illusionist's New Writeups

Everything2 Hubs (thing)

2003-02-25T22:50:37Z

Content syndication isn't a new idea altogether. There are a lot of sites (including slashdot et al) that have rdf feeds and other "tickers" that allow you to syndicate content to other places. If you want a slashdot or everything2 "What's new" box on your homepage, it's really quite easy. With a bit of XML::Simple and basic knowledge of CGI/mod_perl you can cough one out.

What s_alanet has put together is really quite interesting. It has a lot of features of E2 and has some interesting ideas as to the right way to syndicate content, but what's the long term effect of this? It is tough to imagine a website that exists completely as a collection of content hubs (to use his language), working as mirrors of the whole. There are a lot of issues with breaking down a website into a distributed application as such.

The first of which is authentication. Now you can always shortcut this and say that this is guest user only, but that severely strips out the feature set that is…

How to get more change than you deserve (idea)

2002-10-02T11:33:31Z

There are many different ways to defraud someone in a POS-type job, all of which involve sleight of hand, social engineering, and playing innocent if you get caught. Payment feigning, mathematical overages, and sum-up change errors are the most common ways, backed up by documentation and actual studies done. Sadly enough, conspiracy to defraud is hard to catch, because you have to prove intent, but it is possible.

The sad and unfortunate reality in this exchange is that in the vast majority of cases, you're digging into a slush fund of sorts, not an individual employee's pay, and to an extent, not even to a company's profits. This margin is calculated into an individual business's costs as a retail, grocery, and general POS term known as "shrink"; a generic calculation of the bottom line of human and mechanical error in small amounts. This is not to trivialize the crime of petty theft, but companies do…

Goo Goo Dolls (person)

2002-09-05T07:55:13Z

And all I can taste is this moment
And all I can breathe is your life
Cuz sooner or later it's over
I just don't want to miss you tonight
--Iris, off Dizzy Up The Girl

The musings of Johnny Rzeznik have carried the three boys from Buffalo, himself (lead vocals and guitar), Robby Takac (backup vocals and bass), and Mike Malinin (drums) into the limelight from their early punk rock beginnings. It is a transition that critics claim have robbed them of their gritty garage band sound. From their roots in upstate New York, Rzeznik, Takac, and original drummer George Tutuska, the Sex Maggots (as they were then called) started as a cover band in 1986. That same year, a local promoter "strongly advised" an identity change; shortly thereafter, The Goo Goo Dolls were born in their current form. The name came from a True Detective magazine in which was advertised…

Mac users are less likely to believe in God (idea)

2002-05-15T09:57:34Z

Upon preparing for a meeting at my former place of employment, a program manager was going over the facts and figures on Mac users that recent surveys had yielded (about a year into the iMac release at this time). From what they could determine, Mac users:

Tend to be teenaged to mid-thirties
Tend not be married and/or have children
Tend to be living in urban city areas
Tend not to live in the south or midwest
Tend to be more artistic types, and are more concerned with looks than technical aspects of computers

When asked for his analysis of these facts and figures, the program manager could only offer one thing in his defense:

"Mac users are less likely to believe in God."

We could only help but chuckle at his strange collation of the numbers in front of him.

"...And this is the part of the presentation where I start to pull shit out of my ass."

Black box testing (thing)

2002-04-20T08:48:33Z

Black box testing is the process by which one would attempt to discover flaws in a software product, without explicit knowledge of the source code behind it. This method of testing is the industry standard for finding flaws in consumer applications, script languages, API's and other UI-driven products. This contrasts against white box testing, a method of testing based on the source code. Turning a blind eye to the source code has numerous benefits over its cousin that make it particularly well suited to larger software houses.

First and foremost, it distinguishes a separate QA team from a development team. Keeping your source code churn and dispersement to a minimum (open source or proprietary is not under scrutiny here), allows you to employ people who will become expert users of a product, learning its intricacies fully. This grants them the freedom of not having to focus on the learning of the dark wizardry of the code, but of the…

Quick fix to most computer problems (idea)

2002-03-26T10:29:41Z

Tips in this writeup are for the amateur computer hobbyist.
I assume no responsibility for problems that may occur with application of this knowledge.

That being said, Windows can be very frustrating to work with. In my current line of work, I run into a fair amount of "stuff's broken" situations when dealing with a customer's computer. A re-installation of Windows is like re-sealing your basement; if the wrong thing is leaking, then you're not going to fix it. The information herein applies mostly to Windows 95,98, and ME. Windows 2000 and XP are by far much more stable, and are less prone to these issues. It helps to know what causes a PC to break down, and what common steps to repair actually do.

What does a reinstallation of Windows actually do?: A good number of things. First off, it does a minor amount of repair in the registry. This is…