Saturday, December 31, 2005

New Year

Well, the new year is around the corner. No special plans. No plans to go out and party all night. No plans to go get totally drunk. No plans to even hang out at some bar/cafe. Just sitting home and enjoying the downtime.

Gotta go back to work on the 3rd. So really trying to stay home as much as possible and just do nothing. This also is a gift from God. The time, I mean, to just sit around. :)

Might even have to fly out of town in the first week of the new year. The boss is kinda ticked that the pet project of the company isn't taking off any faster. Well, all tried and if it don't move, it don't move, chico! (How's that for a sentence loaded with commas - of which most are unnecessary or incorrectly placed, I'm sure).

Well, off I go to have something to eat and do something else.

A Happy New Year to any and all readers. :)

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Long Time

It's been a while since I blogged. Sometimes, things just keep happening and work just keeps piling up and one starts making more acquaintances and even a couple of friends and before long, blogging is on the back burner.

Well, I had some time tonite and decided to redesign some and to fix up the format a little more to my liking and to make an entry, while I'm at it.

Christmas came and went. Another year come and gone. And what have we done. In our own little areas where we promised ourselves that we'd focus more, did we? That's one thing that I generally think about more around the holidays and around birthdays and so on. As times moves on, there has to be positive changes. Life is a gift from God and it should be treated as such with thanksgiving to God and an effort to spend it more according to His will. :)

Thursday, September 08, 2005

The email that got them fired

Real life soap opera. I mean daytime soap opera played out in real life. This is pretty hilarious!

"-----Original Message-----
From: Nugent, Katrina
Sent: Thursday, 1 September 2005 10:21 AM
To: Bird, Melinda
Subject: RE:
Let's not get person 'Miss Can't Keep A Boyfriend'.

I am in a happy relationship, have a beautiful apartment, brand new car, high pay job...say no more!!"


Quote From: http://www.dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story/0,20281,16522876-5001022,00.html

The 100 what?

There's a Technorati 100 list? Seriously, people need to do something at work instead of surfing blogs.

Why do I quote the whole paragraph? Just 'coz it was easier to highlight the whole paragraph and hit the blog button on the Google Toolbar. :)

Reporting back from BlogHer: "Since I had never seen the Technorati 100 before, I headed there. And predictably, found few women on it. I generally find such lists to be unidimensional and mostly useless, so do not feel unduly concerned that it is a male-dominated list. The important issue is reaching the people you want to connect to. The web is all about being able to reach the Long Tail. So, the more relevant question to me is: Do women bloggers have a harder time reaching people who are interested in the same topics? If the answer is yes, then that is more problematic."


From:
http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_07/blogher-report.html

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

.NET Remoting

.NET Remoting and Remote Events

Problem: I have a remotable object. This object has events. The server serves the object just fine. The client also creates the object just fine. Just when I try to add an event handler to the object, all sorts of exceptions come alive within mscorlib.exe. First, it's about some security level. Which was fixed by manually adding BinaryServerFormatterSinkProvider and setting .TypeFilterLevel to System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.TypeFilterLevel.Full.

Now, I have a really weird issue. The exception says, "Cannot find file . Culture info. blah blah blah blah"

After Googling half the internet and reading just about everybody's projects, I find that Microsoft is _maybe_ achnowledging this to be an issue and recommending a "sit a little to the left of the spinach stain on this couch after 12pm" approach.

This is just insane. Microsoft chose to implement this in the most bizzare way. Cool and new features promised by Microsoft keep varying in size and functionality between different releases. End result? No one wants to use any thing that hasn't been around for at least 10 years.

Forget the rant. This issue is just seemingly impossible to fix. Sure, Microsoft has a recommended work around on their website somewhere but it's just over my head at the moment. I am gonna have to sit and read it carefully this evening and then implement.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

A lesson from a hurricane

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2005/0828hurricane.asp.

Somebody asked me about this just the other day.

This is an interesting article that talks about how God and natural disasters such as Katrina can be understood (for lack of a better word). God is love and wants all of us to be happy. That's what I believe!

