Have you heard about Zimbabwe’s currency problem? They’ve got runaway inflation, called the worst the world has ever seen. It turns out that some enterprising people have been selling Zimbabwean currency on eBay.
Here’s a $250 million note. It’s worth approximately $1 USD.
Here’s a Zimbabwean 10-cent note. By my quick calculations, it’s worth approximately $0.0000000004 USD.
I came across a particularly error-prone Wikipedia entry just now, and was doing some cleanup on it. I was having a hard time finding the correct spelling for one word:
According to the various Byzantine calendrical systems…
After a minute of trying to find the correct spelling, I realized that I was overlooking the obvious:
According to the various Byzantine calendar systems…
There’s no need for a word meaning “of or pertaining to calendars” here.
The moral of the story? Sometimes saying something in big words makes you sound foolish.
Do you remember me ranting a while back about how I’d built an OpenBSD firewall but it was a total pain and someone should make an “appliance” for it?
The pfSense people beat me to it, a long time ago. It’s a FreeBSD “distro” meant to convert a PC into an advanced router. It seems like it’ll support everything, ranging from NATing two PCs out your cable modem, to load-balancing a corporate network, incoming and outgoing. It supports a captive portal too, as well as VPNs, more firewall options than you could ever want and, of course, lots of nice graphs.
Absurd idea of the day: (1) get ISP at home, (2) find open wireless connection and use traceroute to verify that they’re on a different ISP, (3) set up load-balancing with some rules to route ‘sensitive’ traffic over your own connection.
This, by the way, is another project that would rock with Walmart’s $200 low-power PC. (Now if only it came in a spiffy rackmount case…) It’d also be well-suited for a DNS cache and a home DHCP server; you could even set it up as a transparent squid proxy if you wanted. (Though none of those features are listed on pfSense, so you might have to drop into the shell to set them up.) Oh, and it’s got a serial port, so why not buy a GPS and make it a stratum 1 NTP server?
I had a copy of /etc/hosts.deny that I wanted to format up to extract the hostnames from… Every other line started with a comment, though, and I wanted to strip those…
:g/#/d
Will match all lines (:g) which contain (not necessarily “start with”) # and delete (d) them.
I had a bit of time to kill today, so I threw together a quick script to take every blog post of mine here, throw it all into one big file, and then use the Markov Chain script I’m so enamored with to “write” a blog post. What follows is essentially a slightly more incoherent version of me. The conclusion, incidentally, is perfect.
[T]he logout shutdown button locks up the machine for 30 seconds before it displays. This is apparently a known problem with several different causes, but it seems to be growing. And from what he said, but it was always an easy leave, so I have 2 columns. You can remove sponsored links, although I don’t. You can number the results. And there’s the “Autoload” for more, which I thought was interesting we think of OPEC as a cartel that has tons of power. In actuality, our power of demand far outweighs their supplier power, and we have the money to buy a faster lens.
I noticed that the flags often served as a replacement for “true patriotism.” And… Did Carville mean to equate Hillary with Jesus in his analogy?
the URL was just a fraction of what he’s made.
of the rooms. How this isn’t a bug I don’t quite buy the bit about them “checking your tags”? And is Houston a reference to Bush’s wiretapping , and how we should end the war, etc. But he seemed too young to have made millions. Maybe he was just from a rich family?
activity. I use thttpd for this idiotic venture, which lets me get a lot of calls? The DNC is at the forefront of… rights?
duty in the Caribbean.
the wrong way, and have the computer find times that work for each of us within certain constraints. I’ve invented what I call “shotgun scheduling,” which seems to want to run bleeding-edge alpha code as our main OS.
so it’s down to a science. Put it mid-way in the playlist for when you’ve already found your groove. It’s also good if you’re just looking to keep the camera perfectly still on a tripod for 15 seconds, but I wouldn’t try to take my ‘radio arbitrage’ skills and apply them to autos, except that having an extra radio is well and good, but having four broken-down cars in my parents’ driveway might not be profitable, but it’ll at least defray the costs of maintaining the atomic clock , the server really doesn’t know the true time. Thus we can only measure how the time differences compare. In this, I essentially just assume that my setting of 16MB is ideal for you!
comes a third benefit, too done right, I think a second is the tolerance . Here, the worst server is 0.022841 seconds 22.8ms off, and one of the videos he was showing was quite degraded, but that he’d make the arrest. He also mentioned expectations of privacy, framing the issue as a question caused me to be able to get to class. I counted, trust me. And that was all.
I’ve long believed that photography is a skill that should be practiced daily.
Today’s exercise:
Mr. T’s post jibed with something that was in the back of my head. I can’t sleep right now, and have sent my friends enough meandering e-mails, so I’ll post here.
For at least the past month, I’ve been in Linux exclusively. I have a 160 GB, 5400 RPM drive with Linux, and a 60 GB, 7200 RPM drive with Windows. (I also have a combination of network storage and external drives for moving/storing data.)
My roommates have been big into Orange Box lately, so I figured I’d give it a try. (It can apparently be made to run under Wine, actually, but I didn’t want to bother.) I swapped out disks, booting into Windows. And it was just one thing wrong after another after that. Admittedly, many of the problems weren’t directly the fault of Windows, but it was truly the worst experience I’ve had in a long time. (Steam was even more badly-behaved than Windows.)
Here are some things that really bug me:
Half-jokingly, I pondered over e-mail, “Why do people ask if Linux is ready for the desktop? The question, I think, is ‘Is Windows ready for the desktop?’ And I’m not sure.” But really, if I have constant headaches, I can only imagine how the people with 75 IE toolbars and lots of spyware and viruses and no idea how computers work must feel. I think my computer is slow? I have bizarre, unexplained errors? I’m confused by technobabble messages that pop up?
Of course, in the interest of fairness, there are two things that I’m liking about Windows:
Oh, see, this is exactly what I hate! As I’m writing this, I can hear my hard drive going. And the disk activity light is on solid. What’s going on? I have no clue! All I have open is Firefox. Some background process is apparently accessing my disk. What is it? I’m not quite sure!
I was just reading something and realized… Three common ‘problems’ in America are pollution from all of us driving our SUVs, we’re all getting obese, and we’re using ridiculous levels of oil even as it becomes absurdly expensive.
Why is the government not more aggressively promoting bicycling? When you ride your bike to work, you emit no pollution at all. And, when you ride your bike to work, you’re getting a workout. And you’re not increasing our reliance on foreign oil.
Of course we still need cars. I wouldn’t want to go grocery shopping with just a bicycle. I wouldn’t want to bike to work in rain or slow. And I certainly wouldn’t want to bike from Waltham to Merrimack. But there are still all sorts of times when riding a bike would be perfectly practical, and I think that the government would do well to promote it / make roads more bike-friendly.
Firefox is great. But it can be made better! Here are some Add-ons you should consider:
“Your mom is so old that she owes Jesus a quarter?” “Why would she owe him a quarter?” “Because she’s so old.” “Yeah, but why did she borrow a quarter?” … “She’d better hope Jesus doesn’t charge interest.”
Clearly, we needed to calculate this. But there were some questions:
I don’t have a financial calculator handy, so I had to use a web-based form. Not many of them worked that well. $2.97 came up fairly often. Frustrated, we just used the Future Value formula. Jesus is apparently owed $5.88 x 1081.
This shows why interest rates really matter. If she had negotiated a 5% interest rate, she’d owe only $3.67 x 1041. But if she put it on a credit card, where 27% is more typical… She’d owe $9.28 x 10205.