OldMiner

user since
Thu Apr 3 2003 at 07:44:03 (5.6 years ago )
last seen
Tue Nov 18 2008 at 23:43:19 (7 hours ago )
number of write-ups
12 - View OldMiner's writeups (feed)
level / experience
1 (Novice) / 815
C!s spent
7
most recent writeup
September 11, 2007

Greetings! Are you sporting a long, white beard, a bulbous bowl full of heart-attack-inducing jelly about your midsection, and a curious affection for red velvet? No? Then this might not be for you.

I'm notoriously bad about giving suggestions for holidays, which has resulted in an overflowing supply of cotton socks and Michael-Jordan-sponsored underwear. Let's see if I can rectify this.

The winters are cold, and I still like going out running and biking in the inclimate weather. Things that might assist with this such as thin-but-warm gloves (that I will somehow not misplace); hats, masks, and hoods that stay in place on their own (that I will somehow not misplace); wool socks (that the dryer will somehow not misplace); and other items of warmth would be heartily appreciated. If you could be so kind, I wear almost exclusively black.

In the less fabricy area, I am always on the look out for pirate regalia, as I celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day with a fair amount of vigor. I wear, uh, less black those days.

As a third option, I have long hair which I frequently tie back for eating or traveling purposes. Any interesting device with which to secure my mangy mane would be appreciated as well.

Hope these suggestions help. May you be touched by his noodly appendage during the coldest times of the year.

AIM: e2OldMiner

Catbox: Home of Misquoting

"Great...penis...roommate." -Swap

This Isn't Growing

Don't want to be one of those people who are confidently trying to impress each other with their hard work even though I am. S3 said something very much the same in the catbox sometime recently and it bugged me because I identified with it. He said he didn't want to interrupt the people all trying to awe each other.

In case you haven't read him in that forum, despite his exactness and clarity in his writeups, S3 often adds bits of fancifulness, completely unconnected to events at present. Sometimes it's harsh criticism of something recently said. And sometimes it's just a fancy way of putting a sentence together. It's having fun with words and thoughts.

That's what E2 had that got me in all the right places, why I still haunt here. That and pushin' niceness. I'd like to bring that back, even if I have nothing to do with doing so.

Pretentiousness is a bad habit.

He Deletes My Nodeshells, but I Still Like Him

<dannye> I'm now pissing in French. I've seemingly developed a urinary tract inflection.

I was once told by one of my favorite teachers that I had something in common with Mark Twain. Apparently we're both cynics brought about by our idealism meeting reality. My worst habits include trying to sound smarter than I am and not turning in homework because it's only 90% done.

There are those who talk of benevolent sexism, wherein seemingly benign or even desirable traits are brought forth from a crooked idea. It's like Bizarro honor. I say, benevolent egocentrism exists, and I am its ambassador. It's my fault, and the less aware/comfortable/awake I am, the more it is. There are those who claim that only when one is sleeping does her true personality appear.

politicalcompass.org tell me I am:
Economic Left/Right: 1.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.51

Interestingly, their sample chart of notable people's compass includes absolutely no one in the same quadrant.

While I'm at it, my Bartle Quotient notes:

Explorer   93%
Achiever   60%
Socializer 26%
Killer     20%

I've mapped a few MUDs that no one, even the gods, had a map to. And now I don't actively play any MUDs anymore.

This node needs some editing.

Somewhere near Green's Theorem, there's a pocket holding a list of writeups which are marked for downvotes. It's short enough, which is why it fits inside that little pocket. All entries contain glaring errors which have been pointed out. All are by authors who did not see fit to respond positively to being informed of such errors. One hopes at least one of these attitudes will be adjusted prior to this node's reaching level 2.

Having been blessed with votes a few times, I saw fit to mostly upvote and disregard the aforementioned list. The list of writeups to upvote is much longer anyhow, and more deserving of such attention. That list is partially represented far below. It's better that others can see it. Anyhow, there is no pocket of sufficient depth available for that rambling catalog. Thank goodness.

