Fark.com reports that a group of people in San Francisco have started a petition to, well… I’ll quote them.
Kennedy had a stadium named after him. Reagan has an airport. Where will George W. Bush have his name emblazoned? In San Francisco, it looks like that honor will go to a sewage plant.
Of course, my understanding is that this is just something one group is proposing, versus a city initiative.
MetaFilter, the parent component of my beloved Ask MetaFilter, is quickly earning its place as one of the sites I check daily.
A post there today links to a priceless photo gallery, Nightmare Playgrounds. They’re photos of actual playgrounds, surely designed by people who had disturbed childhoods and wanted to ensure that generations of children to follow would have the same.
What’s scary isn’t just the photos of the playgrounds… It’s that people actually thought it was a good idea to put these things in playgrounds. And that kids actually play at playgrounds with these freaky things in them.
It is widely assumed that there are no escalators in Wyoming.
I somehow came to read the “blog” of the Perl NOC one day–the network admins for the perl.org sites. They get some really amusing spam. And then there’s that category of things where you think it might be spam, but you’re not sure, like this one.
But anyway, today I was checking through my own mail that got filtered as spam, and got the following:
from Selma Orr <REMOVED@REMOVED.com> to helen@n1zyy.com, date Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 12:27 PM subject I hate you damm Instant delivery worldwide. Certified by VISA and VeriSign. http://irisembreyck.blogspot.com
They spam me, tell me they hate me, curse at me, and then expect me to buy whatever they’re selling? Also, why does “helen@n1zyy.com” get a lot of spam? That address never existed! (I should disclaim that this message wasn’t actually sent to helen@n1zyy.com, otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten it. But I get rejected mail to helen@n1zyy.com showing up in the logfiles daily!)
For those not aware, “captcha” is the name given to the little images with distorted text. The premise is that a human can figure out what they say, but that a computerized “bot” cannot. Thus they’re used to keep people from writing scripts to sign up for hundreds of accounts, or to prevent spammers from leaving comments. (Incidentally, there are some clever ways to defeat captchas. The most creative was a group of people that apparently started a “free” porn site, where users only had to complete a captcha to sign up. Except that the captcha actually came from another site: they were essentially getting hundreds of porn-starved people to help them bulk-register for various accounts!)
Anyway, besides causing major problems for the visually-impaired, there’s another problem with captchas… Consider the one I got the first time I tried to sign up for Hulu:
I saw a reference to RAID 6 and didn’t recognize it, so I did what anyone would do–I Wikipediad (I’m going to make that a verb) it:
RAID 6 extends RAID 5 by adding an additional parity block, thus it uses block-level striping with two parity blocks distributed across all member disks. It was not one of the original RAID levels.
So that’s why I hadn’t heard of it–it’s not an “original” RAID level. (I don’t subscribe to RAID trade publications, so I wasn’t aware of it.) The description is a good one-liner, but there’s more text that follows. Surely, it will give me a good insight into exactly what this means and how it works in an applied setting.
RAID 5 can be seen as special case of a Reed-Solomon code.[5] RAID 5, being a degenerate case, requires only addition in the Galois field. Since we are operating on bits, the field used is a binary galois field GF(2). In cyclic representations of binary galois fields, addition is computed by a simple XOR.
After understanding RAID 5 as a special case of a Reed-Solomon code, it is easy to see that it is possible to extend the approach to produce redundancy simply by producing another syndrome; typically a polynomial in GF(28) (8 means we are operating on bytes). By adding additional syndromes it is possible to achieve any number of redundant disks, and recover from the failure of that many drives anywhere in the array, but RAID 6 refers to the specific case of two syndromes.
Wait, what? Reed-Solomon? Degenerate cases? Galois fields? Binary galois fields in cyclic representations? Special cases of the Reed-Solomon code? Polynomial notation of the Reed-Solomon field? I’m lost. Very lost, in fact. Here I was hoping for an expansion over a one-liner that I pretty much understood but that was somewhat vague. And instead I get… I’m not even sure what I got.
From an eBay auction I stumbled across for a desktop PC:
256 MB Ram – Makes ALL your Applications RUN FAST
Apparently, in the counties that got around to holding caucuses and primaries, no one was quite sure what they were doing. People waited hours to cast their ballot (wait, you cast ballots in a caucus? How is that diferent from a primary? Why do they hold them on the same day?), which apparently also confused a lot of people by, for some reason, asking them to select their sexual orientation?
The results (of candidates, not Texans’ sexuality) are still coming in….
Texas and Ohio vote today. Polls show Hillary leading in both, but not by much. Vermont and Rhode Island also vote, but I guess they’re being neglected in most media since they only hold a handful of votes. Obama’s winning in a landslide in Vermont polls, while Rhode Island is another “close, but favoring Hillary” poll.
Someone mentioned a good point, though: imagine if Hillary had won 11 straight states. People would have written Obama off as a lost cause. And if he won Ohio today, people would think, “Woo-hoo, one state on top of 11 straight losses. He’s still done for.” For some reason, Hillary’s not getting that.
Kyle sent me the following image…
The image, as hilarious as it is, is even funnier when you realize that it’s taken verbatim from a Neil Gaiman comic, which was not about Obama. How well it adapts!
I’ll close with a quote: “Always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.” Texans and Ohioans (?), get out and vote for a better future!