Archive for June, 2009

Date: June 18th, 2009
Cate: null
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“It’s Love. Remember it?”

–Leo, to Harry, “Billion Dollar Brain” (1967) Michael Caine.

Somebody, somewhere, made an inside joke to that scene.. because I’ve seen a scene of a guy in a sauna saying “It’s love. remember it?” and I feel like I’ve seen it more than once, but I’ve never seen this movie.  So I think, maybe in a TV show (or some later, lesser movie), there was a scene where a guy said that to somebody.  Some writer made an inside joke and I could be in on it if I just remember what movie.

Date: June 17th, 2009
Cate: software

On Hacks, bugs, and tools

This is pretty neat.  For whatever reason, Internet Explorer has a quirk about how it interprets CSS properties.  So, the CSS maintainers adopt a clarification to their rules (in CSS 2.1) which explicitly allows the quirk, and it becomes a way for web authors to recognize and adapt to any other idiosyncrasies that happened to make their way into IE.

I’ve been thinking about idiosyncrasies and coding lately– mostly because I’ve been laying out a new poster for display at the 2009 ISIE conference in Lisbon, which I sadly won’t be able to attend, owing (at some distance) to California’s present financial difficulties.  But at least my poster will kick ass.  I laid it out in TeX using the “arbitrary” class, a derivative of a0poster which appears to be missing from the comprehensive TeX archive network. Anyway, it’s the only way I know of to make a 48″x36″ PDF in LaTeX.

more))

Date: June 3rd, 2009
Cate: null

This thing goes all the way to the top

Heh.

So, all that ranting I did about the network admins at the bren school? It’s gradually dawned on me, and has now been confirmed empirically, that the entire UCSB network, which I think is all of 128.111, is off limits.  Been over 48 hours now.  It seems I actually pissed off more))

Date: June 2nd, 2009
Cate: null

Dick Admins

Throughout my graduate studies, I built my PhD work on the backbone of a thoughtfully designed computer infrastructure. I synchronized files across multiple machines using rsync, utilized proprietary software (matlab) from home via X forwarding, and also made use of CMU’s subnet to access protected resources, like online journals, on the web via a socks proxy (that’s what it’s called- honest). more))