Daley Ponderings

I am not sure of the original source, but I received this via Jack Ganssle in his Embedded Muse.

Mother taught the IF ... THEN ... ELSE structure: "If it's snowing, then put your boots on before you go to school; otherwise just wear your shoes."

For years I badgered my mother with questions about whether Santa Claus is a real person or not. Her answer was always "Well, you asked for the presents and they came, didn't they?" I finally understood the full meaning  of her reply when I heard the definition of a virtual device: "A software or  hardware entity which responds to commands in a manner indistinguishable from the real device." Mother was telling me that Santa Claus is a virtual  person (simulated by loving parents) who responds to requests from children  in a manner indistinguishable from the real saint.

Mother explained the difference between batch and transaction processing: "We'll wash the white clothes when we get enough of them to make a load, but we'll wash these socks out right now by hand because you'll need them this afternoon."

Mother taught me about linked lists. Once, for a birthday party, she laid  out a treasure hunt of ten hidden clues, with each clue telling where to find the next one, and the last one leading to the treasure. She then gave us  the first clue.

Mother understood about parity errors. When she counted socks after doing  the laundry, she expected to find an even number and groaned when only one sock of a pair emerged from the washing machine. Later she applied the principles of redundancy engineering to this problem by buying our socks three identical pairs at a time. This greatly increased the odds of being  able to come up with at least one matching pair.

Mother had all of us children write mail in a single envelope with a single stamp. This was obviously an instance of blocking records in order to save
money by reducing the number  of physical I/O operations.

Mother used flags to help her manage the housework. Whenever she turned on the stove, she put a potholder on top of her purse to reminder herself to turn it off again before leaving the house.

Mother knew about devices which raise an interrupt signal to be serviced when they have completed any operation. She had a whistling teakettle.

Mother understood about LIFO ordering. In my lunch bag she put the dessert on the bottom, the sandwich in the middle, and the napkin on top   so that hings would come out in the right order at lunchtime.

There is an old story that God knew He couldn't be physically present everywhere at once, to show His love for His people, and so He created mothers. That is the difference between centralized and distributed processing. As any kid who's ever misbehaved at a neighbor's house finds out, all the mothers in the neighborhood talk to each other. That's a local area network of distributed processors that can't be beat.

Mom, you were the best computer teacher I ever had.

(too bad Mom probably doesn't understand most of these.  And also apologies to Klaus Sutner, who was the best computer science teacher I ever had)

NEWS BULLETIN: Saying it will improve the education of children who have grown up immersed in computer lingo,
the school board in San Jose, Calif., has officially designated computer English, or "Geekonics," as a second
language. "This entirely reconfigures our parameters," Milton "Floppy" Macintosh, chairman of Geekonics
Unlimited, said after the school board became the first in the nation to recognize Geekonics.

"No longer are we preformatted for failure," Macintosh said during a celebration that saw many Geekonics
backers come dangerously close to smiling.  (More)

I noticed that upromise now allows you to withdraw your money instead of having to wait until your kid goes to college.  Given that our balance is currently $90.74 (thanks Grandma for $16 of that) it'll take a long time before we could even put it in a 529 account, assuming they are going to stick around, and so withdrawing that money now (and spending on our recent Rainbow Resources order for homeschooling stuff) seems like a good use of that money.

PAUL REVERE VIRUS:
This revolutionary virus does not horse around. It warns you of impending hard disk attack: Once, if by LAN; twice if by C.

POLITICALLY CORRECT VIRUS:
Never identifies itself as a "virus," but instead refers to itself as an "electronic micro-organism".

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGAR VIRUS:
Terminates and stays resident. It'll be back.
 (More)

Noah's three year appointment was at the beginning of the month.  He is 42.5 lbs and 41" tall.  They did the hearing and vision tests and the nurse was very impressed.  She said usually at this age, they can hear the sounds but not figure out which ear they're hearing it in, and he did great.  The vision test was very interesting for me, but not the eye part.  His vision is fine, but what they do at that age is show the pictures up close first to see what the child will call each object.  So Noah said "apple" and "house" just fine, and then circle was "round" and square was "round."  She went back and forth on those a couple of times and then said, "are those two shapes the same?"  He started to say yes, and then emphatically said No!  So I told him that that shape was called a square and he repeated it.  Then for the real test, a square was the first object.  He hesitated, and then she reminded him of the name.  After that, he named each object perfectly.  At first, it rather bothered me that Noah didn't know the simple shape names, but it just means we haven't gotten to that part yet.  He knows his colors and lots of other things.  So now he knows the name for a square. (: (More)

I got an email last night from someone who was looking up contact information for one of my customers: Piexx Company. She was wondering if someone was trying to scam her.  The way the scam works is that someone says they are a hiring agency for some company and posts a job offer for a data entry position where you can work at home, and they interview and you get the job.  (More)

Hello.  I often get ThinkGeek gift certificates (I expect they give $10 certificates to anyone who asks them).  And I just got one today for $10 off a $30 purchase.  They have some fun things, but I am not planning on using it.  Let me know if you are interested.

So, I wonder if there is going to be one of those statistics published: "Facebook down for X minutes - office productivity improved 500%"...

I had gotten some rather blank emails in my spam folder recently (and some not in the spam folder), so I thought I'd check into it further.  I couldn't figure out why they were wasting their time, as it just contained a bunch of fairly blank HTML, with some tables, and background colors.  When I opened the email in an email client that understands HTML, it all became clear.

 (More)

 

From disturbed.org

I added a new link on the sidebar, and wanted folks to see it.  If you use gmail's reader, and are a "friend" of mine (defined by using gtalk/chat/email with me), it will show up in your reader automatically.  For the rest of you, (which is most of you, since I don't use gmail all that much) you can check out the link, or subscribe to that RSS feed, which will contain posts of other people that I don't really have much to comment on (and unlike the rest of the blogging world, don't feel the need to make my own post about it...) but think they are worth reading.

As long as you can turn off the sound, it looks pretty neat! 

(From GeekDad) 

I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server.  I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather than an external machine. (More)

Someone on the postgrey list (Matthew, who apparently likes drinking coffee, as that is part of his email address) sent a script that he uses to report on his mail/spam. 

I modified it to work on my systems (and included it below), and here is the output for the last five days:

Rejected by RBL: 21147
Rejected by greylisting: 9917
Rejected by bad sender/receiver information: 959
Tagged as spam: 1457
Real email: 6278

So, ~4000 (50%) are rejected every day simply by being on a known blacklist, ~2000 (25%) are slowed down by greylisting (maybe are retried, maybe aren't), ~200 (2%) due to the spammers faking from or to addresses (or real people mistyping addresses), ~300 (4%) ending up in spam folders, and ~1200 (16%) actually ending up in inboxes.

Taking the inverse of the inbox mail, that means that 84% of email coming into my server is being thrown away one way or another.  I'm glad I have lots of filters to block almost all of it. (More)

For some reason, Verizon thought it would be a good idea to reconfigure their network early morning Christmas Eve (or late the night before, I am not sure which).  Unfortunately, they transferred me to a broken gateway, which has 3 minutes outages every fifteen minutes or so. (More)