The best thing about being a teacher is that you get to reuse old jokes… over and over.

Not much new here. We have a dog. I’ll try to get pics soon… She’s a Brittany Spaniel that mollie watched get hit by a car and took to the vet and… its a long story.

Do you want a fish tank? If so, let me know. I’ve been considering lightening my fish load.

So I sit here on my linux box and I realize… wow. As much as I love my laptop…. as much as I love OSX and how everything works together… I still love Linux. It might not have that ‘everything works together’ feel that OSX has… but its all the little things that make it such a joy to work with.

KDE’s kioslaves(!!!!), gaim (is a much better client than any I’ve used on any OS), kate is the best text editor around for programming (I’ve used BBEdit for about a month, it sucks.), Konsole (way better than iTerm, Terminal.app, or GLTerm), evolution and kmail (the two best mail clients I’ve used) well shit, Kontact (kmail++) seems to be quite the shit itself, and of course there’s the gimp.

to give OSX its fair share of time, I love expose, the way that iTunes makes id3 tags actually useful and desirable, the previously mentioned integration (“click here to IM this contact” from your mail program), the way shit Just Works ™, how its Unix, so I can run almost all of my linux shit on it

You know you’re a loser when all you want to do is be social, but you don’t want to be around anybody or go online… no instead you sit on your laptop, writing a program to use in an IRC role playing game. Yeah, that’ll get you a date fast.

Man. Picking up a program after you’ve been ignoring it for about a week or two really really sucks. You totally forget what part you were working on when you stopped…

still alive. been busy as hell

here, have a valentines day poem.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

All of my base

Are belong to you

In other news, if you are a female, ages 18-24, like guys who know way too much about computers, and could see yourself wearing these, please email me at the email address linked to at the ‘Contact Me’ button above.

so, we got our 60 day “get the hell out or we’ll make you leave” notice today… its not an ‘eviction’ per se (which has lots of other nasty things to go along with it) just a “Termination of Tenancy”

Lying fuckers

Ok.

up to about 270 lines with dbot. I’m sorta stuck but not really at one part. See, I could make it work, but not the way I want it to.

The problem arises from perl’s lack of a builtin Switch statement. This gaping hole left me dumbfounded, as perl has every other single weird statement or operator you can think of. C’s printf? Yup. The Bitwise operator &? Yup. Every single Regexp operator ever…. Hell, it’s even got Java’s crazy fucked up trinary operator, ( IF ? THEN : ELSE ). Which as far as I know, makes them the only two languages that have it…

Anyways, a switch statement is like an if statement on crack.

basically, it works like this:

Nevermind. I wrote an entire lecture on the switch statement before I realized exactly 0 people will care to read it.

Anyways. In other news, chris is a freakin fucktard. For years I’ve been recommending mozilla to anyone who would listen. Especially if they ever complained about popups. If you hate popups, there is simply no reason at all to be using Internet Explorer. One must actually hate oneself to continue that behavior. Then add to that tabbed browsing, java/flash whitelisting, and not being vulnerable to every new bug found.

Like this latest one. Latest pair, rather. You can create a hyperlink such that it looks like one thing, but leads you somewhere else.

For example, this link takes you to your bank:

www.washingtonmutual.com

This one, however, takes you to the washington mutual that some account info stealing black hat rigged up (actually, I just told it to send you to google instead):

www.washingtonmutual.com

I don’t see why there isn’t mass hysteria about this? And if you’re saying “well, I’ll just read the URL” you’re not thinking. When I log on to my bank, I get a huge URL. Now try some site like ebay, its all gobbldygoop!

And this is just one possibility, someone can also use this bug to:

link to C:concon (this will automatically crash any windows 95 or 98 box.

link to a website that has javascript or activeX code which runs automatically and could potentially break your computer

link to goatse.cx (unlinked to protect the innocent.

Worst of all is Microsoft’s response to this! Just type it!

Quote: The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

The whole point of the internet using hyperlinks is so that you don’t have to type shit like: “http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?cg iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2Fws%2F&krd= 1&from=R8&MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&ht=1&So rtProperty=MetaEndSort&query=frfogs”

Anyways. My point is there’s absolutely zero reason to still be using internet explorer at home. At work, ok, maybe your boss doesn’t have a clue. But at home, if you are at all familiar with the computer industry, you should know to avoid IE at all costs.

Just use mozilla. Go. Download 1.6 or whatever is the most recent version. Play with it for a while, give it a week. If you don’t like it by the end of the first week, I can recommend other browsers that also aren’t Internet Explorer.

dude. regexps are at once the coolest and hardest thing I’ve learned in all my programming experience.

I mean, being able to do: /(^-?d+)/

to search a variable for any string that: “Starts with 1 or 0 “-“s, followed immediately by 1 or more “0-9″s” and then storing that result in another variable without changing the first variable all in one bloody line of code is freakin cool.

oh yeah. for those not in the know, I’m in the process of rewriting dicebot, our irc program that comes in and rolls all of our dice for us while we’re playing dnd online.

Two reasons I’m doing this:

1) currently, you have to run it through mIRC. Which means you have to be running windows to run it. Screw that shit. For the longest time I just had someone else fire up dicebot, but thats lame.

2) it can only do the simplest of math. Yeah, thats not its main function (rolling dice, which it does pretty well.) but dammit, it should be able to add a string of numbers together, not just two. And it should be able to at least multiply.

And as of right now I have all of the logic part of the dicerolling part of the program done. Meaning it rolls its dice properly, adds the dice up properly (handling negatives), and displays the results properly and identically to the way dicebot does it.

With one exception… which leads me to reason the third

3) I can add extra bits to this bot very easily, like when you roll a d20+2, and get a 22, it will put underscores around the number, showing that it was a natural 20. Can be useful.

But I can add other cool features. Like say you did just roll that natural 20. I can get it to watch your next input and if you typed say “crit” it will reroll and see if you got a crit. Or other things. Anyway, back to coding.