The Sparrow Nest

>мебелиleaving for a while.

I’m moving my blog and all of its hip and current content. I know you’ll miss me because I post so frequently. I’m sure you’ll summon the patience.

Thanks for your understanding.

A few years ago Dave Brouse and I stumbled upon OneBillionMazes.com. It’s a site that has, well, one billion mazes. I learned two things that day:

1. That there is an absolutely foolproof way to navigate out of any maze. Apparently, Dave had learned it from Sean Connery.
2. That I truly didn’t grasp the magnitude of one billion.

I wrote the following as an exercise for Sherry’s class. From what she tells me, most of the kids really enjoyed it.

Let’s print all of the mazes found on onebillionmazes.com! Why not? It’s only a billion.

Before you start printing, please compute the following:

A) How long will it take to print them?
B) How much money will I spend on paper?
C) How much money will I spend on ink?
D) How much would the paper weigh?
E) How much room (volume) will I need to store my printouts?

Here is the information you need to compute your answers:

Paper is purchased in packs of 500 sheets, called reams.

• A ream of paper measures 8.5 x 11 inches and is 2 inches thick.
• A ream of paper weighs 5lb (2.25kg).
• A ream of paper costs $5.
• An ink cartridge costs $50
• The printer can print 10 pages per minute.

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• The ink cartridge in the printer can print 800 pages before it needs to be replaced.
• Oh, and one more thing. Each maze requires two sheets of paper. One for the maze, and the other of the answer key.

A) 138,888 days, 21 hours, 20 minutes. If you started printing now, you wouldn’t finish until the year 2388.

You will have dead for over 300 years.

B) $20,000,000.00 ($20 million)

C) $125,000,000.00 ($125 million)

D) 20,000,000lb (20 million pounds) which is 10,000 tons.

That is equivalent to 758 adult elephants, 5000 cars, or 22 Boeing 747 airplanes.

E) 18,036,265.4 cubic feet, which doesn’t mean very much. So let’s express it differently.

If the reams of paper were stacked vertically, the column would be 666,666.6 feet high, which is 126 miles. Earth’s atmosphere is 29 miles high.

If you laid column paper on its side, it would reach from New York, NY to Ocean City, NJ.

If the reams of paper were stacked in a big cube, it would be 262 feet high, which is as tall as a 26 story building. If we filled every room of our house from floor to ceiling with reams of paper, we would need 600 more houses.

Our nation is bracing itself as the baby boomer generation dodders into retirement. Industry analysts have been calculating the stress this generation will inflict on our health care system and eventually our cemeteries. But I don’t think we’re considering the real problem. What about the stress on the interweb?

My mother recently sent an email to my son and me. I noticed that she had the wrong email address for my son.

Our boomers also suffer from hearing loss. Tragically, they’re unable to hear phrases like:

“DO NOT SEND ME EMAIL FORWARDS AND OR JOKE EMAILS!”

Go ahead and try it. Scream it, if you like. They still won’t hear (listen to) you.

Even worse, they won’t ever understand simple email etiquette. For example, if you must forward an email to someone, please have the courtesy to trim the chaff, maybe even personalize the message. I had the pleasure of receiving this email from my father-in-law with a staggering amount of chaff. No really, check out the email link. It’s funny.

How many terabytes of bandwidth is consumed by boomer email traffic alone? How much disk space is wasted on the same WMV file depicting a monkey falling off of a branch after smelling his own finger? I’m treated to this gem (and many others) about once a year.

I’m usually OK dealing with stupid people. Laughing at their misfortune seems to help. But, I find it really annoying when they make my life difficult.

Like any self-respecting paranoid geek, I proudly employ secure passwords whenever possible. My passwords have:

• 10 or more characters.
• letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, AND “special” characters.
• no words or personal information.

Oh, and I use different passwords for each of my accounts.

Recently, I tried to change my passwords for my bank, electric company, and prescription drug provider. They each had their own restrictions.

I like (a phrase, which here means, “I don’t like”) that they further define “special” characters. No ‘~’, ‘@’, ‘=’, or ‘:’?

My prescription drug provider assumes their users know what “special” characters are. Oh, and they can’t allow their clients to use those crazy spaces.

My electric company explicitly defines the allowable characters, but in my opinion, it is too restrictive.

They also have a nice undocumented restriction (yeah! my favorite). They don’t allow passwords greater than 10 characters. They don’t tell the user that until they try. I’m sure that doesn’t annoy anyone.

As a software developer, I can’t think of a reason to restrict a user’s password. Maybe the developers were concerned about SQL Injection, which is noble, but why should the user suffer? Why restrict the password maximum length? Is disk space really that precious? Make the database column unrealistically large and forget about it.

Having to lump the developers at SourceForge.net into this short-bus-web-developer category really cuts deep. I feel like I’ve lost my geek innocence.

It’s worse than the time I realized that Hackers wasn’t a documentary.

Over a year ago I published an article about the sweet demise of my childhood bully. I know you probably think I’m sick in the head, and I am. But luckily, I have someone to blame.

