I switched DNS hosting providers for this website, moving from 1and1 to railsplayground (they're already my web hosting provider). In the past four or five years that I've been with 1and1 I've never experienced any problems with the qualtiy of their service or their uptime. But as it turns out, 1and1 had been storing my password in plaintext, a happy little tidbit I discovered after I clicked on the "forgot my password" link and they sent me my original password. So I've changed service providers, simple as that.

Storing passwords in plaintext is absolutely idiotic, and there is absolutely no excuse for any entity, especially a large technology oriented company, to be storing their passwords in a non-hashed format. (I've been salting and hasing my passwords with SHA-1 since I was 16.) The blatant disregard that 1and1 has shown for their customer's security infuriates me to no end.

PLEASE SALT AND HASH YOUR PASSWORDS!

kthxbai

I find my credit card statement extremely humourous. Most of the charges are for food (in terms of monetary cost, the majority of that is from eating out), and the rest is gas and the occasional random crap from Amazon (thank you Amazon Prime). A stranger looking at my credit card bill might assuming I was eating for a family of four.

For example, my crazy Friday night yesterday, involved watching one co-worker lambast and ridicule Gandhi in order to raise of the ire of an Indian co-worker (which resulted in us being even later then 'Asian-late' for dinne), followed by us ingesting giant bowls of noodles along with various side dishes, including thousand-year-old-egg, various kinds of tofu, and beef and tendon. After that we went for some boba and continue to discuss the merits of Blizzard games and of course the unpopular Mass Effect 3 ending, because that's what all the cool kids do these days. I finished my evening by going home, eating chocolate, and crashing happily full. All in all, a fairly typical night.

I've decided some time ago that whenever I go groccery shopping, I should try to buy the oddest combination of 2-3 items possible. Last month I did decently well, with a box of 50 cookies (for 5 dollars!) and 2 onions. Today, I did not fare nearly as well; I purchased a bag of meatballs and 1% milk (which thankfully did not come in a bag). I've considered buying items I have absolutely no need for, just to fulfill my weird desire. But then common sense grabs hold of me (with her big man-ish hands), and I remember that I cannot afford that luxurious 99 cent bag of veggie chips (because apparently potatoes are not vegetarian enough?) on my meager engineer's salary.

It's already been said, my apartment burned down a while ago. But I wanted to add in a few extra things.

I was looking at the pictures and I remembered something that I found intensely amusing when I was first allowed back into the building. (Me being me, I'm going to describe said event in an extremely verbose and roundabout manner.) A month before the fire, I had installed new batteries in my smoke detectors. (Nine cell batteries being surprisingly expensive, this was not a cheap endeavor. And the fact that nobody was in the building when the alarms went off saddens me somehow, as though my ten dollars had been completely wasted.) As I was surveying the wreckage of my apartment, I noticed that my two smoke detectors were lying cracked and badly broken on the ground. The areas where they had been previously mounted (up on the top of the incredibly high ceilings), had been thoroughly smashed in. I can only assume that after crashing through my front door and assuring themselves that no one was home, the fire fighters had proceeded to silence the blaring smoke detectors by bashing them in with fire axes. For some reason, this is amusing too me. I have no idea why.

Common responses to, "my apartment building burned down," include: "why did you burn your apartment down," "what did you do to start a fire," and "did you forgot to turn the stove/oven off." The idea that I was not responsible for the fire, was apparently not obvious to many people. Also, many people seemed to be surprised by the fact that I no longer live there (OK, so technically it's not completely burned down as it's still standing, but it has no roof, the walls have so many holes that the top floor might as well be one giant room, and half the building was about to collapse.).

If this blog was a child I would be in prison for gross negligence. During my absence, a few interesting things of note have occured. Firstly, my apartment building burned down several months back. Which has lead to me discovering three new things:

• I should have gotten renter's insurance.
• Exposing a hard drive to high heat, dropping a roof and bucketfuls of ash on it, and then dousing it with water, will do nothing positive for said hard drive's longevity.
• Eating pizza and relaxing in front of the dying coals of your burning apartment is a great way to meet the neighbors.

And now, a few pictures.

