Eric’s Blog

Yesterday was a LONG day- went out with Tim the night before, got to bed at about 3a, woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep at about 6:30a (probably with leaving that day, and all the activity that night, etc.). Anyway, going to class, and getting out of there was something I was looking forward to.

My flight was at 7:30p, so I got there at about 4:30ish, and figured I’d read my book, an people watch (always good fun). I get there to find out my flight was delayed until 8:30p, so I was stuck for a bit longer. No biggie. The time went fast, I was just mega tired.

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After much window shopping, I finally took the plunge, and picked up at TViX HDM-6500A to play rips of my DVD collection (following the logic that information in whatever form always wants to be made more available). It’s a tinker’s dream, and I have to say I tinked it to near perfection. (more…)

I have from time to time needed to be able to encrypt/decrypt something, but didn’t want to hassle with using gnupg/whatever to do it. So there was my itch, now the scratch was an opportunity to write some C code (which I hadn’t done in a long time).

I have to say it was so much fun writing this- the part that took some work was running it through Valgrind, and getting rid of what memory leaks were left.  The testing was extensive, and I ran it through a test suite I wrote in Perl for quite a while until I stopped it at 218 million transactions, and it still only used about 900k of ram (memory usage never grew). Pretty cool.

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So my good friend Elaine told me about something she and her significant other did over the weekend (he said it was the funnest thing he’s done in a LONG time), and I JUST had to share this with everyone:

The rules are simple, on a 4×4 grid, put some quality of a douchebag in each square. Some examples are:

• Sculped facial hair
• Blatant entitlement (like rolling through a active crosswalk in your Hummer)
• Chest waxing
• Hoop earrings
• Atomic sized dogs
• Gratuitous displaying of your Italian vehicle
• Driving in a Hummer
• Turned up soft collars
• LOW v-neck shirts for men

Anyway, two or more people face in opposite directions, and start scanning the crowd for matches. Find a match, and cross it off- standard bingo rules apply.

Only Elaine could have come up with this, and when she told me, I was dying from laughter. She rocks.

Yes, the subject was a joke, but frankly, so many people mess up the innocent apostrophe, it’s driving me NUTS. The apostrophe is talked about in grade school, and it has nothing to do with spelling, so why is it that this simple concept can’t be done correctly. In short? If you’re an adult, and you can’t use *basic* punctuation, you look really bad to those that can (and probably losing a large amount of credibility in the process). So, here’s the succinct lesson (non exclusive of course, but catches about 90% of the crap I see):
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Yep, Z and I finally saw it tonight- mainly because it was about to leave the theater, but there was a place nearby that will still showing it.  So a few big points- I can’t believe they made this only a PG-13! The thought of my nephew being able to go in and see this by himself really saddens me- some people say this isn’t dark, but I suppose all things are relative, and if you compare this to something like Leaving Los Vegas? That placated acceptance is just wrong.

Two other things that irked me- could they have cut down on Batman’s gruff voice? I mean, please.  Secondly, I could see mouths moving in the last 5 minutes of the movie (and honestly pretty much the whole movie was like this), but I have NO idea what they were saying- the music was as loud as their speech, so whatever the movie was trying to convey was completely lost (unless there wasn’t anything to the dialog anyway, so what does it matter?).

Too bad. Overall, I think I’d give this a 6.5/10. Despite this, I can absolutely agree Heath’s performance was beyond impressive. What a loss to no longer have him with us.

So, PHP’s random number generation is pretty weak- it uses the rand() function which is positively atrocious for anything more than playing a guessing game. So, I wrote the following to give me something a bit better- maybe someone else can use it too (and it’s fast). The good thing is if it can’t read /dev/urandom, it’ll fall back to the mediocre mt_rand() function:

public function random($min = 0, $max = 0) {
   $response = 0;

   if (($fd = fopen("/dev/urandom", "rb")) !== FALSE) {
      # 32 bits of data
      $read_len = 4;

      # MD5 is probably not needed, but whatever.
      $random = md5(fread($fd, $read_len), TRUE);
      fclose($fd);

      $val = 0;
      for($i = $read_len - 1; $i >= 0; $i--) {
         $ch = substr($random, $i, 1);
         $val = ($val << 8 ) | ord($ch);
      }

      $response = ($val % ($max - $min + 1)) + $min;
   } else
      $response = mt_rand($min, $max);

   return $response;
}

When Z was in Le Grand-Saconnex, Switzerland, I headed there to see her, and figured it’d be a great time to get a GPS so we can use it for our road trips. The one I eventually picked was the Magellan eXplorist XL- it was a monster, but it had a big screen on it, and the reviews seemed favorable. I felt clever in that I used my change jar, and took it to the change-machine you find at many grocery stores. If you buy something from Amazon, they waive the transaction fee. Perfect! Things didn’t stay on the up-and-up for long with this thing…

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So, I had a old 32″ TV that finally had to be put to sleep - craigslist style. In exchange my buddy Isac gave me his 35″ tv that works great. Several months ago (at least 6 now I think), Z canceled our TV service (DirecTV), and we just have Netflix now. I think this sums up why we neither have satelite, nor a Hi-Def TV. This is my kind of humor!

So I have yet to write up how the movie Idiocracy creeped me out, but it’s a dark comedy that is really dumb for most people, and super scary if you look at what it’s really saying. Z and I both loved it. Anyway, here’s a video clip of Brawndo- one of the drinks in the movie that you can now buy. I went to buy a case, but saw the shipping was $20. What a bummer. So, without further ado, here’s the commercial: