Nerds!!

Ah, how nice is it to see two mega nerds pretending that they are cool with their white socks and imaginary light sabers

Celebrity sex tapes

Two weeks ago, we were told by all the gossip outlets that Kevin Federline was threatening to release a sex tape of himself and his ex-wife, Britney Spears, if she did not pay him $30M and give him custody of their two children. On a side note, who wouldn’t give a man of such integrity the custody of two young boys who would be completely dependant on him?

Although Spears doesn’t seem too bothered about the possible release of that tape (this might have something to do with her recent vagina exposition) and would even put it online herself to prevent K-Fed from selling it, another star could possibly see herself doing all sorts of sexual things really soon.

It is being reported that a sex tape of Jessica Simpson and her ex-husband, Nick Lachey, is in the hands of the people responsible for the leak of the Pam Anderson & Tommy Lee sex tape. Simpson is horrified at the idea of millions of dorks jerking off while watching her geting tea-bagged.

If I had a piece of advice to offer to Mrs. Simpson, and all the other celebrities who don’t want to see their genitals on the Internet, it would be this: don’t fuck in front of a camera! Seriously, what is wrong with these people? They know that they’re celebrities, paparazzis try to catch topless pictures of the bigs stars in Hollywood and yet they decide that it would be a good idea to hump in front of a camera, knowing full well that many people would go to great lengths to steal it.

If the celebs of Hollywood don’t like their sex tapes being stolen, they should simply stop making them. It’s not because you earn your living by acting in front of a camera that you need to be in front of a camera at home too.

Google Reader

Ever since I started having problems with my iBook, I moved my RSS feeds over to Google Reader. Once I learned the keyboard shortcuts, it became fun and nice to use. Not as nice a NetNewsWire, but for a web application, it’s really good.

However, after a few weeks of usage, I have found a few things that I think could be worked on by the Google Reader team:

• Searching. Come on, this is Google and you can’t search through your subscriptions for a particular article? This needs to be added as quickly as possible.
• When you are viewing a single feed, there is a “Feed settings…” menu. This menu contains a single item: Unsubscribe. Would it be possible to add options to add tags to the feed, changing the name of the feed, etc?
• Not a big one, but sometimes I like to go to the home page of the feed, not to the article itself. Would it be possible to have that link

Emacs: the editor of mediocre UNIX programmers?

Mike Arace has a post that gives signs that your new language or framework is doomed. Most of them are funny, but as an Emacs user, #9 stumped me:

You don’t have syntax highlighting in Emacs: This will ensure that the worst UNIX programmers will never be able to figure your language out. (the best programmers naturally use vi on a monochrome terminal, so they will remain unaffected)

That just seems wrong to me: it seems that people not willing to learn and use Emacs and its powerful extension language are the bad programmers and that the elite hackers have a .emacs file that was written over a ten year period and is at least 500 lines long. A bad programmer will not care if he uses vi (not vim) or nano without colors, autoindenting or other programming support Emacs users have come to expect.

Of course, I realize that I am debating a point in a joke post, so maybe Mike doesn’t really feel/think that way, but you can never be too safe ;-)

Useless RSS feed

I was eating breakfast this morning and it was announced on the radio that there had been an accident on the bridge I take every morning. It was also the first time I heard this bridge mentioned and it made me think “Gee, I could probably get an RSS feed for that…”

I went to the MTQ (Ministère du Transport du Québec) website and the informations for every region in Quebec and every major road is there. And they have RSS feeds for everyone of those! I thought it was really cool, until I subscribed to the feed. Here’s the content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Transports Québec | Montérégie</title>
<description>Conditions routières des routes et
autoroutes de la région Montérégie.</description>
<link>http://www.mtq.gouv.qc.ca/fr/information/conditions</link>
<language>fr-ca</language>
<copyright>Copyright 2005, Transports Québec</copyright>
<image>
<title>Ministère des Transports du Québec</title>
<url>http://www.mtq.gouv.qc.ca/images/information/conditions/mtq_rss.gif</url>
<link>http://www.mtq.gouv.qc.ca</link>
</image>
<item>
<title>Conditions routières de la région Montérégie (Dernière mise à jour)</title>
<link>http://www.mtq.gouv.qc.ca/...p;Maj=2006-11-22_05:40:13</link>
<description>Consulter les conditions routières des routes et
autoroutes de la région Montérégie.</description>
<pubdate>Wed, 22 Nov 2006 05:40:13 EST</pubdate>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

The whole feed is a single item that links to their website. Couldn’t they put the damned information right in there? I’m pretty sure this violates one of inkedmn’s RSS rules. inky?

The Bathroom Blog

My good friend Brett started The Bathroom Blog, a blog dealing with all issues related to bathrooms such as picking a urinal, categorizing bathrooms, the first rule of the clean and quiet bathroom (you don’t tell anyone!), to use the toilet seat protecter paper or not, etc.

So for all you who number ones and number twos, take some time to educate yourselves.

Perl 6 mug!

When I came home from work today, a nice surprise was waiting for me: my Perl 6 mug! Yay! Apparently, my long lost fat cousin also got one!

Debating the insignificant things

This weekend, I read a pretty long thread on the forums of ArsTechnica. The thread was about a comment DHH of Ruby on Rails made on Perl. He said that “Perl burned a lot of people.” A member, most likely unfamiliar with Perl, wondered what David meant with that remark. A few people mentionned some quirks of Perl that could puzzle a developer if he or she wasn’t familiar with Perl.

At one point, the discussion turned to Perl’s handling of the undef value. There were some people who were stunned that Perl converted undef to 0 in integer context and to the empty string in string context. This caused flames back and forth between a few members over the “logic” of such a conversion. I skimmed pretty quickly, so I don’t know if they mentionned that Ruby has the exact same behavior with regards to nil or that NULL in C and C++ is 0. The basic premise of the people arguing that the handling of undef was incorrect was that 0 or the empty string were not undefined values, they were in fact defined. The other group said that in the world of numbers, 0 was the closest thing to undefinedness and the same was true of the empty string in the world of strings.

Regardless, I thought it was a waste of time to debate such a minor issue. Perl has a lot of other more controversial topics that would’ve probably done more to explain to the original poster how “Perl burned many people”:

• No formal parameters
• Barewords
• References (the fact that they are explicit)
• The object model
• Sigils
• Arrays are one dimension only and can only contain scalars

An Inconvenient Truth

I just watched Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Wow. This is really a shocking documentary: the images of the melting glaciers, the graphics, everything. Some people are skeptic of global warming, claim that’s it’s all part of a cycle, that it is not clear whether humans are responsible for what’s happening, etc. Those issues are addressed by Gore. I particularly like when he showed the CO₂ levels and the average temperature levels side-by-side (well, more one above the other) over the last hundred thousand years and that he shows where we are at now and that both levels are way higher (more than 2x higher) than at any other time.

At the end of the documentary, Gore talks about things each one of us can do to contribute to this effort to reduce CO₂ emissions. Here’s my current list:

• Turning off my computer at night and during the day when I’m at work
• Using efficient light bulbs
• Turning off the shower when I’m soaping up
• I don’t leave the heating on in my room when I’m not there

When I worked at Merck Frosst, four of us used to carpool five days a week. Unfortunately, no one from my new place of work lives close.

Part 1
Part 2

What American accent do I have?

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
The Inland North
The Northeast
Philadelphia
North Central
The South
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Of course, this is from giving answers in a web form. Hearing me actually speak, anyone could guess that English isn’t my maiden tongue.