The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Well so far I actually like Netscape 9.  Its Firefox with a polished UI that takes up less space.  It can import bookmarks from IE on Vista flawlessly.  It did not ask to import Firefox bookmarks.  This is a big flaw in the software since I can't migrate from Firefox which is my primary browser.  I hope this is corrected before the release.

about:mozilla works. 

It seems to be faster than Firefox 2.0 for some reason.  Scrolling, page loads and things are a bit peppier. 

Wow. I didn't sleep at all last night. Not 5 minutes of sleep. I asked Caryn to drive me to class which turned out to be a blessing. The air was either let out of my tires or both front tires (which are 3 months old) mysterously lost about the same amount of air while the rear tires maintained pressure. I'm not happy with that. I still haven't resolved that issue.

I managed to write the blog entry but its very poor. I kept trying to sleep last night and I could have just worked on homework.

When I got home, I dropped for 5 hours. It helped a little. I'm still off on my sleep schedule. That blog assignment is scary and I can tell I'm jumping back and forth in this entry. I'm weird when I'm tired. I decided to watch a onk episode from season 2. Mr. Monk and the Captain's wife is one of the best episodes.

I just finished watching the latest "webcast" video.  For Eng 328, it sounds like we just need to make a personal homepage.  We need a targeted site for Eng 444.  I'm going to have trouble thinking of something interesting to do.  I already have several websites which target many of my interests.  I suppose I could do a website about different Operating Systems.  That does seem a bit boring for everyday people.  Most of my better ideas are borderline for an academic work.  I could do a new Jewel site but there would be IP issues.  The OS idea also suffers from that to some degree.  If I use graphics to represent windows, mac os, linux and so on they all are copyrighted.  The screen shots would probably be safe as long as I took them myself.  I think this might need more thought.  Oh my its almost 1 am and I have class at 9am. 

Yet again we see a full disclosure for the two most popular web browsers.  The nature of the web makes it difficult to secure browsers or websites.  The common convention to secure an application is to figure out all the possible types of user input and then create a white list.  With Unicode there thousands of characters from numerous languages to consider.  How do you create a whitelist or even a blacklist for all times of input?  These vulnerabilities deal with iframes, tricking users with keyboard input and other issues. 

I just noticed there is a quicktime video in emuonline. I wish I would have watched that before I turned in my second essay. I get now what the introduction issue was.

Odd.. there is a blog assignment due tomorrow before class. The reading for that blog entry is not enabled on emuonline if i'm clicking on the right spot. Weird.

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/04/0154243

Some people get upset by link posts.  I think this is a serious issue.  Russia is threatening to aim nukes at Europe because we want to setup a missile defense system there.

In season 2, Monk says he was a COP when he met his wife. In season 4? he goes to a class reunion in college and says he met her there.

Last night I began to implement Atom feed support in Just Journal. I've got a good share of the code developed. I haven't decided if I'm going to implement the update protocol or not. It would greatly improve the number of clients that would work with Just Journal. Its a great deal of work. I also prototyped a search feature which I may implement soon. I'm concerned about performance, but right now the site isn't very busy and it should be OK.

I just purchased a copy of Halo 2 for Windows Vista. Its been some time since I played Halo and I've never played Halo 2. This might be interesting.

I was in the process of revising my style essay.  After all changes, it ended up at exactly 1337 words!  LEET or elite in plain english.  Gotta love l33t sp33k. 

I purchased a copy of Super Mario All Stars on Ebay for the SNES.  I used to love the lost levels (Mario 2 in Japan).  So I spend $20 for this cartridge including shipping.  The game doesn't work.  The screen is black.  I've tried cleaning it with no effect.  I never leave bad feedback on ebay, but in this case I decided it was worth it.  $20 for a bad game is very irritating.  I could have purchased it from someone else.  Aside from finishing my essay, I planned to play that tonight.  I'm very pissed. 

Getting widescreen displays in X11 to work is a pain.  With most displays, you must create a modeline.  Here is an example for my Westinghouse 19 inch LCD. 

