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I mentioned in my previous post in passing about determining which was my “dominant eye,” something I’ve merrily gone 22 years without knowing I had. Wikipedia refers to the subject as ocular dominance. Essentially, the brain “prefers” one eye over the other. Of course, this is something that ordinarily goes unnoticed, but it becomes quite [...]
It’s widely-believed that geographic proximity is the main factor determining the accuracy of NTP. While I’m not necessarily disputing its importance, I wanted to mention some interesting tests I’ve done. As I mentioned earlier, my (“our,” really — @ co-owns it, and keeps paying the bill without sending me his PayPal address… *g*) NTP server [...]
In: Cool Links|Ideas|Insanity|Living|OCD|Programming|Rants & Raves
28 Apr 2008Have you guys seen Google Charts? It’s a quirky little API I didn’t know existed until I saw a passing allusion to it. Essentially, you pass it a specially-crafted URL (essentially the definition of an API) and it will generate a PNG image. Here’s a fairly random line graph. My labeling of the axes makes [...]
I haven’t been paying too much attention to my NTP server, but some e-mails on the list about problems with the monitoring server got me to look at my server’s stats. Apparently the monitor experienced a bit of network turbulence and started considering everyone to be way off. I was looking a bit at my [...]
In: Living|OCD|Rants & Raves
17 Apr 2008Last Wednesday (the 9th), I ordered a new pair of sneakers off of eBay. (They’re new, from a trusted seller, and they’re similar to what I had previously, except not falling apart, before you think I’m too weird.) On Friday, I started to think that they should be showing up. On Saturday, I figured it [...]
For the longest time, I’ve wanted a background process that would just increment a counter with each keystroke. A friend here (who has the exact same laptop I do) commented on how it was kind of scary that all of my keys had become really shiny and worn down from use. I couldn’t even give [...]
I’ve been working a lot on cleaning up Wikipedia in my free time the past few days. I think I might stick with it and eventually go for admin, which seems like a fun goal. (Although as they point out, it’s no big deal really… But it’d help me a lot.) A lot of my [...]
One thing I can’t stand is meetings where people have no sense of purpose. Today we had a group meeting for the final project for one of my classes. No one was really going anywhere with it. We discussed a few ways we could split the assignment up. So I did something that worked even [...]
Every now and then I find that I need to do something that seems remarkably obscure, and am surprised to learn that PHP has a function to do it. I found myself cleaning up a really sub-par Wikipedia article, where someone had entered a massive list of things in ALL CAPS. It’s easy enough to [...]
Today most of my tasks are in the “wait” phase, so I had some free time. Of course it’s a Sunday, so there wasn’t a lot to do. So I fell back on an old hobby: patrolling Wikipedia for vandalism. I’d say that 80% of edits are constructive, 10% are well-intentioned but misguided, and 10% [...]