So after cleaning my windshield off and driving, some snow falls on my windshield from the roof. It gets logged under my windshield wiper. Well what does my saturn do? It decides to fuck up the windshield wiper because it hit heavy snow. Now only one speed works (really fast).
I guess I'm going to saturn tomorrow.
I woke up early with the inability to get back to sleep. Caryn is traveling right now and I'm stuck with nothing to do, very tired, and deciding how to spend my day.
I read this article about the lack of profits at Microsoft in terms of their online division. I don't believe Microsoft can turn things around with their "do everything" mentality. They need one good product to attract users to their other properties. Sadly, hotmail is their best weapon now. I think they could be competative with search provided they expand their search results and stop optimizing for their own partners (and their own) products. Nothing is more annoying that to search for linux or bsd and get a Windows ad. The BSD results are a joke. Searching for data on integrating windows and mac os is even bad. It's clear they are either filtering or have a very small index of the web. It's also possible that they manually add entries and their own stuff comes first.
I think there is too much competition online. Most of the novelty of the web has worn off for people. It's become a shopping and news source and less of a peer to peer communication medium. I think this is in part to the younger generation shunning the internet in favor of proprietary cell phone messaging. Why have something for free when you can pay per message. Microsoft will never be amazon.com and they already partnered with NBC. Perhaps they need to get a better arrangement with NBC. The other big pull these days is social networking and sharing pictures. I think picture sharing sites are somewhat a fad. It takes energy to share photos and eventually apple and microsoft will automate the process with their own software. That is an angle for them I guess. Make a .Mac (mobile me) style photo gallery service for free built into windows live properties + a local client. Social networking is interesting, but I think long term that blogging and sites like facebook will die out. Facebook will be replaced by something else just as myspace has lost momentum. It will happen eventually. I give credit to facebook for innovating in many ways, but as they change the site users will leave. It's a catch-22. Essentially sites like google have not changed in years. They only add services. Facebook needs to follow that model not to alienate users.
In my opinion, microsoft should give up on an online revenue directly and instead partner with other companies in to integration with windows. They still have a monopoly lock on their OS and office suites that can be leveraged for a few years yet.
From an open source perspective, we need to de-thrown Microsoft Office and make an idiot proof desktop. I'm not interested in working on office suites.
This is most unfortunte. Time Machine didn't backup all of my files apparently. I lost some music in iTunes that I know was there. I'm quite pissed.
Between coding, I've been playing WoW some this weekend. I've finally got a level 36 character. I've been stuck in the 20s for a long time. Of course I gave up leveling for awhile, but blizzard made it easier.
I printed out my programming assignment only to find a bug in the transtitive test at the last minute. So I spent another hour rewriting the test and cleaning up the transitive_closure function as well. I'm too tired to verify all the output at this point, but at least I dont' see obvious flaws. It's due tomorrow morning.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/14/news/economy/retail_sales/index.htm
I don't understand CNN sometimes. Gas prices fell but most companies kept their higher rates on things like food, shipping (UPS/FedEx), etc due to the decline in purchasing. This means people can't afford $5 for a coffee.
I've been working on MidnightBSD today. I've fixed at least ten different problems in src today. At the moment, it's building again. We'll see what happens.
This is the first day I've taken "off" from homework in awhile. I have an assignment due on monday, but i really don't feel like working on it right now.
I'm quite happy with the presidential election results last night. Beyond the obvious step forward for equality in this country, we also voted for an intellectual who will think about the ramifications of his actions.
Last night, most TV networks began to discuss the possible outcomes for the country. They focused on the positive. Obama won. Some even foolishly tried to declare racism dead. There are still people who hate in this country. Many have diverted that energy toward people with middle eastern backgrounds. Many of these same people voting for change, voting for a biracial man, also voted against the rights of americans to marry and adopt children. Arkansas banned anyone who wants to adopt without being married from participating. That means children in their state will suffer with no homes because of the hatred of a few. A single mother with a child has a tough go, but what about a child with no family at all? In many other states including California they voted against same sex marriage. I believe that issue is the new equal rights issue. People supporting those measures cannot give a clear answer without including a religious belief or some ignorant hate. I don't see how that is different than judging someone for the color of their skin. Many of us still hold the "I'm x so you have to be too" mentality. That has to change.
I've been busy lately. These online classes keep me surprisingly busy. Then there's MidnightBSD. I've done a lot this month, and yet not reached my goal. I decided to take a few days off over the weekend to recoup. I've been playing World of Warcraft with my undead mage on Medivah. It's been fun. I played in the battlegrounds yesterday for hours. Due to system freezes and some other things I switched back to playing in Windows for awhile. My frame rate is double, but it means I can't work on MidnightBSD while flying, etc.
My mother called me this morning to tell me gossip about a church I belonged to 8 years ago. I don't care that much anymore. The people whom I would have wished to talk to haven't said a word to me in years. I've been encouraging her to go to church because I think she needs it. However, I don't like to hear about it much.
find src -name CVS -prune -type d -print | xargs rm -r
where src is the directory name.
tags: remove files directory midnightbsd cvs
I've watched the first three episodes of the new series (plus the pilot movie) now. I think the casting is good. At first, I didn't think it was that great, but they're starting to give the characters personalities. In Mike's case, he doesn't seem like rambo so much. One thing I don't like about this series is that they've completely gotten rid of the one man can make a difference angle. Now it's just a bunch of people. That worked well at the end of Knight Rider (original show), but sometimes they need to cut him off and let him and the car do things. Caryn hates the show, but she didn't like the original either. That means it must be doing something right.
CNN is reporting that NATO is meeting to send ships to Somalia to combat pirates. This is crazy, but I'm glad they're doing something.
It seems like most ftp servers have a similar problem. They have a command buffer. That buffer is a fixed size like 512 bytes. When the buffer is overflowed, it separates the contents of the first and second buffer. This separation can be used to send commands to an FTP server as a trusted user (by providing the idiot a link to click).
MidnightBSD has been patched since yesterday, Netbsd and OpenBSD have addressed it, but FreeBSD has ignored the problem to date. proftpd also has a problem so we updated to the last rc which may still have a problem. tnftpd has also had a reported issue today. This sucks.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/ea_spore_drm_changes/
It's amazing, the community finally bitched about DRM. EA had to release a patch to back out some of it. It might even be safe for me to buy the game now.
Testing Drivel 2.0.3 with JJ. It works well with LJ. I am surprised by the stability of this version over the last version.
My dad stopped by for a visit yesterday around noon. It was a big suprise. Caryn and I went out to dinner last night, but we were back in time for the debate. It was a very odd evening.
This presidential debate is hilarious. CNN has an "audience reaction meter" lLOL
Today is the first day of Fall. It's begun.