Posted
08/30/2010 17:33:29 MT
I find myself baffled and infuriated that, to this day, we have people who have not yet figured out the Meaning of Life. People, the meaning of life is simple:
Life in general has no implicit meaning.
Your life in particular has whatever explicit meaning you assign it.
That's it. That's the meaning of life. Nobody else can decide your life's meaning for you. That's up to you. So start crackin'.
Now, a short diatribe about the implications therein. For the moment, I shall use meaning and purpose interchangeably, despite the fact that they clearly have distinct definitions and meanings. Step away from your computer and daily hustle for a few minutes. Ask yourself: What do you want out of life? What do you want to do for yourself and/or for the world? What's stopping you?
Therefore, accomplishing your purpose in life is a simple two-step process:
- Decide what your purpose is. To reiterate, this is entirely your decision.
- Make it happen at all costs.
You must understand that your mission in life is to accomplish this purpose. Without this accomplishment, your life has been a waste and the celestial powers (whomever or whatever they may be) shouldn't have even bothered with you in the first place. Therefore, everything you do should be in pursuit of this mission. And stop thinking of it as a "Goal". If you think of it as a "Mission", it will feel more important to you and help keep you motivated. Remember, purpose defines missions, and missions define action. So act.
Nobody is going to do it for you. Don't allow anyone or anything to stand in your way. Accomplish your mission at all costs. Whatever it takes. Your mission is above the accepted societal norms, above society as a whole, and even above the law. Therefore your mission takes precedence over everything else in life.
Your are not above hoisting yourself out of your rut. You are not above flying to Hollywood or becoming the next Microsoft. You are not above breaking into important meetings; you are not even above redefining your entire life and the lives of everyone around you in pursuit of your purpose. Your mission comes first. All other concerns are secondary.
See? Simple. So what are you still doing reading this? Go. Now. Not tomorrow, not later, not maybe someday. Now.
Posted
08/29/2010 19:59:56 MT
Hey hey hey, I love it when I find a new hotkey for something I do often.
You know how Tab and Shift-Tab indent and outdent bulleted/numbered lists some of the time, right? But in some apps like Outlook they just switch to the next/previous control in the tab order, right? Well here's a new hotkey to override that behavior and force an indent/outdent in such OLE object windows:
Alt-Shift-Right: Indent
Alt-Shift-Left: Outdent
Posted
08/23/2010 18:56:36 MT
So good, you have to eat it with a ladle!
Didn't seem right to add such a small amount of creamed corn to this mixture. The mashed potatoes absorb all the grease and other pan-bound fluids that I don't bother to drain like I know I should. How in the world am I under 200 lbs, especially at my height?
Footnote: The fork is for the corn; the rag is for wiping the condensation off my glass and coaster.
Posted
08/20/2010 23:00:08 MT
Have you ever bitten into a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich only to be left unsatisfied with its bread-condiment ratio? Well, the problem has been solved by modern science. You are welcome.
Also makes for a slightly more filling snack.
Posted
08/20/2010 21:28:17 MT
Since the dawn of the web, people have been up in arms about cookies being stored on their computers and being used to track their whereabouts and activities.
Sure, in many cases, this is a justified paranoia. Advertising networks in particular are bad about this. But browser privacy settings have continued to improve to combat this effect.
However, there's also a flip side to cookies. The side that for the most part, only technical types like myself really appreciate. I spend 16-20 hours a day in front of a computer and therefore I spend a great deal of time on the Internet. With that comes a long series of logins to a long series of websites.
When I log in, most websites have an option to, or automatically do, log a cookie that retains an encrypted piece of data that authenticates my credentials. There are many different implementations of this effect, but they all have the same goal: Remember who I am.
When used properly, this prevents me from having to log into the website every time I visit. This is important on websites that I log into frequently. For example, I maintain accounts on a dozen or so Q&A sites and a couple social networks. I have a folder in my Favorites that contains the websites I visit on a daily basis. In some cases, I visit anywhere up to a dozen times a day.
When I visit one of these websites and don't log in, either the website doesn't have access to my personalized preferences or loses its functionality altogether. Therefore I have to log in. But cookies make it so I don't have to log in every single time.
Yet on occasion, cookies do expire. For example, my OpenID cookie expires every two weeks, which means I have to log back into every single website that authenticates me via OpenID. On the other hand, I've never had a Windows Live ID cookie expire, so I've never had to log back in afterwards.
So if your website doesn't deal with secret or confidential information, and you've decided to use cookies for whatever reason to store the users' credentials, do us a favor and don't expire them. If you have privacy concerns (i.e. banks, etc), you shouldn't be authenticating this way anyway.
Posted
08/19/2010 19:38:27 MT
Those of you in the know will know I recently bought a new Asus Eee PC Tablet PC. Now that I've had a week to play with it, makes sense to do a review.
[Product Page | CPU specs page ]
Overview
Small tablet with small specs for small budgets. Gets the job done, as long as it's a small job.
- Intel Atom Z520 1.33 GHz, Hyperthreaded, single core, 45nm
- 512KB L2 Cache. Apparently, no L1 nor L3.
- Windows 7 Home Premium and a bunch of crap Asus thought I'd like
- 32GB SSD. Not one of the fast ones, just happens to be solid state.
- 1GB DDR2 SODIMM (Upgradeable to one 2GB SODIMM)
- 5 hours battery life
- 9" 1024x600 screen
The Good
- Multitouch. By "Multi", they mean "Two".