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Boring

Well, I went to sleep pretty early last nite. About 9pm or so. So, only naturally, all nite long I kept waking up for stupid reasons such as: it's too hot, I haven't changed sides in 5 minutes and so on. Close to 5am or so, I was exhausted from having stayed up most of the nite because of stupid reasons, so I really fell asleep.

This means that in the morning, I was late for work. Of course. No surprise there. Just one of those givens in life. Taxes, blah blah and being late for work. It's all just so.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Skinny London House on Sale for $933,000 - Yahoo! News

Skinny London House on Sale for $933,000:
LONDON - This thin house requires a bankroll that's fairly fat. A home in London that measures just over 5 feet at its skinniest and 9 feet, 11 inches at its widest is up for sale for $933,868, estate agents said Tuesday.

The narrow home is spread over five levels and used to be a hat shop before being converted into living quarters.


Now that's a cool house. The price is a little steep but since this is in the area where a lot of media professionals buy, it should be easy to afford for most people interested in buying a house there. :)

My Opera Community

http://my.opera.com/community/party/

Sounds Fun. :)

Monday, August 29, 2005

WinFS 101: Introducing the New Windows File System

Release news at: http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/

WinFS explanation at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwinfs/html/winfs03112004.asp

WinFS 101: Introducing the New Windows File System


Well, so then the WinFS is out.... today.... in beta.... so.... good.... then.

Friday, August 26, 2005

'Men cleverer than women' claim

From BBC NEWS Education 'Men cleverer than women' claim

A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests.
<snip>
There were twice as many men with IQ scores of 125, for example, a level said to correspond with people getting first-class degrees.
<snip>
At scores of 155, associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.


Well, she is just smart enough to know how to control him. :)

You see, one doesn't have to have all the knowledge stored in their brain all the time. You can however know how to locate useful information quickly. With the Internet becoming more ubiquitous, it is better to know how to locate needed information faster. Similarly, other sources of information are more readily available today.

Thus it's better to not _be_ the encyclopedia but to know how to use it best for your purpose.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Google Talk

Google Talk

Ah, the Google Talk. It's the IM from Google. Works over existing open-source IM protocols and can work with multiple existing clients.

Currently works with,
  • Google Talk
  • Adium
  • GAIM
  • iChat
  • Miranda
  • Psi
  • Trillian Pro


  • Been using it all day. Didn't miss Yahoo messenger. Yahoo is good at what it does. But it's cluttered with the Radio, news, weather stuff, games, and so on. Google Talk is a simple client - to the point. Allows simple one click access to Gmail Inbox and allows emailing contacts with one click.

    I'm pretty much thinking about moving to this client exclusively. :)

    Tuesday, August 16, 2005

    Sky News : iPod Licensing Lapse Lets In Microsoft

    Sky News : iPod Licensing Lapse Lets In Microsoft

    Computer firm Apple may have to pay Microsoft £6 for each iPod it sells after a huge licensing lapse.

    Lawyers at Bill Gates' firm filed a patent for technology behind the hugely successful digital music player two months before Apple.


    The US Patent Office has ruled that Microsoft has the right to charge competitors a licence fee for each iPod sold.


    Brilliant, just brilliant!

    Friday, August 12, 2005

    What a bunch of losers!

    Quote:

    Anonymous said...
    Feeling lonely? Hook up with Real Singles now for $4.99 to connect, and only $0.99 a min. A true match is only a phone call away. Give it a try 1-800-211-9293.

    8:20 AM


    This is a comment someone left on my blog at: http://broccoli-guy.blogspot.com/2005/08/cnncom-career-workplace-gender-gap.html. As if it wasn't enough that these morons are spamming the email inboxes of thousands and millions of users. Now the idiots will start spamming people's blogs. It's because of scums of the earth like these that people will force all anonymous communication to be banned eventually.

    I will be changing my blog to only allow registered users to comment. I would have liked to get comments from anyone but hey whatever!

    Thursday, August 11, 2005

    BWired News: Furniture Causes FedEx Fits

    Wired News: Furniture Causes FedEx Fits

    Great minds think of how to sue anyone for any reason. Well, good going!

    Most of us have been there. You can just barely afford to pay the rent. But forget about buying furniture -- not if you want to eat, anyway.

