We live in an amazing world.
I can now safely and legally send my ex-wife ebola or black death.
A couple days ago some odd black rectangles were installed in our elevators. I assumed that they were some sort of new security camera (several years ago our building management corporation was sued for rather a lot of money for failing to maintain a secure building in Chicago and has since become a bit paranoid). Yesterday, while I was riding up to my floor they came to life and turned out to be little LCD screens... that were displaying the logo of an advertising company... followed by ads.
I think I would've preferred the security cameras.
Is spam a random event?
There's a lot of it, it's full of garbage, no one person controls it. It seems like it could make an interesting random number generator.
One of the old tricks for randomizing gameplay is to use the low bits off the analog inputs (or the disk seek times) to seed your random number generator. Seems like you could do the same sort of thing through statistical analysis of spam.
It's probably an intrinsically bad idea to allow an external source influence your security, but the idea of using spam to improve the security of commercial transactions seems deliciously ironic.
I suppose the up side of comment spam is that it's one way to find out what pharmaceuticals the terminally insecure are interested in.
Found the following in our init code:
#ifdef ketpier
bForceRumbleOff = true; // I hate it hate it HATE IT!
#endif
(username changed to protect the guilty)
I guess our lead programmer doesn't like his controller in vibrate mode :)
Project management tip for the day:
add -D$(USERNAME) as a compiler flag in order to enable per-user defines that prevents your only-useful-to-you debugging code from polluting the tty (That's the theory. I just create macros that can toggle printing on and off in sections of code and then apologize when I accidentally check the code in with the printing toggled on).
Is it a bad sign when you read that J.K. Rowling is about to kill off another Harry Potter character and you half expect there to be some sort of demand for someone to pull out of Iraq?
Harry held the knife to Ron's throat. Ron looked down at Elmo's headless body and knew that if Halliburton hadn't started to leave Iraq in 30 minutes Ron's corpse would be joining Elmo's on the floor.
At least people would be paying attention if that happened.
Quote of the day:
"Do you have a whimper and cower animation?"