess what?)

Got this link via email. Seems the Office of Management and Budget deem Apple and Linux fit enough to add them into the reference models that the OMB uses. This could be a good thing for Apple and Linux.

The Cincom Smalltalk Blog by James Robertson points to rants by Tim Bray and Robert Scoble about how they don’t see a future working in IT and feel they might want to push their children to do something else like study Chinese (I think a better reason to encourage your children to study Chinese is because of interest in the culture, not just business).

James debunks their fears on IT. In general, I agree with James about the IT field. First of all, it’s still huge and rightly so. Congrats all to all of you techies the world now runs on computers guess who’s going to be needed to maintain and add more to that infrastructure in the future. It ain’t going to be plumbers. The IT industry at the moment is definitely in a slump but I think it’s also a weeding out process if you look at it from the big picture. The people that are really into it for just money will leave which leaves behind the ones that still like doing IT even if the payoff isn’t that great nor the perks.

The main problem for us folks looking is the waiting part.

On a side note. I talk about Tim and Robert and James as if I sorta know these folk but in reality I never met them. It’s interesting to think that but I guess it’s taken for granted in the weblogsphere.

“Wired” is running an article on people using MIT’s Open Courseware which they opened up in 2001. The gist of the idea is that MIT is making the content of their courses available but not awarding any degrees. To all those knowledge seekers this is really great. If I had more time I’d spend more time looking through some of the course offerings on some engineering topics I’ve always wanted to explore but never had the time/resources/inclination to enroll in a course just to learn it. At least now it’s more of a matter of time and inclination rather than resources.

Interestingly enough, the person highlighted in the article is from Vietnam one of the poorest countries around. I find that really neat. (Disclaimer: I originally hail from there too).

The New York Times has an article on a disorder that seems tied with a subset of underachievers:

“You can be truly smart and still struggle in life if you lack theability to plan, organize time and space, initiate projects and seethem through to completion, and you cannot resist immediate temptationsin favor of later better rewards.”

It’s an interesting read but I can envision more children beingdiagnosed with this order and parents demanding that the schoolsystems pick up the tab for teaching their children how to cope.Ouch.  I’m sure there’ll be some parents who will help theirchildren in coping with this.  However, there will probably bemany more that don’t.

Or maybe these people that are being diagnosed as such just needto learn how to concentrate even if it takes more effort for themthan others.   It’s a proven fact some people need more effortto do certain things than others.   Why not concentration?

I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite for many many months now. After finally starting up this weblog I decided to give the full version of NetNewsWire a spin and see if it’s everything that everyone else is raving about.
So far I like it! Being able to create posts through the GUI seems quite nice.

If you’re visiting Ranchero’s take a look at Huevos as well.

I’m used to using ldd to help list shared libraries for programs in UNIX-land. If you’re a UNIX Admin type person or a UNIX developer ldd is really valuable for trying to figure out what an executable file needs to run.Naturally I tried to use ldd on OS X and noticed this:

(555)  lddbash: ldd: command not found

OS X has a different tool called otool which handles that functionality. Here’s an example:

(556)  otool -L ruby
ruby:
/usr/local/lib/libruby.dylib (compatibility version 1.8.0, current version 1.8.0)
/usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 218.0.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 63.0.0)

Happy otool’ing

Found a link to DHTML version of the classic game Lemmings. This is really neat. And even cooler is that the code is under the GPL (I think)

From Cheah Chu Yeow’s Weblog

Gamespot reviews Real Life as a Game.

There are some really amusing links at /usr/bin/girl today.

• Glossary of Military Hand Signals
• Bad Kanji

The military hand signals is amusing. The second link is hilarious. For years I think ENglish speakers have made a point of pointing out really bad uses of English by Japanese. If you look at some of the Chinese characters (aka kanji) showing up on people’s shirts and stuff these days I’d have to say the tables are reversed.
You’d have to be really dumb (or brave) to be walking around with:

(Follow the Bad Kanji link if you want to know what it means. Extra points if you know where that saying originates from.)

Found this pie chart at NetCraft:

It was really educational for me to see the distribution of known sites running Debian Linux. In the U.S. it’s really tiny compared to everywhere else. I can only attribute that to RedHat and it’s strong ties with the commercial sector. While Redhat isn’t that bad I prefer Debian much more if I’m going to run Linux. The upgrade path of Debian is very smooth. I’ve slowly upgraded a Debian machine I had for months without a major hiccup even up to a new kernel version and major release difference. Redhat it seems harder to do this right.

However, if you ask me just run FreeBSD instead if you’re on x86.

Yet another story where nature proves is more creative than man in coming up with innovative solutions to life’s problems. This one has some really interesting implications for the Fiber Optics industry.

Courtesy of “Slashdot”

Okay, I’m really lost. I’m noticing on an iMac that after awhile it gets DOG slow. As in waiting tens of seconds for any response from the GUI after awhile. I’m completely baffled to why this happens. The Console Log tool shows nothing. When I ssh into the machine (lucky when that even works) and get a process listing I see -psn_0_blahblah tacked onto Finder based processes. Does anyone know what these mean? I’ve been googling around but can’t find a single instance of this anywhere. Doesn’t anyone else see these things? Here’s a snippet to show what I mean (emphasis added to show the -psn options):
401 ?? S 4:28.92 /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock -psn_0_393217
402 ?? S 0:36.82 /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/MacOS/SystemUIServer -psn_0_524289
406 ?? S 12:35.89 /Applications/Virex 7/Virex 7.1.app/Contents/MacOS/Virex 7.1 -psn_0_917505
476 ?? S 0:03.14 /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/MacOS/AppleSpell -psn_0_1441793

Got this link from the Cincom Blog on new technology to help find card counters. Seems the cat and mouse game between the smarter gambler and the craftier house continue on. The MindPlay technology uses some really hefty image recognition algorithms to pull in image information so it can keep track of the cards and various other table information and try to detect anomalies. I can’t wait to see what the answers to this are. Too bad by the time I learn of them they’ll be outdated techniques.

That reminds me I need to get this book sometime soon


. Although I’ll wait until the paperback comes out.