February 2004

I finally went to World66 and made up a state travel map. Kind of reminds me of the map of stickers that my grandparents had on their camping trailer while I was growing up.

create your own visited states map

It appears that envelopes and rejection letters are too much of a chore for Berkeley:

I regret to inform you that you have not been accepted for graduate study in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. The Berkeley campus has a strict enrollment ceiling and thus each department is limited in the number of new students it may admit each year. Our department has the difficult task of selecting students with the strongest overall records from a large pool of well-qualified applicants. Unfortunately, this means we are not able to offer admission to many applicants who are capable of excellent academic work. I am sorry that we do not have a place for you and hope that you will be able to make other arrangements to achieve your academic goals. Sincerely, [Name Deleted] Vice Chair EECS Graduate Matters

Well isn’t that a big giant “fuck you”? I guess I don’t even get the joy of opening “the little envelope”.

It appears that the wiki formatting in Internet Explorer is fixed now. It appears that IE, especially version 5, likes to ignore body width tags. I’ve switched to using margin tags now, which gets me about the same effect.

I’ve also switched from PNG graphics to GIF and JPG, again since IE sucks.

The formatting in Netscape 4 is hopelessly lost. If you’re still using Netscape 4, you deserve what you get.

Recently I got into Orkut, Google’s take on social networking. Its a lot like Friendster with a few extra tricks under its sleeve. Some good, some bad.

Some guys at the Data Whorehouse (yeah, great name) came up with a pretty cool use for all that data. They’ve created a web application that displays geographical density maps of the Orkut membership. Unfortunately the data is limited to zip codes, so the nodes seem to all be clustered near local post offices. But still, a very cool use of data.

Kuro5hin has a great piece up showing some of the juciest comments from the leaked Windows 2000 code. Some of these quotes are hilarious:

private\ntos\w32\ntuser\client\dlgmgr.c: // HACK OF DEATH: private\shell\lib\util.cpp: // TERRIBLE HORRIBLE NO GOOD VERY BAD HACK private\ntos\w32\ntuser\client\nt6\user.h: * The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national debt.

And another good one:

private\shell\ext\tweakui\genthunk.c: * CallProc32W is insane. It’s a variadic function that uses * the pascal calling convention. (It probably makes more sense * when you’re stoned.)