bytex64.net/blog

Ok, so I think the last time I got a haircut was close to my birthday. For those who don't know, my birthday is February 1st. My hair is getting quite... long. Between dying it black, letting it get so long, and that curious smirk I love to use, I'm starting to look like Steve Jobs circa 1984/pix/steve_jobs.jpg
(minus the bowtie). Here, see for yourself/pix/chip_as_young_Steve_Jobs.jpg
.

I'll get a haircut eventually. In the meantime, it's not that bad. I'd like to think that the longer hair enhances my Antonio Banderas-ness, but that's just a Selma Hayek-filled fantasy that will never happen. :) What it does is make me look like a dirty, unkempt hippie/math major. Just ask Tyler. *rimshot*.

I've tweaked the techblue.css style a bit. The link borders should stomp all over each other a little less, now.

Anyway, sleepy-time. I've got a final tomorrow, then I'm done with Summer Session II (Revenge of Summer Session)!

ATTENTION! All of you programmers who failed to account for leap seconds in your program, and are now one of the supporting reasons for removing leap seconds, this is for you. At least several freely available implementations of libc support 61 seconds per minute. Behold, from the strftime(3) manual:

       %S     The second as a decimal number (range 00 to 61).

Really, people. It's not that freaking hard. Time isn't stored internally as a set of values for minutes, hours, etc. It's a single value that counts the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 (also known as the UNIX epoch). Unless you're re-inventing the wheel, there shouldn't be a problem. Now go and rewrite your programs correctly.

Politicians: Stop trying to fix problems that you know nothing about. I know that this will leave you sitting and twiddling your thumbs most of the time, but please, let the experts sort these things out.

Today's new theme, chaoticdesolator.css, comes to you from my buddy Marcin's blog. I always liked the design for its simplicity and subtlety, and for the fact that it's one of the cleanest xanga sites I've ever seen. Not that that's saying much. I mean, really. Look at this typical Xanga blog. Makes you motion sick, doesn't it? No, I'm not going to do a style-a-day. Mainly because I just ran out of cool sites to clone. :)

Ok, I've updated the styles widget (panel... whatever you want to call it) so that you can save the style. Just select a style, then pop out the panel again and hit "save". Note that this isn't a persistent cookie (yet), so you'll have to set it each time you start up your browser (but who restarts their browser?).

The really hardcore amongst you may wish to try out the new and improved console. You can apply your *own* style to my site by typing style [url], where [url] is a URL specifying a css file. For a kick in the pants, try the tamboli-ish.css style. (inspired heavily by tamboli.cx)

So I've been pondering the new Dodge Chargerhttp://www.dodge.com/nav/model/charger_rt.jpg
, and like most of you car nuts, I've got mixed feelings about it. The first thing most people notice about it is that it doesn't really look like the Charger/pix/1968_Dodge_Charger.jpg
we all know and love. I mean, it's got four doors. That's not a Charger. It's a 300C with a different body. If it weren't for the fact that you can get a Hemi, and that it's actually performs decently, it would go down in history right next to the mid-80's Charger. Yeah, thathttp://mclellansautomotive.com/photos/B32140.jpg
one. I know you were trying to block it out of your mind, but let's be honest, now.

This Charger feels too much like a kneejerk reaction to the new Mustanghttp://www.fordvehicles.com/assets/images/vehicle/pg/mst05_009_ext_lg.jpg
, which actually pays homage to its roots (or capitalizes on them, take your pick). I'd lump the Pontiac GTOhttp://www.pontiac.com/gto/images/bg_image3.jpg
in too, except that it's major offense is being a Holden Monaro with a small block in it. If they come out with a full-fastback coupe version of the Charger, maybe we'll forgive them. Really, they should have called it something else.

At some point when I was talking about Apple's switch to x86 macs, I somewhat whimsically stated that you'd see a two-button mouse from them. Well, even I didn't expect that to happen, but...

BOOYAH!

The two-way scroll idea is a pretty good one, and one that dates back to (at least) the IBM ScrollPoint, which I just found out comes in an Optical USB form. This means that I must get one. I bought a stack of the old PS/2 ScrollPoint II's a while ago, and I was extremely impressed with the design.

I'm not about to replace my Logitech MouseMan, but at several points, I've needed a USB mouse, and I've refused to get one until I can get it in an honest-to-God three-button variety. None of that scroll-wheel shit. Plus, if I can get the scroll widget working, it'll be 10x more useful than any wheel. And it glows. That's bad-ass. I should buy one before they start stamping "Lenovo" on them.

Nice mice.

From AIM:

Chrissy: thanks!
Chrissy: hug()
Me: You forgot the semicolon. :)

Alright, folks. For this next part, I'm going to have to ask you to put on a hat. This is so awesome, it may very well blow your mind. The hat will not prevent this. It will, however, make it much easier to collect the fragmented lumps of your cerebellum for later reassembly.

Alright. See the new "styles" item in the list above? Go up to it, and when you hover over it, it should pop out a list of CSS files. Select "techblue.css".

I know, it's awesome. This is what happens when you listen to Digitally Imported's trance station while messing around with the CSS tester. Eventually, I'll make it so you can save this preference. The only real faux-pas is the 80KB .png I'm using for the post titles. It's reused a dozen times, so I don't think it's that bad. Once CSS3 rolls around, I'll probably be able to do that without an image. I like this style so much, I might just make it the default.

Expect more of this kind of awesomeness in the future.

On a whim, I've created a CSS tester for easily creating new styles for the site. Using it, I was able to crank out that redline theme in about 5 minutes. Mess around with it if you want, and send me anything cool. :) Also, feel free to copy it to your site to mess around with styles on the fly. It's also a good way to see how various browsers disagree on how things should be rendered.

