One Billion

A few years ago Dave Brouse and I stumbled upon OneBillionMazes.com. It's a site that has, well, one billion mazes. I learned two things that day:

1. That there is an absolutely foolproof way to navigate out of any maze. Apparently, Dave had learned it from Sean Connery.
2. That I truly didn't grasp the magnitude of one billion.

I wrote the following as an exercise for Sherry's class. From what she tells me, most of the kids really enjoyed it.

Let's print all of the mazes found on onebillionmazes.com! Why not? It's only a billion.

Before you start printing, please compute the following:

A) How long will it take to print them?
B) How much money will I spend on paper?
C) How much money will I spend on ink?
D) How much would the paper weigh?
E) How much room (volume) will I need to store my printouts?

Here is the information you need to compute your answers:

Paper is purchased in packs of 500 sheets, called reams.

• A ream of paper measures 8.5 x 11 inches and is 2 inches thick.
• A ream of paper weighs 5lb (2.25kg).
• A ream of paper costs $5.
• An ink cartridge costs $50
• The printer can print 10 pages per minute.
• The ink cartridge in the printer can print 800 pages before it needs to be replaced.
• Oh, and one more thing. Each maze requires two sheets of paper. One for the maze, and the other of the answer key.

A) 138,888 days, 21 hours, 20 minutes. If you started printing now, you wouldn't finish until the year 2388.

You will have dead for over 300 years.

B) $20,000,000.00 ($20 million)

C) $125,000,000.00 ($125 million)

D) 20,000,000lb (20 million pounds) which is 10,000 tons.

That is equivalent to 758 adult elephants, 5000 cars, or 22 Boeing 747 airplanes.

E) 18,036,265.4 cubic feet, which doesn't mean very much. So let's express it differently.

If the reams of paper were stacked vertically, the column would be 666,666.6 feet high, which is 126 miles. Earth's atmosphere is 29 miles high.

If you laid column paper on its side, it would reach from New York, NY to Ocean City, NJ.

If the reams of paper were stacked in a big cube, it would be 262 feet high, which is as tall as a 26 story building. If we filled every room of our house from floor to ceiling with reams of paper, we would need 600 more houses.

Boomer Net

Our nation is bracing itself as the baby boomer generation dodders into retirement. Industry analysts have been calculating the stress this generation will inflict on our health care system and eventually our cemeteries. But I don't think we're considering the real problem. What about the stress on the interweb?



My mother recently sent an email to my son and me. I noticed that she had the wrong email address for my son.

me:	“Has Grammy ever sent you an email?”
son:	“What? What do you mean?”
me:	“I mean, since you've had your email address, has she ever sent you an email?”
son:	“Dad, I've had my email address for 2 years. I emailed her as soon as I got it. So she could put it in her address book.”
me:	“Right. And since that time, has she ever sent you an email?”
son:	“Dad, that's crazy. Wait. Oh my god.”
me:	“Say it...”
son:	“You know, I've never gotten an email from her.”
me:	“For 2 years.”
son:	“Why?”
me:	“She had the wrong email address in her address book.”
son:	“2 years? Didn't she get a delivery error or something?”
me:	“I'm sure she did.”
son:	“But she never knew what it was or did anything about it?”
me:	“Right.”
son:	“WOW!”

Our boomers also suffer from hearing loss. Tragically, they're unable to hear phrases like:

"DO NOT SEND ME EMAIL FORWARDS AND OR JOKE EMAILS!"

Go ahead and try it. Scream it, if you like. They still won't hear (listen to) you.
Even worse, they won't ever understand simple email etiquette. For example, if you must forward an email to someone, please have the courtesy to trim the chaff, maybe even personalize the message. I had the pleasure of receiving this email from my father-in-law:

with a staggering amount of chaff.



How many terabytes of bandwidth is consumed by boomer email traffic alone? How much disk space is wasted on the same WMV file depicting a monkey falling off of a branch after smelling his own finger? I'm treated to this gem (and many others) about once a year.

Password Madness

I'm usually OK dealing with stupid people. Laughing at their misfortune seems to help. But, I find it really annoying when they make my life difficult.



Like any self-respecting paranoid geek, I proudly employ secure passwords whenever possible. My passwords have:

• 10 or more characters.


• letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, AND "special" characters.


• no words or personal information.

Oh, and I use different passwords for each of my accounts.


Recently, I tried to change my passwords for my bank, electric company, and prescription drug provider. They each had their own restrictions.