Writing that article was a cathartic experience for me, and to this day, rereading it lifts my spirits.

I noticed that the visitor count on my blog was steadily rising. I thought this was kind of odd. Sites usually become more popular because they produce compelling content at regular and frequent intervals. Then I realized that the majority of my hits were coming from Google Image Search. People who searched for an image of an “asshole” were rewarded with David Fleming’s high school yearbook photo. Awesome.

Warning: Unless you’re a Goatse fan, you may want to edit your Google search preferences and the set SafeSearch Filtering to Moderate before you perform this search.

Over the past 6 months I’ve been watching Mr. Fleming’s Google Asshole Index rise. When I first started checking (Yes, I was checking regularly. Shut up.), he appeared on about third page. I got more and more excited whenever his Asshole Index afforded him a higher result position. It was kind of like watching the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, or refreshing the Olsen Twins legal age countdown page.

When he finally broke into the top ten, I just couldn’t contain myself. I had to let someone know. It feels good knowing that people all over the world associate "asshole" with "David Fleming".

I hate Walmart; not because I’m against a free market economy, but because I despise being in that store. So, since I can’t bring myself to buy items at inflated grocery store prices, I’m forced to patronize Walmart about once a month.

Amazon to the rescue!

I’ve started using Amazon’s Subscribe & Save. It’s a grocery store with a limited selection. Their shelves are stocked with nonperishable bulk items at cheap¹ prices and the shipping is free. This isn’t anything to get excited about.

The “Subscribe” part is what I’m excited about. There are some things I can never seem to remember to buy. When I notice that I’m getting low on razors, I’m never in situation where I can write it down. So when I decided to buy a 12 pack of razors from Amazon, I had to specify a “Delivery Schedule”. I’m thinkin’ I’ll need another 12 pack in 3 months. We’ll see. If I’ve miscalculated the delivery schedule, I can change it later. Also, if I’m running low, I can tell Amazon to send the next shipment right away. Or, if I’m overstocked, I can tell them to skip the next shipment.

Subscribe & Save helps me cut down on mind numbing minutiae of everyday life.

me (head):

"Do I have to stop by Walmart on the way home from work today? No I don’t!"

¹Always calculate the unit price, not all items are great buys.

Amazon has it right. In addition to providing one of the best department stores on the interweb, they have been quietly providing incredible web services. Elastic Computing Cloud, Mechanical Turk, Simple Queue, and S3 are few of my favorites.

All of these services share the same basic theme:

“We can do this server hardware stuff much better than you. So why don’t you focus on the software, and we’ll do the rest.”

How much? Pretty damn cheap. For example, here is their pricing for S3:

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

So what can you do with it? That’s up to the developer. There are several free and open source applications that provide slick interfaces to S3. I’m using JungleDisk. It’s an active project with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. You give JungleDisk your S3 account information, and it gives you a file system that you can mount as a drive. The virtual file system JungleDisk provides is only available to your local machine, which is a little restricting, but there are ways around that.

Now that no one is still reading, here’s my million dollar idea:

S3 + JungleDisk + Linux + Samba + Hacked Router = the perfect network storage/backup appliance.

1. Install Linux on a router. Linksys seem to play nice with Linux.
2. Install JungleDisk on the router.
3. Point the JungleDisk instance to your S3 account.
4. Install Samba on the router and use it to share the JungleDisk mount point.
5. Enjoy your worry-free network storage appliance.

So why spend several hundred dollars on a networked storage appliance with limited capacity, when you can have the Infinite Storability Drive from Sparrowlegs Systems Inc.

Deviousbard sent me this wonderful game. It combines two of my favorite things — computer games and prime numbers. Both of these are very popular with the women.

Sherry, don’t worry, you don’t have to have an interweb connection to play! You can save the page locally so you can play sans interweb. Life is good.

On a side note, the domain name for the PrimeShooter game is a little troubling: 1729.com. 1729 is definitely not prime. Maybe I should contact the owner. That’s just embarrassing.

I’m currently wiping down my computer.

I just found out about Google Code Search. As you can probably guess (OK, maybe not Tommy or Sherry), it’s a search engine specifically tuned to find open source code. Cool enough.

But the thing that made me cream all over the keyboard was Google’s decision to use regular expressions for their search string syntax. Good god. Does this mean that regular expressions are going to hit the mainstream? I hope so.

Imagine (Tommy and Sherry, you’re exempt from this activity) how much more useful Google would be with regular expression capability.

Update 2006.10.09: All technology can be used for evil.

Need a name for your interweb alter-ego? Try the Internet Anagram Server. Deviousbard (see? It worked for him.) introduced it to me. I found the advanced search to be much more useful.

Sherry:

• Marry Horny Semen
• Horny Means Merry
• Marry Senor Hymen
• Ornery Man Rhymes
• Smarmy Ornery Hen

Oldest son:

• Amen Nerd
• Nerd Name
• Mean Nerd
• Damn near even

Youngest son:

• Fang Firm Inn
• Snarf in clam fungi

Daughter:

• Mutant Man
• Tan mum ant

Me:

• Her clansman John

Have fun.