Slashdot Mirror

http://quantumg.net/okeefealive.jpg

Too soon?

http://quantumg.net/OhMaome.jpg

Been there since Mar 23 2008...

Loading Mac OS X into a VM is always a challenge.

I'll be trying that myself RSN, after I upgrade to Snow Leopard and install Ubuntu. Apple allows it but only OS X Server and only on Apple branded hardware. Up above some people have posted links to OS X being virtualized, as have I. Here's Mac OS X Tiger on VMware Server. And my link on an Mac OS X guest.

Falcon

done it: http://quantumg.net/tigeronvmware.php deleted the image shortly after.. yawn.

Maybe if there was some place I could go to get up-to-date torrents of vmware images I might care, for the novelty.

You mean this? http://www.quantumg.net/tcpsafe/ No, I wouldn't have any problem with that.. being that I licensed it under the GPL v3 and all. And before you ask, yeah, go ahead and sell it without source code, I don't care.

Ahh, that reminds me. Few years back I did some reverse engineering of Commander Keen using DOSBox.

I tapped the emulation loop and wrote replacement functions for each address. So, for example, whenever address 0x1713 of the Keen segment was executed the function add_monster_1() would be called. It would do its thing and, if I had translated it correctly, the game would appear unchanged. I did this for a lot of functions:

    http://www.quantumg.net/keen1.c.txt

The result was much more enlightening than reading asm code. For example, John Carmack used the same code for doors in the game as he did for monsters. In a sense, doors *were* monsters, they just didn't have as complex "thinking" as some of the other monsters in the game. I could also confirm that there were no more "cheat keys" or secret levels in the game than the ones that had already been advertised :)

I later tried to convert this to compilable source code using libSDL for the graphics but that project has been lost to me.. it's probably floating around on one of my old linux machines.

2 minutes of surfing the LinkedIn website, or in case you're too lazy:

http://www.quantumg.net/linkedin-recruiter.png

Enjoy.

Hey! Not anymore. I apologized to ESR and everything!

http://www.quantumg.net/you-cant-own-property-man.ogg

javascript is more like scheme with a C syntax (the one and only syntax, all hail!)

http://www.quantumg.net/tetris.php

Enjoy.

http://www.quantumg.net/slashdot-lameness.png

They need to test their shit before pushing it to the live website too.

http://www.quantumg.net/eeepc.txt

If you're of the opinion that we'll only find "life as we know it" on an Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star in the habitable zone, then we haven't really got any data on how common their configuration is, so its a complete mystery how many civilizations like ours there are out there. Of course, if you're of the opinion that "as we know it" really isn't that important, then that's not entirely relevant.

Oh, and here's my exoplanet rant that I post every time one of these stories hits Slashdot.

You can't "own" property, man. :)

Oh, you're not a "you mean cracker" adherent. Good.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

See definition 8.

I, personally, think each and every one of those definitions fails to capture the essence of the word in any context of usage that you might care to mention. But definition 8 needs "get off my lawn" at the end of it.

BTW, I otherwise like ESR

The exo-planet scientists are bumbling their way into obscurity. The public does not understand science. They don't understand small discoveries. They don't understand "backwards" discoveries like this one. Currently there is some interest in inferring that planets may exist around other stars, but it is quickly becoming a passing interest and the media attention is quickly turning from awe to skepticism (and not the good kind of skepticism required for science). It's like the 60s when inference of planetary atmospheres using starlight was proposed.. the interest was strong but no-one actually did the experiment for so long that when probes were proposed to go and directly measure the atmosphere of Venus the results of starlight interferometry were completely ignored.. and that was in the scientific community, which has a much longer attention span than the mainstream.
 

As much as I understand the point you are trying to make, I really don't think it is as big of a practical issue as much as it is a psychological one. All the people who contribute to the Linux kernel know maybe 1/1000th of the entire code base, because that's all they need to know. Same goes for Open Office or any other large code base. I remember fixing something in Open Office a few years ago.. I looked at the text on the dialog, searched the code, didn't find the text. That stumped me for about an hour, until I figured out that they were internationalization fans.. I found the string I was looking for in a language file. Next to it was an identifier.. I searched for that in the code, found the part which was responsible for the dialog. If I remember correctly, it was some kind of domain specific language for dialogs. So I studied that for a while and found the identifier for the function that was called when the button I was interested in was pressed. That function was written in C++.. it's probably written in Java now. About 20 seconds after looking at the function I saw the obvious error, and fixed it. I sent the patch to the list, they said thanks, ignored the patch and just fixed it themselves. I implemented a couple of other hacks that I wanted to the Presenter app, posted em to the list, they were picked up in some later releases.

This is what programming in the large is all about. Most software is worked on by a team of developers, few of whom understand the entire code base. You need to use "beacons" to navigate around the code and find the local relevant portion that corresponds to the dynamic behavior. This is classic software maintenance.. see Brooks, 1983. I, personally, think the standard mechanism is not good enough.. There should be better tool support for matching program behavior to the source code, and programmers should learn to use them. I wrote a function tracing tool for this reason. Although, looking at that page now, I see this isn't the version that lets me attach to an already running pid. I should really update that. Can't remember if it does multiple threads either.. hmm.

http://www.quantumg.net/exoplanets.php

Astronomers are using up their mainstream exoplanet currency very quickly. Already "we found another planet" is delegated to the "how about that" section of the news. Soon it won't even make that. So what happens when they find a really *interesting* planet?

Nothing.

Yes, they're fucking nerds, just like you.

Ignoring for a moment that you're trying to use common sense to figure out copyright law and that is always a big fat waste of time, you're probably not away that only last year did it become legal to tape something off TV in Australia.

For almost every case, Copyright in Australia is worse for the consumer than it is in the US. Almost.