I consider myself lucky, all things considering, in that I (nor anyone else) was not hurt in the fire, and having not owned too much, I lost relatively little. Now as far as potentially life altering events go, having my apartment burn down barely noted as even a slight blip in my day to day life. The day after the fire, I was buying a new toothbrush and some clothes at Target, by the end of the week I had a new place to stay and was allowed to pick through the remains of my apartment, and within a month life had returned mostly to normal, save for the fact that I only owned one pair of jeans.

Although my hard drives gave up the ghost in the fire, the non-moving components of my desktop, choking in ashes, bravely survived for a few more weeks of operation before finally surrending to death with a high pitched squeal. So I salvaged what I could from "wolfgang" and built myself a new computer, based around an Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5, and named it "phoenix" (because it was reborn from the ashes). My trusty IBM x61s (aka 'archpad') also fell victim, although I was still able it's recover the hard drive. In a nice turn of events, I used the fire as an execuse to buy myself a gloriously large 27 inch monitor that now bathes my room with more light than the sun, and a mechanical keyboard (very) vaguely reminiscent of the IBM model M.

My Christmas holiday, which was delightfully long, was unfortunately marked by me getting sick on Christmas night, followed by a short convalesence, a snowboarding trip (my first ever), a relapse in my illness (no doubt due a result of tossing myself down an ice-covered mountain several times), a much shorter convalesence, and a trip to Oregon. I spent a few days in Portland exploring the city on my own, going to musems, hiking around, squealing giddily in book stores, and buying iced milk teas from food stands (despite the fact that it was far too cold and occassionally rainy).

Work has been, well, work; interesting most of the time, often busy, occassionally tedious, and happily, rarely boring. In the meantime, I've been reading (far less than I should), watching TV and old movies (far more than I should) and trying (not hard enough) to keep myself from sliding into a totally sedentary lifestyle. Although, as the weather has been warming up again, I've taken to running 18 miles a week, alternating every other day between a six(ish) mile run and weight lifting.

Today at the company gym I was bench pressing an awe-inspiring 105 pounds, when I noticed in the indoor basketball court, a much older balding caucasian male dressed neatly in a polo shirt and slacks, blasting contemporary lyrical music loud enough to be heard through the glass doors and adroitly waltzing (with some sashaying thrown in) with an insivisble partner. He kept this up for at least twenty minutes, occassionally pausing, before resetting to his starting position and starting over again. He could have used one of the smaller dance studios that are fitted with wooden floors and mirrored walls which are most importantly, non-transparent and offer far more privacy. I'm not entirely sure what is odder; that someone would spend so much time practicing the same few dance steps in broad public, or that I bothered to watch him.

I've had quite a bit of time to dwell on things during my unscheduled sabbatical from my dearest web server, so this is going to be a doozy of a post.

On Graduating From College

I never really yearned for high school to end, but after three years of college, I began to grow restless of school. By the middle of my fourth year, every fiber of my being was screaming to be released from learning. I was tired of spending hours in the library studying things that seemed hopeless to understand, tired of 8 AM lectures on circuits, tired of long sleepless nights writing code, tired of worrying about grades, and just tired of being tired. It was a bittersweet relationship that I had with school; I loved UCLA and I knew that I would miss it after I left, but I was desperate for a break from learning.

I made my way through high school with a nagging voice at the back of my mind telling me that I needed to succeed in order to get into a good college. Upon entering college, that voice fell silent and I grew complacent. But I was soon spurred forward, partially by a true desire to learn and to a lesser degree, a niggling realization that a sub-par performance in school wasn't going to get me an even passable job after graduation. The fact is, I've spent most of my life working towards the moment when I would graduate from college, a goal that I always thought was far off in the distant future and therefore never considered the consequences of. So after I moved out of my apartment in LA, a new thought wormed its way into my mind, asking, "now what?" And its a question that I have yet to properly resolve to my own personal satisfaction.

Others brought up in similar scenarios as mine undoubtedly have the same thought running around in their heads. From this point in life, there ceases to be as many milestones set out for us, if any at all. The goal now (as I try to tell myself) is to live fully and pursue that which inflames our passions, refusing to accept the limitations ahead.