I got annoyed reading a lot of long homenodes with a <strike> tag through all of it. Moreover, people seem to think that a smaller font size plus strikethrough is readable. Well, I guess it depends on your eyes. So, being the resourceful comp sci guy I am, I whipped out my user style sheet. 

strike {
 color: blue;
 text-decoration: none;
}

But some people, they seem to like abbreviating things. They use this <s> tag. Forgot about that one. Whoops. But, oddly, no one who uses that tag has done in a fashion that made text unreadable. Perhaps this is a comment on efficiency.

Use Windows 98/ME/XP/2000? Have Active Desktop enabled? Like playing with CSS? Go into Internet Explorer, Tools Menu, Internet Options, click on the "Accessibility" button, set a user style sheet, click OK. The entirety of your desktop is one big div. Me, I'd like to have: 

body>div:first-child {
 border:     40px dotted white;
}

Looks like lightbulbs all around Jack's wonderful portrait. Of course, it does weird things to web pages sometimes. I'm working on putting a selector in there or some such. Watch this space.

But there is wonkiness in Internet Explorer. Quirks Mode reports that Internet Explorer does not [ properly ] honor the child selector, either ignoring the entire rule, or considering the selector to be a descendent selector (as if there were just a space).

However, this isn't a terrible issue. The weirdness lies in that I, oddly enough, like having one stylesheet that I stick into Mozilla, Safari, and IE. IE, I primarily use for making my desktop look pretty. As such, it doesn't matter if IE can't render most websites reasonably. Therefore, the following compromise was devised: 

body div {
 border:     40px dotted white;
}

body>div, body * div {
 border:     2px dotted pink;
}

So all divs which descendents of body (should be all of them), should have a 40 pixel, dotted, white border. Oh, but, WAIT, I changed my mind. Instead, all divs which are a direct descendent of body should have a 2 pixel, pink, dotted border. Oh, and make that apply to all divs which are more than one descendent away from body -- oh, but that's ALL of them.

XP is an imaginary number granted to you by an anonymous stranger.

Do not attribute to malice what can be explained more innocently. Ask before raising your ire.

I called because I felt terribly around the corners of my life, and they felt more than terrible. I called because I remember that when I talked to you, I always felt better. You didn't answer because you weren't there. You didn't answer because we planned to not talk again. Planning was never my strong suit. Planning always made for big ideas that seemed so small in reality. I wrote this here because you would never know to read it. I wrote this here because it would hurt you to know the truth.

Bookmarks organized.

This are items I'd like to node and have some idea about, but need to do more research on. Do what you feel is right regarding beating me to noding these.

  1. fuck - as a surname, apparently with Portugese origin. Contrary to American egocentrism, our bad words aren't bad everywhere.
  2. gas - As in Gnu Assembler. Syntax, capabilties, project scope, and as compared to NASM.
  3. plug and play - a Microsoft innovation, believe it or not. More on the history of plug and play is necessary, as is the actual mechanics of various parts of it (much of it documented on MSDN), including how Linux differs.
  4. magnesium - as an essential mineral for human (and other living things') development. Absorption, common sources, uses in the body, methods of loss.
  5. IU - International Unit. A unit of measurement which is dependent on the item being measured; not quite as nice as a mole which is variable in mass but constant in number. I've done a fair bit of research on this, but history seems hard to come by. References in all my sources are made to the International Conference for Unification of Formulae. I find no other reference anywhere of this conference, however.
  6. Black boxes - Anarchist's Cookbook: Black Box Plans, Surviving an FBI Lock-In Trace (idea) — I need to contact an EE who knows more about the old POTS than I do. I question the credibility of a black box ever working at all. One way or another, my skepticism needs to be answered.
  7. Piaget - Much of his work in psychology is documented, but he himself is not. Perhaps not so queer, considering how technically oriented E2 can be, but it would be nice to have at least a short bio.
  8. amblyopia - also known as "lazy eye". The former should be firmlinked to the latter. This subject is fairly well covered, but I'd like to add more information while conveying my personal experience with this wonderful abnormality.
  9. Crusoe - The VLIW processor that happens to do a decent job of emulating an Intel x86 processor at low power, albeit at low speeds. There is only a one-liner on this right now.
  10. WDM - Windows Driver Model. Getting a little niche-like here, WDM is a subset of functions that all recent versions of Windows are guaranteed to supply so a driver written that only uses WDM functions is guaranteed to be source compatible across many versions of Windows, hence minimizing development time. Let me tell you, the only thing worse than writing a kernel mode driver is doing it twice. Again, this writeup will be heavily referencing MSDN.
  11. magnesium stearate - Might as well be a nodeshell right now. Research: chemical structure (which a chemist probably would know simply by reading the name), uses, discovery, synthesis, stability, all that fun stuff from the chemical data safety sheet.
  12. S.I. Hayakawa - A few years back, I read Language in Thought and Action by this gentleman, and it's had a profound effect on the way I've thought about things since. This book deserves a re-read, some of its concepts should be noded, and he should probably be given a bit more full-featured of a bio. I'd like to add his take as to why some guys don't pick up on hints from women which is scarily accurate in my case.
  13. spam filtering has an existing write-up which somewhat badmouths SpamAssassin. Presently, SpamAssassin does incorporate Bayesian filtering, and in my experience, does a darn good job of it. Once more, the existing writeup says "no one knows" where the Spam Assassin rule scores come from, but fails to note that Bayesian classification is every bit as nebulous. Both are derived from somewhat random statistical tests which can cause counterintuitive results.
  14. Video standards. This is more to satisfy my interest than anything else, but I'd like details about actual frequencies, voltage levels, methods of generating, and other such technical specifics on these things. I already have them for some of them, but have yet to coherently pull the facts together or wish to have some history to accompany my writeup.
  15. tastes like chicken - There have been some articles I've read about this matter which dealt with it in an interesting and scholarly manner. Sure, that seems completely contrary to E2's purpose at times, especially with a node title like this, but I'm always a devil's advocate.
  16. notch filter could use a writeup which deals with common uses of notch filters, methods of creating an analog notch filter (active and passive), a signals view of the thing complete with Bode plots of before and after, zero-pole diagrams, and all that fun stuff. Presentation of a digital notch filter might be overkill but instructive. May be adequately covered under Making band pass / band stop filters.
  17. impedance matching as a means to maximize power output and why this is the case.
  18. action potential and synaptic gap are both fairly well covered. The latter is actually not that great and should be firmlinked to synapse which covers the subject admirably. I'm not certain exactly why I felt I wanted to add more to one of them, but they are in my bookmarks, and removing things from a list of tasks isn't my sort of thing.
  19. Back in the U.S.S.R. - Beatles song. This may be covered well in softlinked nodes, in which case it should have a firmlink. If not, a history and an explanation of the song wouldn't be too bad. Call me ignorant, but this song's lyrics always confused me.
  20. SAX - "Simple API for XML", as already stated in the node. It'd be nice to flesh this out, if only for my own edification.
  21. OCR - It'd be great to see more in the area of technique (curve fitting, etc.), references to research in this area, relation to handwriting recognition techniques, frequent uses of it, expected error rates in various environments, and so on.
  22. OmniPage - Could use a bit more of an explanation of the software how it behaves, its features, and all that. Last I checked, it was trainable, but its initial training was from selecting a font on the scanning system. It would not train most punctuation like commas and periods. Beats the hell out of PaperPort which is owned by the same company.
  23. magnesia - Preparation and uses of, crystal structure, common uses, chemical data safety stuff and all that other fun stuff.
  24. double majority - Heard the term several times in reference to EU and voting, but know not what it is.
  25. second system effect - Jargon file entry. For some reason, didn't make it over with everything else.
  26. Peripheral connectors: My interest in these was sparked a little when a friend of mine bought a dumb terminal at auction. The device had a huge pinout which turned out to be designed to go into one funky-end of a cable and come out a funky BNC-3. "Woah. BNC-3? What's that?" I queried. Standing committee, containing excellent writeups in and of itself, shows that Judiciary Committee and Appropriations [Committee] are not noded. Both are important in their special duties and operations and are common to both houses.
  27. A Praise Chorus, a song by Jimmy Eat World. There used to be three wus under this node which all came together amazingly, illustrating two very different versions of this song. Lyrics for both were explicated very nicely, and it made me appreciate an addictive song all the more. The node is all the poorer due to Copyright zealotry which wiped clean two of those wus, leaving the third an odd (but still illustrative and well written) orphan. I'm not sure this can be corrected without achieving some amazing permission from a big ole' record company.
  28. In my pedantry, I was getting bugged by a lot of uncapitalized words. So I bookmarked a few things till I had some style references. At this point, I'm rather certain that Muslim, Moslem, and some others should be capitalized. After messaging a few people with typo suggestions, I'll get rid of this item.
  29. new.net could use a more thorough writeup. I've had to help people with fixing their systems after somehow this software resulted in their winsock chain being broken. For instance, one case: pings of IPs and even hosts would work fine. Trying to use telnet or IE would always cause errors. For another case, using pings resulted in error messages reporting that the hardware was malfunctioning. (1) Uninstall New.net. It provides a nice add/remove tool. Decidedly not slimy. (2) Use a winsock chain repair tool. I've found one that's always worked for me.
  30. Everything is Everything from the album Alphabetical by Phoenix
  31. foundry as meaning a "font producer". I imagine the origin of this is that original font producers actually had to make molds, then pour metals into those molds to create the blocks that would ultimately be used for printing. But I've done no research, so it may as well have somehow originated from a building in Warcraft 2.
  32. embalming fluid has a short writeup which lacks specifics on appearance, smell, chemistry, usage, and geographic perspective. Some of this might belong in other nodes. There may be a different term that's used more predominately in the industry. Perhaps should interview a mortician. Regardless, the writeup could stand to be fleshed out.
  33. BITS - Acronym for Background Intelligent Transfer Service. Introduced in Windows XP SP2, a system to download automatic windows updates in small chunks. This removes one of the concerns about automatic updates, that they are a pain to download if one has only dialup internet access. See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=842773.
  34. Avalon - A set of features planned for inclusion in Longhorn. See Longhorn Development Center Home: Avalon. Features an XML based language, XAML, which can describe user interfaces, including 3D scenes. Adds support for vector graphics.
  35. errno - The reality versus what it's often treated as. Most of the time, one needn't care. The standard states that it must be an lvalue and not much else. Many treat it like it's an int. In actuality, there are issues with using errno in a multi-threaded environment, so it is often implemented as a macro which selects the proper errno for the current process. This can be written up in a way so as to explain threads to a non-programmer as well as complete enough for programmatic use.
  36. arity - May deserve a separate writeup on its meaning in programming. Basically, it's the number of arguments passed to a function. I haven't found a sufficient explanation or standard meaning aside from ariels' writeup on NSA: What's a language?. I believe in some instances where function are first class values, arity might also refer to argument type as well as number, but I should get my references straight before reinventing the word.
  37. unlock - I marked this when I had been doing a bit of research on cell phone design, but much more would be necessary before I could provide a proper writeup. In short, many cell phones are tied to their provider by a value stored inside of the phone itself. Providing the proper sequence of numbers to the phone can unlock it. Phones are locked to begin with because cell phone providers often subsidize the cost of a cell phone so that consumers will lock themselves into long term service contracts. Upon completion of the contract, one is supposedly given the combination to unlock his phone, so he may use another service provider if he wishes. There are programs to generate the unlocking codes for phones, but they sometimes require one first have a special cable to connect his phone to the computer running the program.
  38. Strict HTML - This is misrepresented in the node at present (2005 March 10). Strict HTML is HTML that conforms to a strict DTD. As far as I know, these only exist for HTML 4.x and XHTML, where there is a strict, transitional, and frameset DTD to allow a variety of styles. (You'll note the slight discouragement of frames there. CSS fixed combined with a content management system or just SSI includes should theoretically allow the removal of frames.
  39. Lua - I'd like to add discussion on what is actually involved in the glue code with Lua, describe tag methods and metatables which have superseded them in Lua 5.0. Plus, the URL to Lua's website is now http://www.lua.org which is a bit easier to recall.
  40. memory debugger - Presently, this only covers in circuit emulators or programs and devices of similar functionality. In fact, I believe it only cover programs, like SoftICE. I'd like to add a bit about valgrind, purify, efence, and similar functionality built into the GNU malloc libraries. Dangling pointers, off by one errors, and other small memory problems are the niggling bugs that are often used to dismiss C as a safe language. These tools help reduce these risks. Depending on your viewpoint, they either deflect the criticism levelled against C or they enhance it by adding another tool C programmers must use.
  41. Goy Cohen - This one just bugs me. There are presently (2005 March 10) two writeups that discuss this aspect of Judaic Law. The first is careful and details what it's talking about. The second contradicts it but provides no evidence. For this alone, it is a candidate for a downvote, but is it correct? I have no idea. Someone should find out. (On a completely unrelated note, I found this node while looking up Goy which the user TechnoLust on Slashdot used as to refer to his one-time mate. I was curious where the name might have originated.)