Section "Monitor"
        #DisplaySize      410   260     # mm
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
        VendorName   "WDE"
        ModelName    "L1975NW"
 ### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
        HorizSync    30.0 - 82.0
        VertRefresh  56.0 - 76.0
        Option      "DPMS"
        ModeLine    "1440x900" 106.5 1440 1520 1672 1904 900 903 909 934
EndSection

Then just add the 1440x900 mode for your screen.  Now I googled this problem and everyone offered similar examples.  What do all those numbers mean on the ModeLine?  Well these numbers come from your xorg.0.log.  In BSD, this is /var/log/xorg.0.log.  Look for a line listing "Supported Additonal Video Mode"  It will list a clock and various h_ and v_ lines. 

ModeLine <name> <clock> <4 horizontal timings> <4 vertical timings>

This will work on MidnightBSD with xorg 6.9. 

I just published my flowerpot essay. It wasn't that time consuming to write, but it sure took me a long time to get it formatted and posted for some reason. I really need to register cuteftp pro on my mac. It lost the registration after moving systems.

The flowerpot designs I did are actually not to bad.

http://people.emich.edu/lholt3/

The readings for eng328 were a bit rough this time. The PDF quality was not the best. I initially downloaded the PDFs on my Mac which has an older 15 inch LCD display. I could not read the PDF documents. Blowing up the text made it way to fuzzy. I also do not have the printer hooked back up yet to print them. So then I emailed them to myself to get over to my PC. I just bought a new monitor the other day so I figured it should look stunning. Well, it stil wasn't that fun to read although possible. There were a few words that were still hard to make out. I found that a bit odd considering I'm using cleartype and acrobit reader isn't typically that bad. One of the few things Microsoft did well was create cleartype in the late 90s. OS X uses PDF natively to do 2d on the screen and it sucked on that.

I've been so busy with homework that I haven't booted into MBSD on my PC since I got the new monitor. I'm curious how widescreen is going to work with the console. I still have to finish up revisions on my 328 essay. Doh.

I just bought the walk the line soundtrack. Its just great. The bass has to be driving my neighbor nuts though. I wish I had superhuman hearing like him and superman.

http://apache.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/01/055243

The latest version of the GPL does little to stop the Novell/Microsoft deal which could seriously impact the community.  Patents are the biggest threat to open source software. 

I was up almost the entire night.  I haven't been this tired in ages.  It was not by choice.  I wrote last night that I'd start my essay in the morning.  I didn't even wake up until afternoon.  I'm still very tired.  Maybe I got 6 hours of sleep.  It wasn't continuous sleep. 

One of the issues with running a webserver yourself is uptime.  There is a perception that an individual can not do as well as a hosting company.  Well I've got a third party auditing service which checks one of my domains every hour.  Over the month of May we had an uptime: of 99.866%.  I think that is very comparable to a hosting company since I used to work at one.  I was above 99% on an NT4 server back then over a year. 

I actually caught someone trying to pass off a wiki entry as their own that I wrote tonight.  I edited the page to correct the "problem".  It looked like that person was doing the same thing to other people in the class.  The funny thing is that I and most other people have been using the author box properly so there is an audit trail to see who created the original work. Plus at least in my case, I have static IP addresses at home so that can also validate my edits.  70.91.226.201-206 are mine.
I just can't believe someone would do that.  At first I thought that person confused author and edit but that is not the case.   The wiki entry assignment isn't very fun and I could see how it would be difficult for some people.  I also arguably grabbed some of the easier entries since I started on it promptly.  I also found it interesting that most people don't have their wiki entries done yet.  I saw two or three people other than myself that had started working on it seriously.  I'm having trouble keeping up with them as well.  Two classes will do that to you. 

In my case, I'm behind on the flowerpot essay.  I have to write that tomorrow.  I just don't have the energy tonight.  On the upside, I'm caught up with eng328 and I've got wiki stuff current for 444. 

Here is a link to a video with bill and steve on stage. Its rather funny.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid910498365/bctid958634947

This is the weirdest comparison ever.  This was on slashdot.   A performance comparison was done for common tasks like starting up the computer and running some basic apps.  The idea is that computers have not improved productivity since the 80s.  This is not true.  Additional tasks like surfing are now possible on modern hardware.  Gaming has advanced dramatically.

In order to prove the authors point, he would need to conduct usability testing.  Put regular people in front of both computers and see what they can do.