as any fule no

This journal entry is an attempt to explain this post.

It's not quite time to change sigs yet, but here's a statistical anomaly from Phil Plaitt:

"One man's mean is another man's poisson."

I've found it attributed to both Anon and J.W. Haeffner, but Google knows nothing about the latter person apart from a single attribution of this phrase.

I might leave it attributed to the Bad Astronomer, just because it's a more /.y link.

I've been re-reading some Iain M. Banks, and there are a couple of mottos that fit the .sigspace nicely.

I did toy with "Perfect AIs always Sublime" as being fairly /. relevant. I eventually decided on the more pithy .sig you now see on my posts.

Previous .sig pointed to the previous journal entry.

Who knows the minds of spammers? I've noticed a trend lately: about 75% of my spam (~30 emails a day) are "apparently from" either "National Refinance Exchange" or "Western Advisory". The actual "From" field generally looks fake (abc123@yahoo.com, and so on).

Blocking those two strings at my ISP has cut the amount of email I have to download by 2/3 (I don't get much real email <sniff>).

The moon has decided to protest against Slashdot's North American bias. The lunar eclipse on May 4th will be visible everywhere in the world except North America, and the extreme eastern parts of Russia. NASA has a map of where the eclipse can be seen.

OK, so the Bush joke wasn't funny. Maybe I should have said "Bush managed to avoid a war in Vietnam".

New sig:
<br>-- <br>
If I use parts from Autozone to mount a Thinkpad running Suse into a Jeep, how much do I owe the Sco Group?

This political joke occurred to me during Shrub's press conference on 4/13.

<br>-- <br>
What's the difference between Iraq and Vietnam?<br>
Bush has been to Iraq.

old sig was:
<br>-- <br>
<b>Karma:<b> Curate (mostly due to parts of it being excellent)

I love it. Otherwise these ideas would be taking up valuable neurons.

So I was singing in the shower the other day, and it struck me that "donna e mobile" could be the kind of person that calls into talk radio: Donna E. from Mobile, AL. So I checked on 411.com for people called Donna in Mobile. Unfortunately, the only searches I could get to work are "E, Donna" (there aren't any) and "Donna E. *", which listed the following candidates:

... another lame karma joke.

new sig is:

Karma: Curate (mostly due to parts of it being excellent)

old sig was:

Karma: 3452816845 (mostly due to an uninitialized variable)

New sig is a lame Karma joke that only windows programmers will get.

--

Karma: 3452816845 (mostly due to an uninitialized variable)

Old password was:

--
int x=354583890,y=371516;main(){putchar(x); x>>=y&7;y>>=3;return y?main():0;}

First they outsourced the textile producers,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a textile producer.
Then they outsourced the auto workers,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a auto worker.
Then they outsourced the COBOL programmers,
and I didn't speak up,
because I was a Java programmer.
Then they outsourced me,

David Gould pointed out that my sig really needs a line feed at the end. Fortunately, the bits line up like this:

'T': 01010100
LF: 00001010

So the only change required to my sig code was to change the intial value of y so that it did an extra shift of three bits.

Old intial value of y was 1010101100111100 (43836)
New intial value of y is 1011010101100111100 (371516)

GCC didn't like my sig. Thanks to lemonjus and jungd for pointing this out.

New sig:

--
int x=354583890,y=43836;main(){putchar(x);x>>=y&7;y>>= 3;return y?main():0;}

... but it is too long to fit in the space available.

"Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it."
Charles Babbage