Time to find a new search engine.

Google fucked up. That sort of BS is why everyone left altavista. Who will be next?

uscav.com shipping

Ordered some new boots off uscav.com saturday around noonish. Up until this morning despite the claimed availability being in stock, ships in 24-48hrs, the status on the order page had gone from ‘pending’ to ‘backordered’. But alas, as of checking 5 mins ago it says they were shipped on the 3rd and I have a tracking #. They should be here wednesday.

So apparently the 48 hours means *business* days, or they actually were backordered and I got lucky. I don’t know and don’t really care, it’ll just be nice to have boots that aren’t covered in paint again.

Ooh. I can throw up pics…

So here’s some eggrolls I made. Postbot wins. Back to work now, sigh.

Just testing a different WordPress app…

Postbot. Seems ok.

Getting tired of this shit.

I know of three searches for which Google currently throws me to the top of, and at least two more that it decides warrants the first page. And I’m still getting a fuckton of hits for … christ, make that four. Seriously Google, go get laid. There’s nothing here that interesting.

Apparently I should be looking for a job in SEO or something. Sheesh.

1986 Mac Plus keeps up pace with 2007 AMD Dual-Core.

86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won’t Believe Who Wins — because it’s not the size of the processor, but what you do with it.

PayPal just fucked me.

Been busy the last couple months, working on houses, getting some cash together. Finally did, and got a few books regarding web design. Just made a simple site, it came out quite nicely. Got a PalPal account so they could pay, and they did. Went to add my bank acct and verify it… whoops, “You are currently not allowed to add a bank account because your account access has been limited.”. Everything in PayPal’s help area regarding such, with the steps for fixing it, don’t work. There’s nothing in the “Resolution Center” most of them reference. I just confirmed my cell phone, upgraded it to Premier, and still the same deal.

What. The. Fuck?

Yes, I’ve tried to call them. It’s a bunch of voice prompts, all the options being things already on their site.

Yes, I’ve tried to email them, it says 2-4 days for a reply which will probably be canned anyway.

Update: The resolution seems to have been to upgrade to a business acct. Can’t imagine why… bank acct in my name, I wasn’t planning on switching to a business PayPal acct until I got one as such from my bank. Go figure. Waiting for the deposits to verify the bank acct now. Any more problems and I’m going to just drop PayPal and get a merchant account.

Update: Woke up, checked to see if the two little deposits paypal makes to verify account had been made, and they hadn’t been. Nothing unusual, it can take 3-4 days and I started it on a weekend anyway. Checked paypal acct, and I see this:

We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information about your business to allow us to provide uninterrupted service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Why is my account access limited?

Your account access has been limited for the following reason(s):
Sep. 22, 2008: We have detected suspicious activity regarding the receipt or withdrawal of funds.

Apparently, there were two refunds. Except my one customer swears they didn’t request one, and the 2nd one is… a whole 10 dollars, which was from my self when I set up the acct to make sure I could accept $ with it. I fucking know I didn’t request a refund from my self. Again: What. The. Fuck?

Needless to say, I’m not fucking amused at all. I will attempt to get my fucking money out of this situation, but considering their well known history of this crazy shit, I’m not expecting much. Damned thing is I knew about this going in. It was just the only real way I could accept a payment at the moment. I was so happy, too. Was going to use the cash to get a business license, open a new bank acct for it, get a proper domain and hosting, and buy more books to study, particularly regarding PHP5, as most of my PHP knowledge is from when PHP4 was new. Now I have nothing.

I’ll just have to borrow the cash I need, and work my way from there. Which is precisely what I was trying to avoid having to do. Needless to say, no more of my earnings will be trusted to PayPal.

No more Facebook.

Logged In or Out, Facebook Is Watching You

Facebook A Black Hole For Personal Info

Facebook Sharing Too Much Personal Data With Application Developers

Facebook Widget Installs Zango Spyware

Facebook Caves To Privacy Protests Over Beacon

Facebook Beacon Privacy Issues Worse Than Previously Thought?

Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking

Facebook Users Complain of New Ad-Based Tracking

The New Facebook Ads – Another Privacy Debacle?

From Facebook’s Terms of Service:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

Text editing, efficiency, and design.

The Craft of Text Editing — by Craig A. Finseth.

