4/12    josh@csua:
        http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/13/DDGTLOSCTP1.DTL
        Ways to spend money:
        -- Real estate agent Michael Murphy of Zephyr, holding an open house at\
26th and Florida a couple of Sundays ago, didn't have high hopes when a
        prospective buyer arrived at the house on a skateboard. But the shopper\
looked around, liked what he saw and paid $649,000 (without a
        mortgage) for the house, his first. His name is Josh MacDonald, he is 31\
 years old and he is an engineer at a successful Silicon Valley company.
        \_ Why would you pay cash? I don't think that's very smart, but
           then I guess I am not a Google millionaire either.

4/12    Thank you for fixing log rotation and thinking about not
        blocking pings to soda.  I apologize for inferring
        whoever is running Soda these days is a knappy headed fucking Asperger's
        Syndrome autistic retard. - !tom
        \_ The person fixing log rotation is an alum volunteer and the csua
           politburo almost certainly had nothing to do with this.

4/12    confusing blackberry UI:
        Lawyer: Rove didn't mean to delete email
        \_ Is there a "Deleted" folder where mail can be recovered after
           deleting?

4/12    Just finished a programming quiz. Do you think critizing the test
        was OK? They wanted someone to write code for something that could
        be done via shell aliases. This was at Riverbed.
        \_ I assume Riverbed is a company and this was an interview?  If so,
           I think this kind of criticism is a great thing to do.  It shows you
           really know your stuff if you can do both.  If they count that
           against you they are idiots and you don't want to work there anyway.
                \_ this was actually after the phone screen. Probably not a
                    good sign. Or maybe the manager's worries too much.
        \_ IMO, the right way to handle something like this is to say, "Oh,
           this would be really easy to do with shell aliases, and I can show
           you how I'd do it that way after I write the code to do it..."
           -dans
        \_ It makes you think twice about their ability to create well
           architected code if they cant come up with a good quiz; especially
           considering what is already out on the net. I have seen too many
           cases these days crafty perlers who write terrible code. Knowing
           what $_ means does not you are good engineer or coder.
           \_ Jesus christ you are an idiot.  A programming quiz is not
              real work.  It is a way of saying "prove to me you can do
              basic tasks in this language."  Making it a simple problem
              means it is something you can actually have someone write
              in half an hour or so.  Most simple tasks are probably easier
              to do with a shell script than with a real program.  So what.
              That's totally orthogonal to the tester's goal.  Oh and I'd
              almost take dans's advice.  Start with answering the problem
              the way they asked and then mention, as an aside, not a
              critisism, something like "you know, if this was something
              I had to solve at work I'd probably just do x instead."
              You don't come across as too good for the test (which looks
              very bad, lots of otherwise good engineers are a disaster
              because they don't work well with others), you show you know
              your mad shell skillz, and you are letting someone know that
              you know to use the right tools for the right job.  I've seen
              people rewrite stuff like find | xargs grep because they
              didn't know diddly about unix.  That kind of stuff is never
              pretty.
              \- sort of the flip side of this, for a sysadmin interview,
                 i've asked questions like "how would you generate a 10
                 random numbers between 1-100 from the shell", "how would
                 you generate the numbers 1-100 from the shell" etc and
                 people who would do it in C are slightly missing the point.
                 people who would do it in C are sort of missing the point.
                 i mean it is fine to say "i dont know how i would do it from
                 the shell, but here is the 5line C program, that took 2min
                 to write", but to say "that's dumb to do from the shell"
                 will not serve you well. yeah, there are a lot of people
                 unfamilar with xargs, mapcar, apply, lambda ...
                 while riverbed may be in an inflationary phase, i suspect
                 they are still small enough that they are being careful
                 about who they hire. the OP had an interesting quandry
                 whether to not to de-anonymize himself on the motd ... if
                 he's an active member of the sloda community he faced either
                 a "oh i dont know about his technical chops, but he seems
                 pleasant enough" to "i havent seen his code, but he seems
                 like a dumbass" ... given that various people here have
                 various riverbed connections.
                 various riverbod connections.

4/13    Another Bush effort to trample our civil liberties:
        http://preview.tinyurl.com/26y9nb

4/13    Ha ha ha.  Last year, an Obama event was started by a group called
        "Nappy Roots"
        http://www.intheagora.com/archives/2007/04/nappy_roots.html
        \_ and of course, there's no difference between a black person
           saying "nappy roots" and a white person saying "nappy-headed hos".
             -tom
           \_ You got that right. There isn't.
              \_ Okay let's take the racial element out of it.  Is there
                 a difference between you calling yourself an idiot and me
                 calling you an idiot?  Idiot.
                \_ Old Man Imus knew what he was doing, it's just this time
                   the media manipulators got pissed off and got smacked
                   down hard.  I can't believe he got away with telling
                   60 Minutes he hired a guy just to make nigger jokes.
                   Anyway who cares, Imus will pop up somewhere else.
                 \_ Gotta agree with tom.  Old white dude using
                    "nappy headed hos" is different than black people
                    calling each other nappy headed hos.
                    \_ I think the addition of the "hos" part is what makes
                       it derogatory. -ausman
           \_ Which reminds me of Rush Hour where Jackie Chan saw Chris Rock
              saying "Whatsup n*gger" and then mimic after him, and got very
                       \_ Are "nappy headed" and "hos" terms associated with
                          African-Americans, or is it the team's racial
                          composition versus the commentator's whiteness that
                          raises the racism question?
                          \_ "nappy headed" is a racially charged phrase.
                             When combined with "ho", it adds a racial
                             charge to an misogynistic epithet.  Unrelatedly,
                             are you stupid?
           \_ Which reminds me of Rush Hour where Jackie Chan saw Chris Tucker
              saying "Whassup, my n*gga?" and then mimiced him, and got very
              different reaction from people in the bar.
              different reaction from the bartender.
           \_ I am quite impressed with the quality of the discussion on this
              blog.

4/13    I use IE7 to browse a web site, and the server says the UserAgent
        string is
        "UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET
        CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30)"
        Is MS bowing to the Mozilla community?
        \_ What are you talking about?  IE has always reported its UserAgent
           string to be "Mozilla-compatible".  It's derived from the original
           Netscape Navigator "Mozilla" codename, not from the Mozilla
           OSS project.  Netscape Navigator has reported itself to be
           "Mozilla" from the beginning.  Kids these days.

4/13    Republican debate will air on MSNBC.  Dems are still pussies and won't
        appear on Fox News.
        http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0407/3497.html
        \_ Your premise in the comparison is the MSNBC is propagandistic for
           the Ds as Fox is for the Rs.  Your premise is wrong.
           \_ What a moron. Having a D debate on Fox would be an open forum for
              liberal thought. If you think FN is propaganda for the right,
              why would they have a D debate?  And wouldn't having the D debate
              there fight the propaganda.  No, the reality is the Ds are
              pussies and if they win the presidency in 2008, they'll do
              everything possible to make it illegal to be conservative.
              \_ Okay, so, you're saying you think the Democrats are not
                 going to have any debates, and then calling them pussies
                 because they won't debate?  Or are you calling them pussies
                 for not participating in a Fox News sponsored debate?  If
                 they participated in an MSNBC sponsored debate, would they
                 no longer be pussies in your eyes?
                 Your "illegal to be conservative" crack makes it clear,
                 though, that you are utterly useless to converse with.
                 \_ Do Not Feed The Trolls

4/13    John Walker Lindh picture
        http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070412/ap_on_re_us/american_taliban
        That picture looks like a cool cover for a CD album.

4/13    Can someone w/ root fix this:
        $ ls -l /dev/null
        crw------- 1 root csua 1, 3 2007-01-25 19:41 /dev/null

4/13    To the person who wanted me to give evidence that Africans were being
        priced out of the world oil market:
        http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/2448
        One of the comments:
        "I haven't been there for a while, but it's hard to imagine how $60
         oil has affected Senegal. And as more people are abandoning the
         countryside and moving to Dakar, it's just getting worse every year.
         Also, many are unemployed and desperately trying to get to Europe
         through Canary islands."

4/13    This year I had to pay a bit more in taxes than I liked.  Can someone
        reccomend a good tax advisor who would do something like back-and-
        forth consultation over email for a reasonable fee?
        Mainly looking for ways to reduce my earned income tax liability.
        \- i suspect trying to do something like this via email, at least
           initially, is the wrong approach.

