Al Hoang

Oh wow, I managed to cram 3 acronyms in my title. That’s sick. Anyways I was glancing at Yet-Another-CMS-Written-in-PHP. The website is very glossy and slick. Going on for pages and pages. However, here’s one thing about Open Source stuff. I spend a good chunk of time looking at OSS (and sometimes commercial) solutions. The first thing I usually want to know is SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS.

Once you toss out the cost factor, the next factors I need to know are:

• What programming language is it written in (Helps in evaluating integration with a system)
• What does it run on
• What particular libraries and versions does it need

If I have to waste my time looking for this crap I tend to not bother. When it comes to looking at a CMS or other rather large-ish system I need to know where I can fit it in my infrastructure. Not whether I’m going to wrap my infrastructure to fit its needs.

Anyways after looking at this, give me
Mod_Perl, Zope, or AOL Server anyday since I’ve already spent a bit of time reading and understanding their architectures. And yes, I’m not a big PHP fan since I don’t need Yet - Another - Language - That-Doesn’t Stand - Out to take up my time to learn.

Wired interviews Viet Dinh who helped draft the Patriot Act. I found the interview a major waste of words since it’s very obvious that the interviewer herself is strongly in the liberal camp as the way she asks questions it’s basically an accusation of the Patriot Act. These sharp questions bring on a rather gruff and defensive response from Mr Dinh.

Reading this interview just brought disappointment with both the left and the right sides back since both the interviewer and the interviewee seem to be spending more time word jousting than bringing up a meaningful conversation. Which is sad since I don’t follow politics that much. And having to slog through this just lessens my desire.

Here are some tidbits:

WN: Some critics have called you the purveyor of the most sweeping curtailment of freedom since the McCarthy era. Is that an exaggeration?

Dinh: I think it is very easy to employ sweeping rhetoric and personal denunciations. I think it is much harder to back it up with facts and concrete examples. I seek to engage in this conversation by giving as much facts as I can and letting the efforts of the Department of Justice, the administration and my own to be judged by the people, by history and by eternity. Where I err, I obviously am not hesitant in recognizing my mistakes. I wish people who criticize me would just pick up the phone and ask me specific questions, like we are engaging right now, so that we can isolate the issues of difference, so that we can engage in a constructive dialogue rather than a destructive dialogue.

Right now looking over Version Control with Subversion. I’ve started using CVS for some of my file management lately however I’ve found it’s not always what I want. The main issue for me is versioning of directories. I find it annoying to have to issue 4-5 commands in CVS to tell it the directory has changed. Subversion looks like it has this built in. The notion of atomic commits looks nice too.

Go read the book youreslf

Professor Felton describes a survey of university presidents of the top 10 books that they would make students read. Interesting set of titles however then Dr. Felton asks his fellow readers:

Readers: tell me in the comments which five science and technology books you would have every student read. I’ll summarize and give my own list once your lists are in.

I’m still thinking of my 5. Amusingly I’m not sure I can think of 5 since so much
of my science and technology knowledge had to be amassed from probably hundreds to thousands of sources

Cast your votes in!

Oh man this is the funniest post I’ve seen in awhile. It’s a commentary on the blogosphere.

So consider this my wake-up call or slap in the face to all you bloggers out there.

Blogs are not going to�achieve world peace

Then the author goes on to complain about ’settle’on a syndication format already:

… bickering away on a syndication format? Now, have any of you tried explaining to your parents what the difference between RSS 2.0/1.0/Atom are? I suggest you try it. As far as syndication format goes, let me tell you what I feel. I DONT CARE. As far as I know, I hit ‘Subscribe’ in my aggregator..and I see a bunch of posts on the left pane and a bunch of text on the right pane.

Amen to that. When it comes to blogs I find it more enjoyable to be:

• Reading them
• Finding new ones to subscribe to

However, when it comes to the techie wankery of HOW the blogs work. I want to know as little of it as possible. I don’t need a metric ton of philosophy about the format and ontologies and whatever fancy terms you can dream up. What I’d really like to know that there’s some de facto subscription system that I can use and not have to worry about matching acronyms.

