quiet despair » Tech

Interfacing With Another Species 7.2 Ksecs Too Early

Maker — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:57:39 +0000

I’ve been scheduled for a conference call without my input on the time for more than 7Ksecs before I usually resume consciousness. In the past this has usually resulted in disaster for the other involved parties, as I typically can’t resume from standby that early, let alone speak in coherent sentences or form what humans would consider lucid thoughts. My ideal employer would either be able to work with this better, or be located in Japan.

This article on Code Climber identifies a lot of the most important reasons I and so many others work best at night. There are numerous benefits to working at night:

There are far less interruptions by email, instant message, and news via RSS
There is minimal interaction with human species, as they seem to prefer sleeping while Sol illuminates the oppopsite side of their planet
My best and most productive work requires long periods of concentration and Focus

A little regex in php for fun

Maker — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:01:44 +0000

So after working thirteen hours in a row I came home and thought of a handy function to bandaid some legacy code that returns a url with double slashes after the TLD. I realize this is a worse solution than fixing the code in question, but my regex-fu could use work so I though I’d do a little exploring. motel6 sparked my imagination and deserves full credit for my work below. Here’s what I came up with:

$url = remove_url_slashes('http://www.killallhumans.com//?robots_eating=hobos&passion=361', 'killallhumans');

function remove_url_slashes($url=”,$domain=”) {
if(empty($url)) return false; if(empty($domain)) $domain = 'killallhumans'; $pattern = "/($domain)(.*?)(\/+)/ie"; return preg_replace($pattern, "'\\1\\2/'", $url); }?>

New Phone and New Comment

Maker — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:41:20 +0000

Real quick, here’s a little clip about when I’m getting a new phone:

SAN FRANCISCO, June 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple(R) today introduced the new iPhone(TM) 3G, combining all the revolutionary features of iPhone with 3G networking that is twice as fast* as the first generation iPhone, built-in GPS for expanded location based mobile services, and iPhone 2.0 software which includes support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and runs the hundreds of third party applications already built with the recently released iPhone SDK. In the US the new iPhone 3G is priced at a stunning $199 for the 8GB model, and just $299 for the 16GB model. (Gizmodo)

Onto something just as important, ojuice and I got a comment on our screenshots from a while back and it wasn’t spam!

Mobile Computing Device Settlement

Maker — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:17:37 +0000

I have decided to wait for the next generation of iPhone. Hopefully these will be out by early 2009. The keyboard on it may be two times slower than regular qwerty phones, but it suits my giant fingers and missing keys a lot.