Archive: May 13, 2003
I'm making a prediction about AOL/Time Warner. They'll declare bankruptcy, or have a major "restructuring" where they fire like a quarter of their workforce, within 4, maybe 5 years. I'm really thinking like 2-3, but I'm being conservative.
Our economy is going to explode within the next year/year and a half, I'm betting. From everything I see, a year/year and a half out, unemployment will be dropping, the economy's growth will be great, there'll be talk of raising interest rates, etc. The two things on my list that could bring that to a quick halt and set us back a year or more would be a 9/11-level terroist attack, or if AOL/Time Warner fucks up the economy real bad.
AOL bought/merged with Time Warner a few years ago with funny money. The thing's waiting to fall apart, and I see no action being taken to stop it. How many billions of dollars did they lose last year (or was it last quarter)?
I'm telling you... it's not going to be pretty.
Via HtP, some smart people at Stanford (where Google originated) figured out how to speed up page rank calculations by up to a factor of 5. Good news for everybody.
BlogMatcher seems pretty cool, and also seems to do a very good job of finding "similar" blogs, from the very tiny bit I've played with it.
I keep catching little glimpses of the Matrix while watching TV. This time I was channel surfing and saw Neo jumping off something or other doing a backflip. I know, not a big deal, but it happens a lot. The other day I saw part of a car chase where Neo was like... well, I can't describe it, but I'm sure I'll recognize it when I see the movie, and it will have lost some of its impact. You know what? Screw my road trip. I think I'm going to have to stop along the way on Thursday and catch The Matrix. I should try to find a really honkin big theater along the way and go there!! Anyone know any good theaters between NJ and Virginia?!
Awesome, when I had heard that Angel was renewed, and that it's going to have Smallville as a lead-in (which is totally awesome), I thought, great, now I have to choose between watching 24 and Angel. But in other goodnewsiness, it turns out that Smallville is moving to Wednesday, so, finally no more annoying TV conflicts!
For reasons I can't reveal just yet (cue sinister music), I'm being forced to educate myself on what it takes to write a markup language or a program that supports Unicode. So, here's the start of my research:
As an aside: Base64 encoding uses A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and then '+' and '/' for encoding. Part of the motivation for the characters they chose, IIRC, was to try to achieve some conformance with both ASCII and EBCDIC. I've always wondered why they used plus and slash rather than plus and minus...
From the definition of base64:
NOTE: This subset has the important property that it is
represented identically in all versions of ISO 646, including US
ASCII, and all characters in the subset are also represented
identically in all versions of EBCDIC. Other popular encodings,
such as the encoding used by the uuencode utility and the base85
encoding specified as part of Level 2 PostScript, do not share
these properties, and thus do not fulfill the portability
requirements a binary transport encoding for mail must meet.
Hmm...
These characters, identified in Table 1, below, are selected so as to be universally representable, and the set excludes characters with particular significance to SMTP (e.g., ".", CR, LF) and to the encapsulation boundaries defined in this document (e.g., "-").
So, it turns out that because it's part of MIME, and the minus has special meaning within mime, they didn't use it for base64 encoding.
Since the hyphen character ("-") is represented as itself in the
Quoted-Printable encoding, care must be taken, when encapsulating a
quoted-printable encoded body in a multipart entity, to ensure that
the encapsulation boundary does not appear anywhere in the encoded
body.
I still don't quite understand why something that is used in quoted-printable encoding impacted on what was chosen for base64... since if base64 text was transferred as quoted printable, the hyphen could just be encoded again, right? Maybe they just wanted to avoid that.
Ok, I get it... it's not because of quoted printable. A boundary between different parts of a MIME document could be something like this "--gc0p4Jq0M2Yt08jU534c0p--", which could also be valid base64 encoded text. So, since you wouldn't want to dump some base64 encoded text in a document and find that you accidentally ended your current "body part", they disallowed it. And hyphens were used for boundaries because of the desire for conformance with previous specs. Interesting.
Joe at BitWorking.org has a great essay, along with a great follow-up comment, about, well, levels of abstraction, and whether it's worth it to do things like provide RSS feeds with xhtml:body. It really is an interesting discussion, and best of all, Joe provides one of the best illustrations of the different levels at which to understand a computer I've seen.
If you are ever working at a very low level like this you can attach a scope to different points on the circuit and watch the pulses go by, and see for yourself that the system simulates a digital system. Yes, simulates. All the transistors, resistors and capacitors are really analog circuits that eventually settle into one of two states. Now they settle pretty quickly, but the egdes aren't those beautiful step functions you see in the product spec sheet.
The Mind/Body Problem In Biblical Perspective, By Dr. Greg Bahnsen.
Evangelical Christians have often been trapped by a picture in thinking about man's constitution, a picture which, because of its inappropriateness, has led to many an "anthropological headache." That picture of man which so often captures Christians has been vividly dubbed by Gilbert Ryle as the "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine,"[1] a picture suggesting that man is made up of two different kinds of substance: matter and immaterial. The latter is looked upon as the operator of man's body which "evaporates" to heaven at the time of death (commonly denominated "the immortal soul"). So renown, a theologian as Charles Hodge did not flinch in propounding the doctrine of substantival dualism....
read the rest  I haven't read it yet (unless I've read it before and forgotten I've read it, which is possible), but from the looks of it this is yet another great example of why Greg Bahnsen is my favorite theologian/philosopher of all time.
Via Les, Bit Twiddling Hacks. This is in line with Hacker's Delight, which I want to get.
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Tuesday, May 13, 2003
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Well I have finally found the crazyguy that preaches useless nonsencein A...
Joseph Baxter: Jan 7, 11:07pm