    Jose Avila recently found himself in just that predicament. Although he has a good job as a software developer, he's locked into two rents after moving to Arizona, and has no extra cash for an Ikea shopping spree. But instead of scouting street corners for a ratty, unwanted couch, Avila got creative and built an apartment full of surprisingly sturdy furniture -- out of FedEx shipping boxes.

    Fanciful as his creations may seem, FedEx is not amused. The shipping giant's lawyers have sent Avila letters demanding he take down the site he created to document his project, invoking, among other things, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (.pdf), or DMCA.

    Avila has outfitted his entire apartment with FedEx box designs, including a bed, a corner desk with wall shelves, a table, two chairs and a couch. Drawing from architecture and drafting classes he took in college, Avila has designed pieces that are surprisingly un-boxy.

    He was blindsided by the cease-and-desist letter from the company to which he proclaims long-standing loyalty.

    "I was surprised, actually," Avila said. "One thing I’ve always stood behind is I'm pro-FedEx. I ship stuff with FedEx all that time and I feel more comfortable shipping with FedEx because their boxes are stable and sturdy."


    Quote from the link.

    Sunday, August 07, 2005

    Top 10 dot-com flops - CNET.com

    Top 10 dot-com flops - CNET.com

    Well, the bubble burst and it left a big mark on the IT history of the world. More on the United States economy than anything else. But nonetheless the world learns its lesson from this. Or I hope so.

    Tuesday, August 02, 2005

    BitTorrent moving uptown - Yahoo! News

    If I don't copy the whole article, it will disappear off of Yahoo in a couple of weeks. :)


    BitTorrent moving uptown - Yahoo! News: "Bram Cohen arrives in San Francisco's Mission District, his hair disheveled, his face stubbled with a day's growth of beard and his black BitTorrent T-shirt proclaiming him for what he is -- the poster boy for a popular and disruptive Internet file-swapping technology.
    ADVERTISEMENT

    Time was, guys like this would be found hunched over a computer keyboard in a distant Baltic republic, working anonymously for some offshore corporation.
    But now that the Supreme Court has clarified the do's and don'ts of file-sharing, the creator of BitTorrent -- which allows video and other large files to be quickly downloaded -- has no reason to hide. Indeed, Cohen, 29, recently relocated from Seattle to San Francisco, and he and his chief operating officer are making the rounds on Sand Hill Road looking for venture capital for their new company, BitTorrent. They've forged a partnership with paid-search provider Ask Jeeves, and recently the duo flew to Burbank for high-level talks with the Motion Picture Association of America.
    BitTorrent already has struck deals with video game publishers to distribute games with its technology.
    Cohen's bid to commercialize BitTorrent is a measure of how far the entertainment industry has come since the late 1990s, when Napster introduced millions of people to the power of peer-to-peer technology for downloading songs -- and mobilized scores of lawyers to shut it down.
    The recording industry continues its legal campaign to crush the once-wildly popular Australian-based Kazaa file-sharing service. But the studios are now moving to embrace BitTorrent technology -- which gracefully and cheaply distributes giant files -- even as they sue those who use it to trade bootlegged movies, TV shows or video games.
    ``We have no aversion to peer-to-peer techn"

    Friday, July 29, 2005

    Design Documents

    Ah, the software engineering cycle. Application develoment cycle. All the documentation that goes along! Just fun!

    Is NOT!

    I've been working on a Design Document for a project. The technical writer side of me says it better be good. The technical side of me says, it better be a good Design Document and other developers should be able to look at this document and engineer the solution. The practical side of me says, since the business doesn't really respect the technical writing and always wants things done their way, which is "how they've always done it", why should I bother? The practical side also says, just get it done and put it out there. Since I'll be the one developing with another developer who already knows the details, we won't really have to come back to the Design Document and criticize it.

    You see, this is all part of the new process we're following. We have a process that we try to follow for each project and this process addresses each step of software engineering cycle. Documentation, design, implementation, testing and all. How ever this causes our time estimates to be thru the roof. Which could be a good thing for us.

    When all is said and done, I wouldn't buy a solution from me if I saw one of my estimates. What a jerk!

    Hitch?

