I have recently gone back to IRC — specifically Freenode — and among the delicious problems of the old days, such as the inability to easily establish DCC transfers (more on that later), I have been presented with the inevitable ident check delay during the connection to server. Ident is essentially a protocol that lets the server…
Month: July 2010
The only problem with Blu-ray is BD-J
Unlike Steve Jobs, who claims that Blu-ray is a bag of hurt, I think that Blu-ray is great. I’ll take instant 1080p24 at 40-45 MBps over 720p at 10 MBps without hesitation. In fact, I had originally bought a Playstation 3 mostly as a Blu-ray player rather than as a gaming rig, and I recently…
Righties and lefties
An Italian proverb says that you can’t thread all the weeds in one bunch. It’s exactly what comes to mind when I see people commenting on the iPhone 4 antenna issue by saying that “it only affects left-handed people.” The basis of such theory is that, since the problem stems from a gap on the…
Get a replica of your skull
Here is what I was thinking: you can get a digital 3D scan of your skull through a CAT/CT scan, which is essentially a series of 2D scans stacked one on top of the other. You can also print things in 3D these days, using one of various technologies available industrially. Considering you can pay…
Overkill e-mail validation
I just came across an insane code snippet to validate e-mail addresses, apparently derived from RFC 822. It is in the form of a Perl module that can be downloaded at http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html. The Perl code is intertwined with just a little bit of regexp hell, and looks as follows: (?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:(?:(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|”(?:[^\”\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*”(?:(?: \r\n)?[…
Video games: are they addictive?
Every now and then, we hear news that someone around the globe has ruined his or her life by playing video games. It appears to be a big problem, to the point that the American Medical Association had considered adding it to the next edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The…
Oh, the memories
I think I’m going to need a Commodore 64 emulator, so I can feel like I’m six again.
Analysis of a misspelling
Some time ago, Lamebook showed a picture that captured my attention. Here it is: (Click to enlarge) It seems to me that the author of the message is not even a native English speaker. The syntax of the phrase is unusual; nobody fluent in the language would say “I do apologise,” unless someone complained about…
Headless virtual machines with Oracle VirtualBox
Like any other well-respected geek, I would love to have many computers all around me. However, money constraints make that hard, yet it’s still possible to have extra machines around… if they are virtual. For those unfamiliar with the concept, virtualization is exactly what it sounds like: an entire computer is created in software, possibly…
Most gamers prefer physical media
The research company Ipsos ran a poll in the UK, and found out that “64 per cent of the users polled would rather have games on physical discs, while only 25 per cent would prefer digital copies”. The survey involved “over 1,000 Internet users aged between 15 and 50.” A detailed article about the findings…