2/24/2002 05:40:00 PM
As I mentioned in my other entry,. I'm currently reading Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke for class. I just came across this bit while searching online for more info on the upcoming movie version of it. Thought some of you may be interested. If you don't know who Aruthr C. Clarke is, perhaps you know who director David Fincher (Director of 'Se7en', 'Fight Club', and 'The Game') is.


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2/23/2002 12:15:00 PM

So if you've read this entry, you know that I got a crush link email sent to me. Then I mentioned here that I wrote a script to find out who my crush was... Here are the details

The script I wrote, admittedly a quick hack, takes all the hints mentioned in this entry into account... At the moment, It works purely under the assumption that the other person's e-mail resides in the andrew.cmu.edu domain and you must run it under AFS (in your andrew acct). Unless you can get a hold of other domain's /etc/passwd file, that is... Eeeenyway... so this is what I did

% ./crushcrack.py --ul=6 | wc -l ( hint #1 )
3923 (this is the number of matches)
% ./crushcrack.py --ul=6 --fl=6 | wc -l ( hint #1, #3 )
1066 (getting better...)
% ./crushcrack.py --ul=6 --fl=6 --ll=5 | wc -l ( hint #1, #3, #4 )
495 (much better, but still a bit too many...)
% ./crushcrack.py --ul=6 --fl=6 --ll=5 --fp="^[klmno]+\w*" | wc -l ( hint #1, #3, #4, #5 )
90 (voila!)
Being the lazy bum that I am, I just went ahead and added hint #6
% ./crushcrack.py --ul=6 --fl=6 --ll=5 --fp="^[klmno]+\w*" --c | wc -l
77 (oh, babyee.....)
Then, I realized that I should take advantage of the Asian name hack that I put in. :) So I ran it again with the Asian name hack
% ./crushcrack.py --ul=6 --fl=6 --ll=5 --fp="^[klmno]+\w*" --c -a | wc -l
77 (It didn't make a difference.)

Looking at the 77 matches is rather interesting, I must say..... I don't think I recoznize any of the names... ^^;... The sad thing is that the first thing that came to my mind after getting the results was the thought that any 3l33t UNIX sys admin could probably have written a 5 liner that did the same thing using awk and sed... I just killed the intense desire to optimize the script or write a shell script and just went to sleep... I've got bigger fish to fry... zzzZZZ

UPDATE: You'll notice that the number of matches have changed. I noticed that I had duplicate userids in the list, so I fixed that and the counts went down by almost half!!


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2/20/2002 02:10:00 AM

I'm so friggin pissed at AOL... They've put in other measures to automatically disconnect Trillian users after a few seconds... The guys at Cerulean Studios are trying to come up with a work around, but in the meanwhile I won't be able to get on AIM... >( ...

UPDATE: Trillian has relased v0.725 which fixes this


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2/20/2002 02:06:00 AM
It wasn't until a few days ago when I had noticed that I forgot to make it so that the comments preserved line breaks... I finally got my lazy ass to just quickly fix the XSL so that it won't escape the text output of the comment body... I've reflected the changes in the ASP Ment-O-Matic package as well..


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2/07/2002 03:51:00 AM

AOL is being a pain in the arse again... Trillian doesn't seem to connect to AIM servers.... I wonder if Fire works... AOL should just give up.... any more resistence is futile!!

UPDATE:Trillian 0.724 has been released that works around this so that you can finally connect to AIM again.


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2/06/2002 05:18:00 PM
SquareUSA is shutting its doors.... I feel fortunate that I didn't end up going there to work cuz if I had done that I would be out of my job by now... but at the same time I have friends there... grrr.... I was hoping that their DVD sales and international market would keep the company going... but I guess not... I'm gonna go and order a copy of Final Fantasy DVD right now!!!


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2/02/2002 10:53:00 PM
I'm a very happy man right now... I had received update notification from Apple on my iBook a while ago about better internationalization support... So after updating it seemed like the menu displays and stuff of that sort all seemed to just work better at displaying them in Korean. That's nice... I just thought it was a bug patch... But it wasn't until today that I browsed around the System Preferences panel to find out that I can actually now use their input method editor to type in Chinese and Korean characters!!!! woo-hoo!!! This is awesome!! Kudos to Apple!!! You guys rock! Now if I could only get those Microsoft Mac people to make the messenger display CJK characters correctly..


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2/02/2002 03:34:00 AM
Just some random thougts on software engineering blazed through my head while I was reflecting on Brooks' talk... I guess it's all cuz I'm trying to understand just how design should be done... It's a great feeling to design something and to vision its greatness... but I always end up changing many of the design later on as the design matures with the implementation... Maybe I'm just trying to find the answer to an unanswerable Q? As Brooks puts it, are we never sure of the design goal or the design tree when we begin? Do we have to accept that fact and somehow fuse the idea of being very very flexible in our software development process and have a constantly evolving overarching design philosophy that guides it? That reminds me of an idea I exchanged with my professor yesterday... I was basically suggesting extending eXtreme programming to do eXtreme designing... For the sake of clearning out my own head, I should just try and write a paper on that subject.... So many uncertainties...


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