http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com random rantings Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:21:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The local AT&T stores sold out of the iPhone 3G by around 9 AM.  The salespeople are telling customers that they can order and pay for an iPhone today, and they will get it by "direct fulfillment", which they explain means that the phone will show up at the store ... http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/07/11/att-doublespeak/ My friend Sellam Ismail is going to visit this weekend, and I might sell him a computer. I also might have a coin-op video game for him. In an email exchange to make plans, he asked: Do you need anything from me? I replied: World peace, or failing that, maybe some ... http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/07/09/world-peace-out-of-stock/ My colocation provider informed me that I went way over bandwidth for June, and would have to either pay a large overage charge, or upgrade to a higher bandwidth tier.  I couldn't really afford to do either, and was surprised by the large jump in bandwidth, so I started analyzing ... http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/07/08/web-site-abuse-by-yahoo/ Steve helped me install a window air conditioner yesterday. Actually Steve installed the air conditioner and I only helped a little bit. Just in time, as it turns out, since it's in the nineties this week, after a week of cooler weather.  My bedroom is upstairs, and ... http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/07/07/air-conditioning/ I went to SBARA's station at Lake Elizabeth in Fremont around 1200 UTC and spent about half an hour ttrying to make phone contacts on 20m. I only made two contacts. The signal quality was terrible, apparently due to too many callers piling up. I rarely heard ... http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/06/28/field-day/ Today is Field Day, part of the purpose of which is to practice amateur radio communications by methods that would be used in emergencies, when normal power sources and communications systems might be unavailable. Today at home I've experienced two power outages, apparently due to utility transformer failures, and an unrelated ... http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/06/28/field-day-irony/ Who else but George Carlin could have gotten the "seven dirty words" shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits into a Supreme Court decision? Carlin truly was a Man for the Millenium. http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/06/23/rip-george-carlin-12-may-1937-22-jun-2008/ Some years ago, a cryptographer proposed a "Chinese Lottery" in which some consumer good such as televisions sold in a particular country (e.g., China) would have an embedded chip that would be used by the government for brute-force cryptanalysis. The television that successfully decrypted a message would indicate to ... http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/06/14/its-3-am-do-you-know-what-your-computer-is-doing/ I wish I could say that I was surprised at how many female students at Padua Academy were willing to sign a petition to end women's suffrage. The issue seems to be controversial at UVM. Personally, I'm in favor of women's suffrage. http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/06/14/petition-to-end-womens-suffrage/ I'm just starting to learn about printing in GTK+. The documentation provides a good API reference, but is a bit intimidating, and I didn't find much in the way of sample code. There's a sample called "printedit" in libegg, but it is somewhat out of date. I ... http://whats.all.this.brouhaha.com/2008/06/14/gtk-printing/