    Just saw the movie Hitch. I liked it a lot. It had a really funny tone to it. For the most part the idiot was played by the guy from "King of Queens" or whatever that show is. Although even Will Smith played the idiot a little in the end when he didn't understand the girl he was in love with.

    Both actors just did a really really good job of handling this movie. I liked the girl also but I don't recognize her. Some parts of the movie could be called slightly cheesy by a few people but for the most part it was a straight love/comedy movie that just did a really good job.

    I enjoyed it while I was watching and didn't have any of those moments where you would go take a restroom break without pausing the movie.

    Also saw The Pacifier with Vin D. That one was also pretty good. Although not in the same league as Hitch but it was funny and lighthearted enough to be fun overall. Some bits of the movie were a little annoying or just plain too much but overall it's a fun watch. It has a very light mood overall.

    And that wraps up this unofficial two-word review.

    Sunday, July 03, 2005

    SMU School of Engineering

    SMU School of Engineering

    Pretty decent program

    Wednesday, June 22, 2005

    Newsday.com: Brain Areas Shut Off During Female Orgasm

    Newsday.com: Brain Areas Shut Off During Female Orgasm

    These people obviously have nothing better to do than to rig up people and their partners and watch their brain responses during sexual activity. I mean, being a scientist used to mean more than being a pervert with a computer!

    Married men earn more if wives do the chores-study - Yahoo! News

    Married men earn more if wives do the chores-study - Yahoo! News

    But, of course!

    Man Wakes Up With a Bullet in His Tongue - Yahoo! News

    Man Wakes Up With a Bullet in His Tongue - Yahoo! News

    Monday, June 13, 2005

    CodeSmith Tools: Home

    CodeSmith Tools: Home

    Pretty Interesting.

    Thursday, June 09, 2005

    Resources

    Resources

    Well she might have some useful info. :)

    Many Scientists Admit to Misconduct - Yahoo! News

    Many Scientists Admit to Misconduct - Yahoo! News

    And they finally admit it?

    Be Cool?

    Just watched "Be Cool". Would have been a great movie if it had stuck to the original story in the book and if it didn't preach black-ism at every turn.

    Don't get me wrong, discrimination is unacceptable and I do believe in equality of all people. But sometimes a movie is just a movie and a story is just a story. We cannot turn all stories, songs, events, movies, and make them politically correct.

    The original story also called for a rock 'n roll band trying to make it big. But here it's a big hip-hop artists that starts out making an initial appearance with the rockers Aerosmith. Exposure to one audience made the girl big with a totally different audience? Brilliant. :)

    Also interestingly ridiculous was the fact that Cedric The Entertainer was pretty racist in his comments and attitude to the russians all the while preaching about how the black people are a part of white American and how people should thank them and how he is tired of people not appreciating the black man. Come to think of it, he didn't really talk about equality of all people at this point that much.

    Well that's political correctness for you today: Black people can insult anyone and talk about anyone anyway, the brown people can also do so, the asians can also do so but the minute the white people open their mouth, it's judged as being discriminatory. If not discriminatory by direct comment then by exclusion of all things that are not typical American things. It is explained that most typical American things (traditions, ideas) are white only because that's what's been pushed on the society as a whole. Now that would have been a little believable if my Rolling Stone magazines weren't full of rock 'n rollers such Mariah Carey and JayZ and LL Cool J. Or Eminen. A lot of specialty culture (meaning culture observed by few people in real life) is being pushed down people's throats in the name of equality and political correctness and nobody really knows any better because most people only want to be cool and will follow whatever latest trends seems to be. Case in point, J.Lo's ridiculously front-missing dress that is now a must at every award show.

    Overall, the movie seemed to have a racial agenda that really made the movie lack the original fun and cool factor of Get Shorty.

    That's why I like Will Smith. He gets on the screen, he delivers an amazing performance and keeps all political, judicial, racial, religious, social, and all other issues out of it. He may use his fame and recognition to support different causes but he doesn't have roles that hijack the movie or the performance itself and start preaching. Chris Rock is also really cool about that.

    Anyhoo, I'm gonna hope Mr. and Mrs. Smith is as much fun as I it's supposed to be. :)

    Monday, February 07, 2005

    Thursday, February 03, 2005