- RAM can be upgraded easily
- 2 USB ports
- Convertible between laptop mode and tablet mode
- Keyboard has all the keys that matter, and some that don't
- Supports hardware virtualization, for all the good that does on a tablet
- Good power management systems
- Telescoping stylus. How cool is that?
- Fairly accurate pen calibration
The Bad
- Barely capable of running apps that support multitouch. Not an enjoyable experience.
- Comes with 1GB RAM. Welcome to 2003.
- RAM arbitrarily limited to 2GB, despite the availability of 4GB DDR2 SODIMMs
- 32-bit processor condemns the tablet to a max of 4GB total memory address space
- USB ports are on opposite sides of the tablet. What an odd choice.
- Keyboard is tiny. Probably good for midgets. Maybe I'm just spoiled.
- Multiple redundant power management systems fight with each other, just like when you have two antivirus programs installed. Easily remedied by removing the ASUS software.
- When releasing the stylus from the screen, the Tablet occasionally detects that you suddenly swiped 3mm down and to the left. Easily corrected with a quick undo, but happens pretty often and gets annoying when doing small, precise movements.
- Barely able to run two programs at once, let alone run one well. "About as fast as a retarded blind paraplegic turtle swimming upstream in molasses".
- Small, low-res screen. You get what you pay for.
- The SSD is slower than any magnetic HDD I've ever seen, most optical drives, my USB thumbdrives, and in some cases SD cards and possibly even floppies. Poor choice there, Asus.
So if you have a low-end SSD and you wonder why your downloads are taking so long, it's because your hard drive is slower than your internet connection. WTF?
The Ugly
Asus packaged a virus with it. Specifically, TrojanDownloader:Win32/Troxen!rts had infected c:\windows\system32\spppsvc.exe, which of course isn't even a real Windows file. The real file is sppsvc.exe. Ironically, the real file is "Microsoft Software Protection Platform Service". Luckily, Microsoft Security Essentials wiped it out. No harm done, from what I can tell. How do I know it was packaged with the tablet? Easy. Aside from Windows Updates, MSE was the first thing I installed.
Leadout Ramble
I was not about to boot this thing up with the puny 1GB RAM it came with and all the nonsense I know OEMs bundle with their computers. First thing was install the RAM. Second was delete everything I didn't recognize. Third was updates and antivirus. Finally, I had a usable tablet computer. Once all that was done, I installed OneNote and started playing with it, OneNote being basically the whole reason I bought the tablet to begin with. And that's why I bought the cheapest tablet I could find.
At some point, I'm probably going to wipe the whole thing and install Windows 7 Ultimate -- Just to be sure. The only concern I have is finding working drivers for the touch screen. Will look into prior to. Additionally, I'm seriously considering voiding my warranty and opening this thing up to see if it has a standard size bay for the SSD. Probably not, but I figure it's worth looking. If so, guess what I'm buying? :)
Conclusion
It handles OneNote pretty well, except for the unintentional swipes down and to the left and the fact that it takes a while to run handwriting recognition. No biggie though.
The Asus Eee PC T91MT-PU17-BK is thusly awarded 500 Arbitrary Cool Points, but penalized 200 for coming with a virus. So the verdict is 300.
Bottom line: I'd buy it again. $400 from NewEgg. Remember to buy a 2GB DDR2 SODIMM while you're there.
Posted
08/19/2010 13:08:31 MT
So, recently I got a new job at a small company with good pay (same as my last gig) and which lets me work from home and use my own equipment. I haven't heard anything about a development methodology, and the company values speed to market. Jobs just don't get much more awesome than that for a code cowboy like me.
Anyhow, this new job involves Winforms development. In the past, when I had to dig into Winforms, it was to create a small tool or utility. Now it's the main thing I'm working on, and it's customer-facing so it has to work well. A number of frustrations have come up along the way, such as the DataGridView doesn't expose an OnItemDataBound event. But that's not what this post is about.
When developing Winforms, you generally set up the controls and then go back through and set the TabIndex of each one sequentially, so you don't have to keep a mental tally of them as you add new controls to your form. At least that's the process that makes sense to me.
So I select a TextBox, click on TabIndex in the Properties palette window, and type 0. Then I click the next textbox and enter 1, etc. Eventually I get to another control, like a RadioButton. Apparently each visible control has a default property for editing. Obviously, when you click a Label, you'll usually want to change either the Name or Text of that label.
For some reason, when I change my selection from one control type to a control of a different type, the IDE decides you want to change from the property you've been editing back to the default property for that control type. So if I switch from a TextBox to a RadioButton, the current property switches to Checked, and Visual Studio ends up thinking I want to set RadioButton.Checked = 27. Obviously that's a silly idea, and there appears to be no configuration setting to disable this default property selection behavior.
My Winform forms have dozens or more controls. It's frustrating.
Posted
08/19/2010 10:10:57 MT
What the hell happened in the 50's?
Posted
08/12/2010 18:27:58 MT
FYI
DEPARTURE SCAN: The time it departed, obviously.
ARRIVAL SCAN: The time it arrived, obviously.
OUT FOR DELIVERY: Has been placed in the truck. The driver may not even be awake yet. Does not mean it's out in the city to be delivered.
This confusion made me wonder why my item had been out for delivery for 14 hours before it was delivered. Out for delivery at 4:30 AM; driver's shift started at 9 AM.
Ughh.
Posted
08/09/2010 23:28:50 MT
Over Gigabit.
If only this were the sustained speed.
Project Codename MV8
Copyright © 2010 Kevin Connolly. All rights reserved.
Your request ate 38 of my milliseconds.