From Tolkien's "The Two Towers,"

To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.

On Entering the Work Force

Perhaps the awkwardest part of starting full time work, is that I must now address men twice my age by their first name. No prefixes like Mr. or Professor, just a first name. For the past month, I have been attempting to unlearn the manners that twenty years have taught me.

In college, if I had class at 8 AM, I rolled out of bed at 7:30, put on the first set of clothes I pulled out of the dresser and walked to class in sandals. The oh-so detestable act of shaving was something I only had to submit myself to once a month, and even less frequently if I was feeling lazy. But these days, I shave my face and comb my hair every morning, I often wear collared shirts and my feet haven't felt sandals in weeks despite the lovely weather. If I ride my bike to work I even take the time to shower at the company gym before heading to my desk. These morning rituals are apparently a sign that I'm growing more mature (how unfortunate).

Work is easier then school; its done when I leave the office and it doesn't require me to work sixteen hours in a day. The best part of course is that I get paid to work, which means I don't have to constantly worry about being as thrifty as humanely possible (although I still do, just not as dramatically as I once did). Having some money available for discretionary spending is of course the reason why I splurged and bought two HP Touchpads yesterday (one for myself and one for my parents) at the low price of $99 each.

On Company Culture

Culture matters. It determines how people work, how they interact with one another and how managers treat their employees. People matter, because no matter how awesome the work and no matter how much they pay you, coworkers that you hate will make your life a misery.

I'm quite happy with the company that I work for, so no complaints on this front.

On Living Alone

I have found many benefits to living alone. I can lube my bike chain in the kitchen while cooking fried rice with fish paste (something a previous roommate absolutely detested), leave the bathroom door open at all times, and not fold my clothes immediately after washing them. Trying to fall asleep while my roommates are playing video games or hammering away at a keyboard has become a memory of a distant past. Admittedly, it does get a little bit lonely, but I've never been the most gregarious of people to begin with.

But without the judging eye of another human being, or the constant reminder that having company brings, I have fallen quite lax in some of my personal habits. I've become quite messy, only washing dishes every other day and leaving clothes draped on every available surface (of which there are actually very few). Last week, I checked out Brandon Sanderson's massive novel, "The Way of Kings," and stayed up till 3 AM reading it (and therefore woke up extremely tired) simply because there was no one around to be a constant reminder of what time it was. And in an incredible display of continued idiocy, I also did the same thing last night, this time with a stack of books by Diana Wynne Jones. (Who would have thought that in a library eight stories tall, "Howl's Moving Castle" would be stored amidst a section dedicated to old and out-of-print children's fiction on the seventh floor?)

On Writing Production Quality Code

I notice that there isn't too much difference between the programming style of most professionals in industry and that of the typical undergraduate computer science student. Granted, a more experienced engineer writes with a little more forethought and with more elegance and cleanliness then an amateur, but many of the slipshod techniques picked up in school still remain.

When you're writing a project over the course of a week, there is not a huge need to thoroughly comment up your code, especially if you know the TA is only going to run your program without actually examining the source. But you would think an engineer developing for a product that is going to remain on the market for many years, would add nice helpful comments for their successors. This is quite often not the case. Stumbling through several hundred lines of obtuse C, written many years ago, with nary a single comment to explain what is going on is far from an enjoyable experience. And yet this seems to happen far too often in the real world (quite frankly, even once is too much).

Choosing meaningful variable names has always been a bit of a chore for me. When in a rush, I, like many others, will simply slap down a somewhat arbitrary variable name and continue plodding on. C programmers, writing in the Unix style, seem to be especially guilty of this terrible sin. Four or five letter acronyms, unusual abbreviations, and names with an inside joke like "hufflelumps" or "i_win" are never particularly illuminating to anyone except the original developer. Picking good variable names is a bit of a fine art, one that I feel most people (like me) never really learned, and one which we never seem to appreciate until its absence.