Nodeshells

These are primarily dictionary definition nodeshells which I since looked up in Meriam Webster. Copyright law being what it is, I can't directly node these things, so I plan on doing a bit of research for books which utilize these words. Nothing like dictionary entries with references. Then again, I'm sure Oxford keeps such things when they add new words to their dictionary.

  1. polyphagia - poly == many; phage == eater; Excessive appetite.
  2. gentrify - (Covered in gentrification.) Gentrification is the process by which a formerly low-class area is renewed and the associated influx of middle-class which often displaces the former low-class residents.
  3. thrombocytopenia, thrombocyte - A decrease in blood platelets (thrombocytes), the things that stop you from bleeding to death from minor wounds.
  4. megakaryocyte - mega == big; karyo == nucleus, center; cyte == cell; So it's a big nucleus cell, no, wait. Large cell, usually found in bone marrow and which produces blood platelets.
  5. smooth muscle - The sort of stuff you find lining the insides of nearly every organ of your body. It's the gentle rhythmic contraction of this that keeps food moving through your insides. Compare to skeletal muscle and cardiac muscles both of which are striated.
  6. pull up resistor, pull down resistor - Elementary concepts which were probably once covered, and then someone pulled a thefez.
  7. HOCR - Needs to be softlocked and firmlinked to Human Optical Character Recognition, its highest softlink.
  8. Boehm-Demers-Wiser conservative garbage collector - Specific garbage collector which is intended for use in C. A summary of its strengths, weaknesses, and uses would be nice, especially since it seems to be softlinked from many of the other garbage-collecter related nodes.
  9. court reporter - Not my field, but I can give it a shot. It is a nodeshell and probably needs filled. Sadly, I don't know if there's a preferred term, yet. Much research to precede this one. While I've done no research yet, the kindly wordnerd pointed me at stenographer which seems more likely the proper term.
  10. stepping - A somewhat small revision of a CPU. See http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=6
  11. Addams Family Values - Humorous movie. Prominently features one day of the week, attempted murder, hairy things getting their groove on, and "to rot".
  12. CLSID - Class Identifier, a type of GUID. 128-bit and can be generated using uuidgen provided by Microsoft for free to developers. From http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsinstal/html/idh_vedefclassidentifierclsid.asp:
    A Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) associated with a COM class. It is the unique identifier of a COM server.
    Frequently one must generate a CLSID when doing things like hooks or plugins in Windows. It's a long string of hexadecimal characters with no paritcular meaning. They're just intended to be unique so there aren't collision. Partially covered under UUID. Covered in greater detail at Globally Unique Identifier, including mention of Win98 phoning home and Word files tracking users.
  13. SQL injection - A common vulnerability introduced by naive programming. To get data from a databse, one will normally build a string containing an SQL query. If user input is part of that built string, the user my try to inject extra SQL statements into the query, probably resulting in either modification or probing of the database. In the case of Microsoft SQL server, it has a significant chance of compromising the Local System account as well.