So on Friday and Saturday Scott and I installed our restaurant ordering system over at Margaritas on Philo road. (Quick plug: Go check the place out, it's pretty good stuff.) If you're ever there, check out the computer that they punch orders into. I made that software. :) Scott and I were going to call the software KitchenSync, but I just found out that the name has been taken. *shrug*.

Mike was here this weekend, and we wound up driving to Scott's in separate cars. This meant that once we left, it was inevitable that we'd be racing. Out on a back road that shall remain nameless until the statute of limitations kicks in, we drag raced from a stop sign. I won, but not due to my greater skill or my car's power to weight ratio advantage. Mike chickened out. "Why?" I screamed at him through my window. "Cops," he screamed back. Oh, well.

While driving back home, we were making a two-lane left turn. Mike was on the inside, and I was on the outside. I wasn't ready for the light, and mike got ahead easily. Unfortunately, a car on the opposite side of the intersection decided to make his right turn on red at the same time, effectively blocking my lane. I cranked the wheel, the rear end slid out a bit, and I power-slid into Mike's lane.

A little later, I pulled up next to Mike and passed him, squealing my tires in the process. When he got back, Mike said, "That was pretty impressive, I didn't know your car had that kind of power." Well, truth is, it doesn't. :) I'd mis-shifted, and failed to match revs while shifting into second. The mis-match caused the wheels to slow down suddenly and give a loud chirp. If you do this while braking for a corner, it will upset the rear end and cause it to slide out. Tsuchiya Keichi uses this to begin what he calls a "shift-lock" drift. I actually did this accidentally once, while driving around by my house. Unfortunately, the result was less of a drift and more of a frantic plow through the grass on the side of the road as I desperately tried to return the car to the pavement.

Next time, Mike. Next time.

It occurred to me lately that my site design, while lightweight and usable, relies on, well, I guess I'll just come right out and say it.

Tables.

At some point the table-based layout went the way of the frame. I'm not sure exactly when this was, but nowadays all the cool kids lay out their webpages with divs and spans and the mercurial float property of CSS. I'm down with the CSS thing, but I'd never really thought about giving my site a refresher.

It turns out it was a piece of cake. Ok, almost. I had to use one strange hack to get it to not look like shit in IE. (This just in: Internet Explorer breaks compliant website designs. Film at 11.) The best part is that I didn't have to re-do any of the work I'd already done on things like turbo mode or live preview. Both of them worked flawlessly. As an added bonus, I've got this little [-] thingy in the sidebar now. Click on it, and the sidebar dissapears, so you can see more of the actual content. Oh, that doesn't work in IE. (Ok, for future reference, kiddies, IE is broke as hell, and you should get another browser. I'm not going to rant about it anymore.)

So, really, not a whole lot has changed, except for a few visual tweaks on the blog. Look forward to another redesign in five years when everyone finally gets with the XSL stylesheet thing. :)

1. Apparently some people are calling video podcasts "vodcasts." If I ever come across the person who invented this term, I'm going to crush their kneecaps with a pickaxe.
2. Ndiswrapper is the bomb.

That is all.

Ok, in line with the whole thing with the thick-rimmed glasses, I'd like to publicly admit that I think Tomoko Kawase/pix/tomoko_kawase.jpg
(Thanks Moji and ja.wikipedia.org!) is t3h h4wt. You may know her better as the chick from Tommy February⁶ (or alternatively, Tommy Heavenly⁶). Now, I know what you're thinking. She's the whitest looking japanese chick you've ever seen. This is true. I'll admit it, I have a weakness for Japanese girls that want to be Caucasian. But in my defense, her music isn't half-bad either.

On the Tommy February⁶ side, she sounds sort of like a Japanese Kylie Minogue. Not that I'm a fan of Kylie, but I may have blasted "Love at First Sight" while driving around in my RX-7. These things happen. It's a disturbingly mesmerizing brand of synth-pop. Honestly, it's really insubstantial stuff, but I wind up humming four bars of it all day despite my best efforts. And yes, her birthday is February 6, 1975.

For what I've just listened to of Tommy Heavenly⁶, it's not-half-bad pop-punk. I can't really compare it to anyone popular here without dragging Tommy down in comparison. If you'd like to hear and see some of it, Yan's sharing the music video at the moment. Unfortunately, in Heavenly form, Tomoko's not wearing her librarian glasses, but she makes up for it with the attitude she lacks in February form.

Warning: This post has way too many pictures.

Yan: You have to watch this video, man. This is how cosplaying should be done.
Me: I think you're making the assumption that cosplaying should be done. I'm not sure that's a valid assumption.

It's a well known fact that in the panoply of truly scary things in this world, cosplaying is very near the top. Don't believe me? Witness the scariness for yourself. Stuff like thishttp://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/yyv/Otakon_2003/A_whole_bunch_of_hot_female_cosplayers_=).jpg
gives me the heebie-jeebies. For further scariness, note the filename. O_o...

Not that a little dressing up ever hurt anyone. Personally, I'm a fan of kimono, schoolgirl uniforms, and whatever it is that Rei Hino/pix/mars27.jpg
wears. But when a man dresses up as their favorite magical girl, it's just wrong.

In a previous post, I described the ideal girl. But if we consider an ideal fantasy girl, I'm going to have to make a few amendments. First, she must be a cat-girl. This is non-negotiable. Any magical abilities are a plus, with a bonus for any ability that turns items into hard liquor. Ideally, she'd be wearing a kimono, and if she's a librarian, that's awesome, too.

So we have: magical cat-girl wearing a kimono and emo glasses, shelving books at a library. Yeah, I think that about maxes it out.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some fantasizing to do.