Few people enjoy maintaining legacy code, especially if it suffers from annoying deficiencies like the ones previously mentioned. But the thing that bothers me the most above all, is actually quite insignificant in the broader scheme of things: white space and formatting. As projects change hands and teams, the standards used for white spaces changes. Are open brackets supposed to go on the same line as the conditional statement? Eighty characters per line or something more modern? How many indentations when we overflow a line? Do we expand tabs or not? Is a tab two, four or eight spaces? Perhaps the developers were feeling especially ballsy and decided on THREE spaces (Oh the ignominy!) Editing files touched by so many hands, each one using a different formatting scheme, often with multiple schemes in the same file, is by far the most aesthetically unpleasing thing I've ever had to do. But that's how programmers are; simple aesthetics do really matter and we often have problems accepting another persons designs over our own.

Despite the many lingering issues that plagues many professional developers, they still write far better code then a rank amateur (as one might hope). But I suppose its partly due to the fact that style and the small details that generally don't seem to matter much, are never really taught in school.

Finals week; that wonderful time of the season characterized by late nights, early mornings, hours of unbridled fun in the library, and most of all, incredible amounts of procrastination. I recently decided that every time I get too restless to study, I should get up and run a few miles. Monday turned out to be a particularly restless day, as I ended up running ten miles in the afternoon (two full perimeter runs (four miles each), and a truncated north-campus loop (two miles)). The end result was that I got very little work done and utterly failed at curing my restlessness, as each successive trek through the outside world only served to fuel my desire to be away from my studies. Obviously, I have since abandoned that failure of a studying technique.

But onto other more exciting news. My roommate started the process of moving out yesterday and so today I learned that he owned all the knives in our apartment. Which is why I made lunch today using nothing but a pair of chopsticks, and an ancient pocket knife. Presumably, for the next few days I will be eating a lot of instant noodles. Which is fine, because that was essentially my plan anyway.

I was wandering through the deluge of old data that I've accumulated on my disks and discovered a high school recording of me playing Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" piano concerto, accompanied by the community orchestra (which was, to put it nicely, not a very good orchestra). I was initially mildly impressed by the solid skill and slight bravado with which I performed, but then immediately became extremely depressed when I realized how much my piano skills have atrophied over the last four years.

I bought a new phone recently (Nexus One) and have been discovering the joys afforded by the marvels of modern technology. Perhaps the most shocking of its features (when compared to my previous phone), is that it doesn't lock up every time the screen is touched. The Nexus One, being a rather older model, superceded by various other phones including the Nexus S, was relatively quite cheap (only $260 unlocked and without contract), compared to the ~$600 it might cost to buy a current, unlocked, contract-free, top-of-the-line model. Nevertheless, $260 is still $20 more then what I paid for the stolid and trustworthy IBM x60s that I'm currently typing away at. There's been a lot of complaints on the tubes (i.e. from guys like ESR) about how American cellular providers are racking up exorbitant profits by locking consumers into unfair contracts that span several years. But the fact of the matter is, modern smart phones are prohibitively expensive and the only way most Americans are even going to consider buying them, is if they don't have to realize the full price of the product up front. Thus contracts that appear to partially subsidize the cost of the phone, but in reality simply act as a payment plan. Its the American way; buy crap you don't really need with money you don't have right now.

But I digress. Yesterday night, we realized that the window in our room opens. This idea, which has apparently been gestating in our minds for the past year, only to hatch a few days before we move out, was still quite welcome as it served to ventilate our every-so stuffy room.

I'll be doing undie-run tonight, despite the looming presence of two more finals in the very near future. But I figure it'll be worth it since I've never gone and this will be my last chance. Amusingly enough, they have yet to change the picture for the undie-run Facebook group in several years. It remains a picture someone took my first quarter here, containing a streaming mass of humanity with my then-roommate in the middle, wearing nothing but his underwear and for some inexplicable reason, a tie.

And with that, I return to other acts of procrastination.

Its rather old news, but rather new to me. There is a known bug with the 64-bit Flash plugin when used in Fedora 14. When playing back certain Flash videos, the bug produces regular high-pitched beeping noises, as though there is some odd clipping issue. The culprit of the bug is a recent upgrade in glibc's memcpy(). I'm seeing a few hacks and patches being thrown around in the bug report, but for now, I'll probably just stick to running 32-bit Flash in a wrapper.

And again, here's the bug report.