4/13    Yes, tom can be obtuse, but he's not the only one wondering why soda
        isn't reliable, why mail isn't reliable, why there aren't any help
        sessions, why meetings aren't publicized, etc. etc.  I realize the
        csua has had fallow periods, but this seems unprecedented in the
        10 years that I've been member.  I realize that times have changed
        a lot, but I would be sad if the institution that helped me so much
        in my time at Soda were to wither and fall away.  !(dans || tom)
        \_ Frankly, every alum assumes that because soda is not being
           administrated well that the students are not being served.  This
           is not the case.  Sadly, by far the majority of new memebers will
           never log into thier soda account.  The machine is no longer a
           "necessity" to new students, who all have one or more personal
           computers powerful enough for thier needs.
           The meeting publicity is a good point, and I've been talking to
           polit trying to get them to be more proactive about getting the
           word out.  But the lack of visible publicity is not a good
           indicator because events have been occuring.  We put on at least 3
           helpsessions in the first few weeks as well as 2 general meetings,
           a video game tournament, broomball, movie nights etc.  Things are
           happening, the club is not coming to an end.
           We are going to work toward making soda more reliable.  At the
           moment, there are very few people helping the VP out, and he is
           overburdened with the enormity of being responsible for fixing all
           of the current issues.  That is going to change, which will
           hopefully result in better stability and usability for soda.
           -mrauser
           \_ How can there be no one helping the VP out when there
              are 7 politburo members?  What is the role of the alumni
              relations politburo position when there is no one
              relating to the alumni except to complain about them?
              Do you really think that current students don't need to
              have information available on the CSUA web page?  (I see
              that some contact info has been put up, after 5 months
              of nothing being there--that's a start).   -tom
              \_ Sadly, the current feeling is that whenever there is a
                 problem with soda, its the VP's sole responsibility to deal
                 with it.  It actually doesn't make sense for the other
                 members of politburo to be co/assistant VPs, because they
                 each have job responsibilities that need to get done.  But
                 right now, darch isn't recieving very much support from
                 root staff, because most of them are so jaded and
                 disgruntled that they don't wish to help out (except mconst
                 who is saintly in his patience).
                 As far as I can tell, the two alumni and industry relations
                 officers have done very little at all.  This is a result of
                 us not having a good person for the job and just needing it
                 filled.
                 I think the website is a huge resource which right now the
                 current politburo is wasting.  But, seeing as I am not on
                 politburo, its not my job to fix thier screw ups.  I have
                 mentioned this to them many many times, so they know abou it,
                 but apparently its not a large enough priority to restore it's
                 functionality.  Whats even worse than the website, is lately
                 minutes of meetings have not been taken.  Both of these
                 issues are a function of the elected secretary just flaking
                 out and quitting about a month into the semester (what caused
                 that might have been _my_ bugging him about the website).
                 I don't mind answering your questions, but I've already
                 served 4 semesters on politburo and I want to let the current
                 group make thier own decisions/mistakes, though I try to
                 influence them in the right direction (by pointing out errors
                 like not taking minutes). -mrauser
              \_ Do you really think your apparent outrage, damnation with
                 faint praise, and general tone of condescension help matters?
                 -dans
                 \_ I think my questions deserve answers.  -tom
                    \_ I was getting to it. -mrauser
                    \_ I think your questions are reasonable enough.  Is it
                       reasonable to expect that they should be answered?
                       Sure.  That said, saying that your questions *deserve*
                       answers strikes me as a little presumptuous. -dans

4/13    Welcome to Mexico North
        http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55155
        \_ Welcome to Yellow Journalism:
           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

4/13    South Park's latest episode of 300 brave Lesbian warriors vs.
        Persians -- pure brilliant.
        \_ I don't know any Persian who is obsessed about nice
           designer clothers, lots of cologne, nice cars,
           blue carpets, and gold plated decorations. Do you?

4/13    Why I wouldn't use prototype.js -- it makes your javascript
        program 3-4X slower due to Array hogs and other bloated stuff.

4/13    Carlos Slim now 2d richest man in the world:
        http://urltea.com/5ef (news.yahoo.com)
        \_ Interesting. ""Our concept is more to accomplish and solve things,
           rather than giving - that is, not going around like Santa Claus,"
           Slim said. "Poverty isn't solved with donations."
           Judging from the fact that Mexico appears to be devolving into
           a gang ridden, corrupted hellhole that will just get worse
           when Mexico's oil production capacity collapses in a decade,
           Slim is really good at making sure he's not impoverished,
           not his fellow Mexicans.
           \- his wealth is about 1/20 of mexico's gdp.