Thanks to Smalltalk with Rants for the link.

Link to Commentary

From the d2jsp Website:

d2jsp is an embedded implementation of a JavaScript engine for executing user program code (scripts) inside Diablo II. d2jsp can be used to make Diablo II do almost anything that can be done in the game by a human player

All I can say is… wow. That’s goofy. Too bad I stopped playing Diablo 2 a long time ago but I can imagine someone with some JavaScript skills could be testing their JavaScript on automating a little Diablo 2 bot.

Diablo 2 JavaScript Parse

Decided to check through all of /usr/bin/girl since I was last there. Wow, it’s amazing how many links to amusing things this girl can dig up. Well here’s a collection of ones I found amusing.

• Historic Tale Construction Kit
• The Urban Dictionary
• Adventure the game as a Java Applet (Yes THAT old Adventure game)
• Battle of the Bands for Karaoka Revolution. (What if real bands played at Karaoke Revolution?
• Pong, it’s not just a game anymore (Very amusing and disturbing)
• Way of the Exploding Stick (Very cool)

/usr/bin/girl pointed me to this link. Very amusing. Check it out for yourself!

Link to Flash Anim

Debian has a wonderful Overview on Internationalization. You can buy many books however if you’re poor and are looking for decent technical manuals on different subjects the Debian project and FreeBSD project tend to have some pretty good material on more aspects than just the Operating System. Of course it might require some sniffing around and a little bit of stretching the mind to see beyond the UNIX-y origins but I’ve found
some of the more detailed technical explanation on subjects tends to come from the
UNIX world.

Debian’s Intro to i18n

Seems Slashdot linked to a story about Computer Schools going out of business. It seems focused on most of the unlicensed schools. I feel bad for the students who went there but there is a reason to go to an accredited school over a non credited school.

Of course the most important aspect to a student is the quality of the instructor. I’ve seen my share of good and bad ones and once in awhile great teachers. However, there are so many variables to consider that it can be bewildering when you start trying to break down it. And these days you can be so bogged down in other things that making decisions like this can be harder. But my suggestion is, try to put as much effort and time into researching your decision of a school if you can. Obviously, you can’t always do so but going completely blindly is even worse.

Link to Story

Steve Perlstein of the Washington Post throws in his 2 cents on the offshoring fun. The last paragraph is an excellent passage in my own opinion and points to a very valid point from the proponents of offshoring. All of the pro-folk found the benefits of offshoring on a sort of faith. I don’t know about you but if I’m going to throw my faith around I think I’d rather believe in an all encompassing deity rather than our shallow understanding of a man-made system (economics).

I would put the passage in but I’d rather not violate the user agreement set forward by the Washington Post so just go read it at the link below:

Link to Steve Perlstein’s post

Went through a couple of RFCs lately. (One of them again to review anything I might have missed).

RFC 2516 PPP over Ethernet
RFC 2279 UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646

The PPPoE one was just to make sure I am understanding PPPoE. TOo bad the protocol gives only the hint that you need ta-da… PPPoE servers / concentrators at the ISP end doing the authentication so PPPoE clients can access the Internet. But isn’t it great how we can take a broadcast network architecture and make it Point to Point again? Although from an ISP perspective makes perfect sense if you’re not willing to hand your customers
all you can slurp bandwidth.

The UTF-8 informational RFC was actually quite informative for me. As it explained how UTF-8 is actually variable encoded as bits. It uses a nifty encoding scheme in that if the high order bit is set (and any bits after that until a zero bit) then this marks how many bytes compose this UTF-8 character. For example 110xxxxx xxxxxxxx means 2 bytes (16 bits). If the higher order bit is NOT set you can just map it to ASCII mappings. Pretty funky.

Okay, that’s just lame. Ken dumped by Barbie.