Monthly Archives: August 2008
Ford and Computers
Blah Blah Blah, IP addresses are running out, we need to be pushing IPv6 so we can all fit in blah blah blah…
It is true, IP addresses are slowly running out, and considering nearly all house homes are using NAT, we really need IPv6, but the fact of the matter is, we don’t need to rush such an important change. There are plenty of unused IP address, and some silly blocks that should be re sold off.
For example, Ford owns the 19.x.x.x range, and when I nmapped that subnet, I did not find one host that was connected, silly isn’t it. I’d like to see some of the larger subnets that aren’t being used sold off to make room for cheaper services.
canada
Hate is a very strong word, which is why you need to use it to balance out anything good you say. Sometimes you just need to find something to hate to keep your ratio of good / bad at 1:1. I choose to hate canada for a few reasons. Here’s a list of why you should hate canada.
- It’s canada
- It starts with a c
- It has the same first letter as Kenya
- People die in canada
- canada has snow
- canada pirates
Hence why I absolutely refuse to capitalize the “c” in canada.
VB .net
I was helping a friend out with his IPT assignment, which involved creating a educational game in Visual Basic .net 2005. He decided that he wanted to create a simple hangman game, which I thought was a good choice. Oh how wrong I was.
The last time I programmed in Visual Basics was about 3 years ago, and it was in VB 6. This was a big shock to me. The first step was to load a word list, and select a word randomly. Don’t get me wrong there are lots of information on the net about VB .net, but when your searching, it’s easy to pickup bits of information from VB 6. They changed Open filepath #1 as blah to FileOpen(1,filepath, blah) or something, why make the stupidest change.
Next was arrays, I wanted to put every line of the file, as a word in an array. Simple create an array, load the file by line, and append each line to the array. Not so simple, you first have to make a dynamic array, then tell it to resize to the size 0, then add an item, resize it one larger, add another line ect… Just silly, wheres the append function?
Ok, now we can make an control array of labels to display each letter. Oh, no control arrays. A bit of googling says everything is done in code now, and it’s better. Actually for me it was worse. I didn’t want to dynamically create controls, I just wanted 20 label boxes as an array. Now the websites were correct saying it was easy, but it wasn’t easier, and they neglected to say how to make the array. It took me several minutes to find the information required to make them.
The problems just kept coming and hangman took several hours to get to a very light version (no hangman yet).
So here I am thinking, I’m struggling, how is anyone else in this class gonna get this assignment done?
Silly VB .net, there is a really good reason I use python.
SPAM IN MAI TUNA
I like to be all good and nice when I register my domains, and put in valid information (unlike 99% of all domains registered), and one thing I do is setup an email for the domain.
Usually I set it, and usually within the hour I get spam on that account, but that’s alright because GMail usually catches the spam and does what ever GMail does with spam.
Yesterday GMail failed me. What? GMail fail. That’s what I said. It’s amazing I got a spam yesterday and today I got a spam message.
GMAIL WHY WHY OH WHY. Oh well, it stopped the other 2000 odd spam messages a get daily.
“Although we’d all like Moore’s Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 litre of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information.[10] A fully populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2128 blocks = 2137 bytes = 2140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2140 bits) / (1031 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg. To operate at the 1031 bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc², the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2×1028 J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4×1021 kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4×106 J/kg * 1.4×1021 kg = 3.4×1027 J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.”
Taken from wikipedia.