http://www.cakespy.com/2009/01/taking-it-to-sweet-cupcake-street-art.html Sure they’re handing out cupcakes instead of backstabs, but it’s still pretty hilarious. And awesome. If that doesn’t make any sense, play Team Fortress 2 and look for this spray in-game.
Any discussion of encryption from a programmer’s perspective almost inevitably leads to public key encryption. This elaborate handshaking process ensures a totally private connection between two distinct parties, and is the basis for SSL/TLS encryption. The most common encryption programs are GnuPG and OpenPGP. However, what about when the only party involved is yourself? Ever run into a situation where you’re own software is the only thing encrypting and decrypting a set of files?
I have a friend who showed me something on the WineAccess homepage tonight that just made me laugh. Check it out. See anything wrong with that picture? How about the “What You Missed” section at the bottom? It contains wine bottles that you can’t purchase, because they’re sold out. Hence the title. Worthless information with which the user can do nothing, essentially wasted primo homepage real estate. Homepage design is a very complex topic, but you can definitely tuck this one in the “What not to do” column.
When I’m not coding, I’m gaming. Pretty standard formula. My latest gaming indulgence is Valve’s Left 4 Dead, offering the most original take on the first person shooter formula that I’ve ever seen (and I play a LOT of FPS). Okay, 30-second summary. L4D sets itself apart through its 4-man survivor team mechanic. Whether you play cooperatively or versus, you and 3 buddies have to navigate a level chock full of zombies.
Well this is interesting. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said security on the device has been “enhanced.” Reality-check: it’s still on the BlackBerry network (as far as I know), which means it’s still subject to the same points of access. And failure. Any one taking odds on how long it takes until someone has hacked his device or accessed his account? I give it a year. Somebody remind me on Jan 22, 2010.
Jeff Atwood’s latest post on Coding Horror provides great insight into the history and mindset of one of the Computer Science greats, Alan Kay. It’s a good read for any computer professional looking to delve further into the advances that Kay worked on. Unfortunately, Jeff has a pretty strong distaste of PHP, and blindly jumps on a perceived opportunity to back up his case. He cites an ACM Queue article where Kay discusses why software development does not happen faster.
FYI if you run Mirror’s Edge on your PC and the sound effects are all outta whack, check to see if you have a Realtek sound card installed. Their older high definition drivers don’t work properly with the game, and you’ll have to download the latest version. Now, chances are that your Realtek is built into your motherboard; that’s how they sell most of their gear. In most cases, you should install drivers for onboard devices — aka stuff built into the mother board, network card, sound card, etc — provided directly by your motherboard retailer.
Ran into another cool hurdle today for my Fwd:Vault development. When I grab the message content to archive it in the system, first thing I do is scrub it out to ensure that (a) it displays properly, and (b) there are no misbehaving characters. I grab both plain text and HTML email formats (if present), so the scrubbing process is a little different in each case. For the plain text, I take some extra steps to ensure there is no HTML whatsoever.
I’ve been working furiously on the back end logic for Fwd:Vault for the past few weeks, specifically the logic that processes incoming messages/attachments, archiving them in the system, or returning stored data per user request. As I got into the final nitty gritty, I confronted a serious design issue: should the system use one email address for all processes (storing new data and retrieving stored data), or should I split the processes into separate addresses (one to store data, another to retrieve)?
From a recent post in the Signal vs. Noise blog…
(1) Windows 7 Explorer vs. (2) Dance Dance Revolution. I’ve never seen an illustration, written or visual, that flawlessly encompasses everything wrong with Vista. Awesome. The author references the Windows 7 beta, but the interface is identical to Vista as far as I can tell. Any parallels to Vista are probably the last thing Micro$oft needs, let’s hope they deliver some more bang to go along with their DDR-inspired flash this time around.