It’s a book on how to design[1] an Emacs clone. Comparisons to vi are made where appropriate.

It’s interesting in that despite being written in 1991 most of what it covers regarding editor specific functionality and concerns is still valid. It’s essentially built around a model-view-controller pattern, long before the patterns book was published. There still hasn’t been much improvement on gap buffers or linked lists and such for modeling the data. User interface design is obviously important, if you expect to have any users. I like timeless shit like that.

A few parts such as chapter seven cover implementation and performance details which aren’t of particular concern today, but I think are still worth the read simply because it’s an interesting look into the sorts of tradeoffs one faces when performance matters (chapter seven itself even says as much, pointing out that for screen management you could just use the prevalent curses library). Thankfully we don’t generally use monochrome text-only terminals over a connection who’s speed is measured in baud anymore, but while people typing faster than the networked terminal could respond on slower connections is no longer a real concern, over time people have gotten lazy and despite multi gigahertz machines with megabit/sec connections we still deal with lag. The lag’s just in other areas now, but it’s still there, especially on the web. Especially when someone’s on dialup, or a cell phone, neither of which are exactly uncommon just as 300 baud connections wern’t uncommon in 1991. I’m thinking specifically of XML‘s rampant misuse for non-trivially-sized datasets here as one example where something like JSON or SQLite or Google’s newly released Protocol Buffers would be far more appropriate. Using scripting languages to implement entire applications (as in RoR, Django, etc…) would rank pretty high as well, but at least in those cases it’s the server’s CPU cycles they’re chewing away and not your own computer’s. Unless of course it’s also an AJAX site. Sigh[2].

Writing a new editor, of any sort, from scratch today would simply be retarded. You aren’t going to do anything new, editors have been done to death. It would accomplish nothing but a pointless reinvention of the wheel when all you needed to do was pick a well designed customizable editor, and learn to use it. Emacs, vi, LyX[3], Eclipse, TextMate, there’s shit loads of good editors already. But the fact that the book covers writing a text editor for obsolete equipment seems incidental to me. It’s more about properly designing software, using a text editor as a specific case example. In that regard it will remain valid for many years to come, especially in a world where test-driven development and “agile” development run rampant and naive programmers think “if it works, it’s done”. Not to say that TDD/Agile are bad ideas, I think TDD is awesome. But when they’re mis-used by the lazy, they’re fucking horrible.

—

[1] Design, not program. The book won’t teach you how to code in general, let alone anything usable, save for an appendix covering the minimum of C necessary to, with effort, understand the code examples. It was written for programmers, ergo it contains mostly concepts, not code.

[2] I know there’s going to be some ass chewing over this. Oh well.

[3] Especially handy when writing papers, articles, and such like. While the web has only recently begun to understand the value of separating content from presentation, it’s been around for document editing for eons. If you’re trying to do both at the same time, you’re wasting time. The trick is these two choice quotes from Bram Moolenaar:

“I want to get the work done, I don’t have time to look through the documentation to find some new command”. If you think like this, you will get stuck in the stone age of computing. Some people use Notepad for everything, and then wonder why other people get their work done in half the time…

Don’t overdo it. If you always try to find the perfect command for every little thing you do, your mind will have no time left to think about the work you were actually doing. Just pick out those actions that take more time than necessary, and train the commands until you don’t need to think about it when using them. Then you can concentrate on the text.

Scheme, Forth, and C

I came across an article entitled Forth Versus C, and I couldn’t help but notice how much of it applies directly to Scheme (and mostly Common Lisp) as well, with only a few changes in terminology. Naturally not the parts involving its dual stack nature and such, but that’s far from the majority (and you could bring up a similar topic anyway, just compare the C stack to call/cc instead).

This bit especially caught my attention, especially in light of another recent post:

Q. But how can a non-programmer even read a program, let alone tell whether it is right?
A. Forth syntax can be learnt in an hour or two. If the top level of the program cannot be read and understood by someone who understands the problem domain, it is wrong and you should change it.

I would also say this would apply to *any* Domain Specific Language. Lisps (and apparently Forth) make constructing DSL’s trivially easy, any many of the pros and cons of such are discussed (in relation to C).

Back on topic though, I think this article neatly describes many of the fundamental differences between Lisp and C just as well as Fortran and C. I highly recommend giving it a read.