I like (a phrase, which here means, "I don't like") that they further define "special" characters. No '~', '@', '=', or ':'?


My prescription drug provider assumes their users know what "special" characters are. Oh, and they can't allow their clients to use those crazy spaces.







My electric company explicitly defines the allowable characters, but in my opinion, it is too restrictive.







They also have a nice undocumented restriction (yeah! my favorite). They don't allow passwords greater than 10 characters. They don't tell the user that until they try. I'm sure that doesn't annoy anyone.



As a software developer, I can't think of a reason to restrict a user's password. Maybe the developers were concerned about SQL Injection, which is noble, but why should the user suffer? Why restrict the password maximum length? Is disk space really that precious? Make the database column unrealistically large and forget about it.

Having to lump the developers at SourceForge.net into this short-bus-web-developer category really cuts deep. I feel like I've lost my geek innocence.







It's worse than the time I realized that Hackers wasn't a documentary.

World Wide Asshole

Over a year ago I published an article about the sweet demise of my childhood bully. I know you probably think I'm sick in the head, and I am. But luckily, I have someone to blame.

Writing that article was a cathartic experience for me, and to this day, rereading it lifts my spirits.

I noticed that the visitor count on my blog was steadily rising. I thought this was kind of odd. Sites usually become more popular because they produce compelling content at regular and frequent intervals. Then I realized that the majority of my hits were coming from Google Image Search. People who searched for an image of an "asshole" were rewarded with David Fleming's high school yearbook photo. Awesome.

Warning: Unless you're a Goatse fan, you may want to edit your Google search preferences and the set SafeSearch Filtering to Moderate before you perform this search.

Over the past 6 months I've been watching Mr. Fleming's Google Asshole Index rise. When I first started checking (Yes, I was checking regularly. Shut up.), he appeared on about third page. I got more and more excited whenever his Asshole Index afforded him a higher result position. It was kind of like watching the ball drop on New Year's Eve, or refreshing the Olsen Twins legal age countdown page.





When he finally broke into the top ten, I just couldn't contain myself. I had to let someone know. It feels good knowing that people all over the world associate "asshole" with "David Fleming".

I Heart Amazon

I hate Walmart; not because I'm against a free market economy, but because I despise being in that store. So, since I can't bring myself to buy items at inflated grocery store prices, I'm forced to patronize Walmart about once a month.

Amazon to the rescue!

I've started using Amazon's Subscribe & Save. It's a grocery store with a limited selection. Their shelves are stocked with nonperishable bulk items at cheap¹ prices and the shipping is free. This isn't anything to get excited about.

The "Subscribe" part is what I'm excited about. There are some things I can never seem to remember to buy. When I notice that I'm getting low on razors, I'm never in situation where I can write it down. So when I decided to buy a 12 pack of razors from Amazon, I had to specify a "Delivery Schedule". I'm thinkin' I'll need another 12 pack in 3 months. We'll see. If I've miscalculated the delivery schedule, I can change it later. Also, if I'm running low, I can tell Amazon to send the next shipment right away. Or, if I'm overstocked, I can tell them to skip the next shipment.

Subscribe & Save helps me cut down on mind numbing minutiae of everyday life.

me (head):

"Do I have to stop by Walmart on the way home from work today? No I don't!"

¹Always calculate the unit price, not all items are great buys.

A Million Dollar Idea

Amazon has it right. In addition to providing one of the best department stores on the interweb, they have been quietly providing incredible web services. Elastic Computing Cloud, Mechanical Turk, Simple Queue, and S3 are few of my favorites.

All of these services share the same basic theme:

"We can do this server hardware stuff much better than you. So why don't you focus on the software, and we'll do the rest."

How much? Pretty damn cheap. For example, here is their pricing for S3:

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.


• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.


• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

So what can you do with it? That's up to the developer. There are several free and open source applications that provide slick interfaces to S3. I'm using JungleDisk. It's an active project with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. You give JungleDisk your S3 account information, and it gives you a file system that you can mount as a drive. The virtual file system JungleDisk provides is only available to your local machine, which is a little restricting, but there are ways around that.

Now that no one is still reading, here's my million dollar idea:

S3 + JungleDisk + Linux + Samba + Hacked Router = the perfect network storage/backup appliance.

1. Install Linux on a router. Linksys seem to play nice with Linux.


2. Install JungleDisk on the router.


3. Point the JungleDisk instance to your S3 account.


4. Install Samba on the router and use it to share the JungleDisk mount point.


5. Enjoy your worry-free network storage appliance.

So why spend several hundred dollars on a networked storage appliance with limited capacity, when you can have the Infinite Storability Drive from Sparrowlegs Systems Inc.

Mathlete Game

Deviousbard sent me this wonderful game. It combines two of my favorite things -- computer games and prime numbers. Both of these are very popular with the women.

Sherry, don't worry, you don't have to have an interweb connection to play! You can save the page locally so you can play sans interweb. Life is good.

On a side note, the domain name for the PrimeShooter game is a little troubling: 1729.com. 1729 is definitely not prime. Maybe I should contact the owner. That's just embarrassing.

Google Code Search

I'm currently wiping down my computer.

I just found out about Google Code Search. As you can probably guess (OK, maybe not Tommy or Sherry), it's a search engine specifically tuned to find open source code. Cool enough.

But the thing that made me cream all over the keyboard was Google's decision to use regular expressions for their search string syntax. Good god. Does this mean that regular expressions are going to hit the mainstream? I hope so.

Imagine (Tommy and Sherry, you're exempt from this activity) how much more useful Google would be with regular expression capability.

Update 2006.10.09: All technology can be used for evil.

Smarmy Ornery Hen

Need a name for your interweb alter-ego? Try the Internet Anagram Server. Deviousbard (see? It worked for him.) introduced it to me. I found the advanced search to be much more useful.

Sherry:

• Marry Horny Semen


• Horny Means Merry


• Marry Senor Hymen


• Ornery Man Rhymes


• Smarmy Ornery Hen

Oldest son:

• Amen Nerd


• Nerd Name


• Mean Nerd


• Damn near even

Youngest son:

• Fang Firm Inn


• Snarf in clam fungi

Daughter:

• Mutant Man


• Tan mum ant

Me:

• Her clansman John

Have fun.

Anonymous Cowards Rejoice!

OK, the doors are open again.

It appears that WordPress has pretty good splog control. So, I've changed my comment settings to:

• Anyone can comment.


• Anyone can register.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up regretting this, but it's worth a try. Right?

Pink

daughter:	“Dad, I made a PowerPoint presentation today.”
(head):	“fuckin' Microsoft.”
me:	“Wow, that's impressive. Did you have any trouble?”
daughter:	“No, not really. OK, I had little trouble Googling for pink.”
me:	“Why was that hard. Didn't you go to google and type 'pink'?”
daughter:	“Yeah, I did, but it only found things about Pink. You know, the artist?”
(head):	“This conversation is going last much longer than it should.”
me:	“OK”
daughter:	“She sings the song, 'Stupid Girls'”
me:	“Yeah, I know.”
daughter (singing):	“Stupid girl, stupid girls, stupid girls...”
(head):	“OMG.”
me:	“Yes. I know the song.”
daughter:	“I think she was married to that motocross guy.”
(head):	“Faster please.”
me:	“Right. Carey Hart. Got it. Where are you going with this?”
daughter:	“Oh, well I wanted to have pink as my background.”
me:	“So, what was the trouble?”
daughter:	“I told you, I only got things about Pink the artist.”
me:	“Right, we've been through this.”
daughter:	“Well, I wanted pink the color.”
me:	“You're kidding right?”
daughter:	“No, for real, I wanted a pink background but it wouldn't let me pick the color, so I thought I would go get a pink picture from the internet.”
me:	“A picture of the color pink.”
daughter:	“Right, but I couldn't find any.”
(head):	“...don't say anything JC, you'll just hurt her feelings...”
me:	“What else did you do today?”

I'm Back

Hi. I'm back. I'm sorry about that. I had a nasty run-in with a group of Brazilian hackers. Two months, a few defaced web pages, new blogging software, and I'm finally back online. I think I'm going to be more diligent about backups (Skinny, a "backup" is something that is used by system administrators to recover from catastrophic failures such as a disk crash).

The old blogging software I was using had some problems. I've switched to Wordpress. This is what I like about Wordpress so far:

• categories -- I can assign more than one category to a post.


• list management -- You know, that stuff on the right sidebar. Links, blogs, movies, etc.


• cool administrative interface -- You'll see it if you have a user id.


• more secure...I think.


• easier to install/administrate


• better comment/splog filtering

<geek>

I'm having a problem with the RSS feeds. It looks like some of the characters are not encoded properly.  Stay tuned.

2006.08.21, update: If you want an RSS feed, use the link in the sidebar.

</geek>

I'm not sure if I like the new look...so that may be changing.

All the user ids have been migrated, but the passwords will have to be reset. Send me an email to get your new password.

Employment For The Luddites

I had no idea my in-laws or my parents could write for Wired magazine.

Yes, this post is a thinly veiled attempt to get everyone off of my back for being a logical father.

A Blogging Opportunity

The user admin pages for Blogger are down...that means millhousethecat wasn't able to post this morning. Boy is she pissed.

However, you can clearly see that I'm able to post.

Sincerely,

A reliable blogger

Eats for Geeks

Skinny and I have been hooked on Sheetz's MTO for years. For a geek, the service is near perfection:

• no eye contact required


• no speaking required


• cool touch-screen computer used to place order


• no order ambiguity


• chicks stare in amazement as you quickly navigate the order interface

It appears Red Robin has been working to remove the human component from their dining experience as well. Sweet Tea just told me about Red Robin's Burger Customizer. It's much like MTO, only flashier. You use the power of the interweb to customize your burger while sitting in the privacy of your own home naked from the waist down. When you're finished, you can printed it out and hand it to a server (a person, not a computer) at Red Robin.

I can't wait to try it. I bet I can complete an entire Red Robin dining transaction without uttering a single word to the help.

Technology Rules!

. . .And that was the happiest day of my life

Ever since the crash, I've been living in a world without Quake. A month without Quake is tough. I found myself mentally firing rockets at various people in the real world.

Shortly after my Linux box crashed I got a new computer. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get Quake to run on it. Running the game resulted in a unresponsive white screen. Well, it wasn't entirely unresponsive. If I pressed the Enter key the game (white screen) would exit. Beautiful.

For weeks I've been trying to use the power of the interweb to solve my white screen of death. The gaming forums were uninformative and infuriating. If you've ever tried to solve a problem this way, you know the routine:

person #1:
subject: Help! Getting white screen trying to run quake3 on OSX.
I installed the latest patch of quake3 on my new mac...person #2:
subject: re: Help! Getting white screen trying to run quake3 on ...
Did you install the latest patch?

person #1:
subject: re: re: Help! Getting white screen trying to run quake3 ...
Yes I did. argh!!

person #2:
subject: re: re: re: Help! Getting white screen trying to run ...
hummmm...works fine on my new mac.

completely random jackass:
subject: re: re: re: re: Help! Getting white screen trying to ...
I just installed quake. It's awesome! I'm getting 500 frames per second. Yeah!

person #1:
subject: re: re: re: re: re: Help! Getting white screen trying ...
Never mind. I found my problem.

sparrowlegs:
subject: re: re: re: re: re: re: Help! Getting white screen ...
Can you post your solution?

------ [end of thread] ------

OMFG! Shoot me.

I finally got Quake to run of my new computer¹. Sigh. Now I can uninstall the Methadone Quake replacement games: Cube, Sauerbraten, and Unreal Tournament 2004 (yawn).

I'm sure I'll get complaints from my wife about the speed of our internet connection as I download all of the maps and mods.

¹ I doubt anyone cares...but here is the solution.

Yahoo Flocks to del.icio.us

You have probably already read the news about Yahoo! buying del.icio.us and Flickr.I wonder if this means that Yahoo! will soon invest in donate to Flock?Speaking of del.icio.us: There's a great new Firefox extension for tagging web sites. It's not perfect, but it's the best one that I have found so far.

Disturbed Links -- Sans Commentary

I've been sittin' on these links for way too long:

Sex is for Fags!
IRON HYMEN

My 15 year old nephew sent them to me a few weeks ago. I've trying to think of something funny to say about them, but I've got nothin'.

Enjoy.

Corporate Blog Blocking

Things are getting worse for employees of big companies.

I guess it's only a matter of time.

A Flock Of Geeks

I started using Flock today. Flock was Charlie's find. Thanks Charlie.

I love the fact that the bookmarks are stored in del.icio.us. No more syncing my work and home bookmarks. I worry about the strain the Flock community is going to put on del.icio.us servers. Before Flock was announced, I noticed that the del.icio.us site sometimes had trouble keeping up with the load.

I tried the integrated blog stuff, but it was a difficult to configure with my blog. At one point, it pranked my Blogger account pretty hard, putting my blog was in a weird state. I mistakenly published a test post and couldn't delete it.

Flock is interesting so far, but rough around the edges.