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Tasty Stuff February 29, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Stuff... , add a comment

I’d like to point you to all the tasty things Amazon sells: Yum! ;)

Funny Programming Manual February 26, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Programming , add a comment

Haha, this is the funniest programming language tutorial I have ever seen. Even if you have no interest in learning Ruby (like… um… me) it’s worth taking a look at. Too bad more books aren’t like it. And the book is even free. People should send him $5 just for the effort. :)

Google Bombing February 26, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Website , add a comment

I bought the BookBargainsUSA.com domain the day before yesterday. I was not able to setup the DNS settings due to a bug in the registrar’s website until yesterday morning. It took 5 hours before I was able to resolve the domain on my computer. (In other words, the domain name is inaccessable until all this was completed.) One hour later, I put the content of the website up. Two hours later I add a link in this blog. One hour later I add a link to my website from OP-Design.com. Finally, two hours later Google visits for the first time (downloading the homepage and the robots.txt file). Insanity, I tell you.

On their next crawl Google will download every damn page in my store… which is in the 100,000s of thousands–after all I have one page for every product Amazon sells. Hence “Google bombing”. :)

New Blogging Software February 25, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Website , 3comments

I’m giving this WordPress software a try. It looks like it should work well. We’ll see… :)

New Website February 25, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Website , add a comment

Checkout my new (and sexy) website: BookBargainsUSA. If there’s anything you want to buy, and Amazon caries it, checkout my site first. =)

Uptime February 20, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Website , 1 comment so far

No downtime for Buddy4u (ha!)

[root@ehumor root]# uptime
4:01pm up 352 days, 4:26, 1 user, load average: 9.30, 21.41, 19.82

Almost one year and no reboots! Ok, the load is through the roof (1.00 is roughly 100% utilization), but I’m impressed I can keep a computer running for that long without it crashing. :)

We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source February 19, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Programming , add a comment

Here are some funny comments from the Windows 2000 source code. I haven’t viewed it, of course, but they’re from this Kuro5hin Story. First the embarrassing:

Now, how bad is it?

The code is generally excellent. Modules are small, and procedures generally fit on a single screen. The commenting is very detailed about intentions, but doesn’t fall into “add one to i” redundancy.

So despite funny comments, the code isn’t horrible. I didn’t expect it to be horrible, though. You can’t get something as complicated as an operating system to run at all well with awful code.

In short, there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.

I’d imagine all but the worst companies can generate decent the code–it seems to me problems occur not in writing code or creating functions that do what they claim, but in problems with the design. In my experience, once you get an idea down (in requirement and design documents) it’s easy to convert the document to code and have each procedure do what it is supposed to do. The problem is that an idea doesn’t necessarily convert to reality. I’ve gone wrong there and I’m sure Microsoft has too. The lesson is to do good prep work–something I’ve certainly learned the hard way in my college career.

5 Weeks! February 18, 2004

Posted by Owen in : School , add a comment

I made a website 5 weeks ago for my ICS 175a (Artificial Intelligence Project) course and I was doing some searches (the prof wants to know how we will know when our AI works correctly–but I don’t know how to determine that) and I keep finding references to my own site. It’s just funny seeing my own (crappy) site in the middle of a bunch of references from Science magazine and ACM and IEEE.

What you didn’t know about Buddy4u February 17, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Website , add a comment

Spam of the day:

My name is Kay and I’m an account rep for Hard****money.com (*s inserted so they don’t get higher ranking in Google). I saw your site buddy4u.com listed on HotBot under the term “hard a**” and I just wanted to take a moment to introduce our affiliate program to you.
As you probably know, we are one of the largest and best adult affliate programs on the Net today, offering webmasters over 55+ hot converting sites to promote and paying $40 for every sale.

You will find our sites convert extremely well, with new sites added weekly!

(Here are a few of our top converting domains)

Teeng*rls.com
Interr*cial.com
Hard****live.com
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[...and so on]

[Gibberish about why signing up is good]

Kashka Burrowes
Account Manager
www.hard****money.com
Toll Free 866.255.****
ICQ# 14622****

P.S. - To remove yourself from future correspondance, simply reply to this email or call 866.255.**** during normal business hours.

I swear. Thank you very much, but Buddy4u is NOT an obscene website, nor are we listed on Hotbot under “Hard***”. Geez.

Busty Babes February 15, 2004

Posted by Owen in : Weird , add a comment

Yesterday I was driving around and I saw a sign that I thought was funny so I said it out loud: “Busty Babes”. But then as we got closer, my sister says “No, Owen, that sign says “Busy Babies.” Oh man, I was way off on that one.