Deserving Writeups

Being presently incapable of voting, but planning on being around long enough to at least grant a C! or two, I figured I'd keep track of nodes I found particularly well done.

  1. Journal (idea) (1393426) by Quoi?
  2. Toxic Sludge Is Good For You (thing) (1123403) by Misuba
  3. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? (idea) (1326758) by Haze
  4. Hamming code (idea) (918149 and 1391191) by Mturner and Netcurl respectively
  5. Valentine's Day (person) (413907) by Oenone
  6. catastrophe theory (idea) (715078) by Mblase
  7. April 29, 2002 (thing) (1293328) by Schist
  8. Jacobite succession (person) (1498075) by aneurin
  9. Role (thing) (1197986) by Awestruck Dove And this one has a story! I often message authors with small corrections. On one case, I sent a message:
    (ariels) OldMiner says re world's most narrowly useful programming language: You've got a circumflex over the 'o' in role in the second to last sentence in this one. Is that an error? I've never seen it before.
    ariels says I've always seen it that way. It might be a Britishism (I wouldn't know, I'm not even a Brit). Ask someone like Gritchka?
    I investigated and messaged back my results. So, I learned something from my nitpickiness. Woot!
  10. corpus callosum (idea) (1449265) by Timeshredder Well researched. Good references. Concisely written. Did I mention the thorough references at the end? I think I'm in love.
  11. Nuclear test streamers (thing) (1512439) by archiewood
  12. We're all missing the point on computer security (idea) (735401) by dg
  13. flexagon (thing) (1310521) by Excalibre
  14. Make yourself redundant (idea) (676947,676981,969484) by simonc, whizkid, and Cletus the Foetus respectively.
  15. Realizing just as the drunken brawl gets going that this time, *you* are the asshole (idea (676610) by The Custodian
  16. Ballast (thing) (1378725) by CamTarn

Of Interest

These are links I know I want to visit again, but don't have the room to keep in my short list of Personal Links.

  1. Sensei (person) - A touching story with bits and pieces scattered throughout Everything.
  2. About ekw theme - A more attractive interface to E2
  3. The Value of a College Degree - Computer Science
  4. How To Buy Banner Ads on Everything2
  5. Writing for a wider audience
  6. The e2 Stat Server
  7. Mixed Euphoria - Various musical endeavors by the fair E2 operators
  8. Everything2 URL Interface - Playing with opcodes, more valuable to god types and developers
  9. Everything XML - Mainly for external and bot access to E2
  10. E2 Family Tree
  11. Gauche - A Scheme variant with good IL8N support. The wu isn't great enough to be C!ed but the content is worth investigating. See if Sawfish might see fit to utilize it.

Broken Nodes

When I find typos in nodes, I either message the author, if they've been around in the last three months, submit a notice to broken nodes, or make a note to myself for later. This last option is common when I've already submitted a writeup to broken nodes, but it has since been marked for destruction, so I must wait till the next day to post the new fixes.

These have been filed already

The bookmarks below are notes to myself about nodes I either wish to add to or wish to use to add to other nodes pointed to here. This means they're probably boring. Be warned that I sometimes bookmark things just because they have typos that I don't have the time to correct right away. (I've tried to stop bookmarking that way because have too many unsorted bookmarks already. Sometimes I forget to go back to fix typos.) Therefore, do not view these as endorsements.

User Bookmarks: