Excursions Into The Casgo

Enter the majestic gates. Or rather, the opening beneath the rolling warehouse door. Let them greet you as you flash your pass. Could you want anything more?

Try out the little goodies all around. Different tastes offer themselves to you. The sweet and the salty, the bread and meat. All mixed in your stomach like some strange stew.

What will you do when the crowd confronts you? You seem overwhelmed and help from who? Nobody cares about you and your posse. Oh look the pirate child to the rescue!

He has a sword on his little belt. And a fearsome glow within his eyes. His hand is at the ready, But possibly if his Popsicle is taken he cries.

The cheese! The cheese! Oh so much cheese! You want to eat more? Well then just say please.

Bring your riches, then you may pass. I see the light, oh yonder ho! There is just one standing in our way. She then says, “thank you for coming to Casgo.”

Macs Have Emacs Key Bindings?

As a relatively new user of Macs, I was amazed to find that I could use some Emacs key bindings by default in Mac OS X. I’m sure that many people out there already know about this, but I thought it significant enough to write about it. Key bindings are basically combinations of keys that will perform some action because it is associated with it. For example, Ctrl+S is generally regarded as being used to save something, Ctrl+P is used to print, etc.

Anyways, for those of you using Mac OS X and who don’t know much about Emacs I wanted to give a short run down. Emacs is basically an extensible text editor with the ability to have user-defined functions. There are key bindings that have a specified meaning when you’re using Emacs. Some useful ones that you might consider trying out are:

Ctrl+f - Move 1 character forward Ctrl+b - Move 1 character backward Ctrl+d - Delete character in front of the curser Ctrl+a - Move to beginning of line Ctrl+e - Move to end of line

There are many more key bindings available to Emacs that seem like they will usually get overridden by the program. Remember, this hint is for Mac OS X users. The most useful place that I could use these key bindings was in text fields in Firefox.

Try it out and let me know. Don’t blame me, though, if you hit the wrong button or if the key binding is overridden to be something else in the program that you try it with!

Inconsiderate Internet Browsing

Nowadays as nearly everyone has interaction with the Internet in some way, it is important to stop and think about how people might actually be using the Internet. Actually, right now I want to look at how some people might be inconsiderately using the Internet.

There are a few things that I’ve recently realized are inconsiderate browsing habits. To start off with, you must know that for the Firefox browser, there are programs that can be installed called Firefox extensions. I’d like to use a couple as examples of some of the browsing habits that are inconsiderate. However, it must be noted that they are not the actual habit, but they are rather a means to an end.

1. Adblock and Filterset.G Updater are both super extensions that are often the first that I’ll install when I have a new installation of Firefox. Basically they attempt to take the ads out of your Internet browsing experience. And they work very well. Adblock will basically filter out anything that you you specify. It is as easy as right-clicking on an ad and adding it to the list to be blocked. However this takes a long time to build up a reasonable list. Luckily it also allows you to use some pattern matching (similar to regular expressions) to allow you to make your list useful in a shorter list. Basically it allows you to match multiple things with a single pattern.

This is not easy for most people. So in comes the Filterset.G Updater! It uses a master list that someone else has taken the time to create. It will match almost all of the ads that you would have normally encountered. Of course some sites are good enough to get around this. Nevertheless it leads to a pretty ad-free browsing experience that is incomparable to one filled with pop-ups and more ads than content.

The inconsideration involved is this: websites need those ads as a source of revenue. Although I’ve only realized much of this by having my own site, it does make a lot of sense. Many sites that you read are free to use. However, they often need some income in order to stay free. It costs money to host a website (sometimes a good deal of it). When you’re browsing a site with ads, it is similar in idea to watching television with commercials. Television uses the revenue that is garnered by having commercials in order to create the content. Merely by the fact that you’re watching the show (and subsequently in some way affecting the Nielson Ratings), you are allowing the television company to charge more for their commercial time.

Advertising on the Internet works similarly. I’m talking specifically about Google AdSense because I have experience with it, but this valid for almost all other advertisement programs. There are a couple of ways that users help support a site monetarily through their advertisement program.

1. Viewing an ad.  Simply by viewing an ad with the content, users are helping out the site because many ad programs will allow advertisers to purchase space that ends up paying per view (or impression in AdSense speak).  The more views a site gets, the more it gets paid.


2. Clicking on an ad.  This is definitely applicable for all advertisement programs out there because nearly all of them will pay a site publisher (those producing the content for a site) based on how many clicks that an ad gets.  There are a number of ways that a publisher might put ads on their website, but that is another matter entirely.

What does this mean for you? Well I don’t know what it means for you. But for me it means that I will try to browse in a way that supports the website. As I use the Adblock extension, I can easily do this by

1. Clicking the Tools menu


2. Going to the Adblock item


3. Click Whitelist this page or Whitelist this entire site

Whitelisting a site means that you have given that site priority to not have anything blocked by Adblock. To undo this, on the whitelisted paged you can follow the same procedures as above. On top of whitelisting pages/site, you might consider clicking some ads. Don’t think that you’re giving your life away because ads are getting better and better nowadays. Very often they are related to the content that you’re reading (for contextually-based ad programs). So don’t avoid ads like the plague, they do some good by monetarily supporting sites that you are enjoying for free.

1. Fasterfox is another extension that highlights some inconsiderate browsing habits. This extension will basically tweak the Firefox settings to give you a faster browsing experience. This seems very cool because it helps you out as the end-user.

However, this is actually fairly inconsiderate some of the time. The way that this extension works is that you can set how much tweaking you want the extension to do for you. At its extreme, it will prefetch (follow the link and load the page before you actually click on it) pages, open multiple connections to servers, and more. Obviously this puts more a load on the server than is necessary because you will not always click every link in a page nor will you absolutely need to load a page 1 second quicker. By putting an extra load on the server, you are unnecessarily making it harder for the server to serve its content to other people who might want it.

Now, this does not affect low-traffic sites like my own because I could happily handle way more traffic than I currently do. But it does affect higher-traffic sites because they are already closer to being pushed over the edge. And that is just not nice. Other variations of this inconsiderate browsing habit are constantly refreshing pages for no reason, etc.

1. Utilizing Digg is actually somewhat inconsiderate because it often results in a Distributed Denial of Service. Without going into too much detail, this is basically when lots and lots of people will simultaneously access a site and overwhelm its ability to serve pages. This means that either some hardware will go down or people who actually would like to visit a site will not be able to because they are stuck behind everyone else waiting for the page. Granted, I participate in using Digg, but it still can definitely be an inconsiderate browsing habit. Consider using caches that have been made of that page. Hopefully most sites that get dugg will be able to handle the traffic and will actually benefit in some way from it (I try to find good ads to help them out with if I like what they have to say).

In the end, you just basically have to think about how your actions affect others and not just yourself. Apparently, that’s true for life as well.

NBA Playoffs (Thus Far Commentary #2)

Well of course things go on, so I wanted to write my thoughts at this junction about the NBA Playoffs 2007.

I was hoping that the Golden State Warriors would get farther than the second round. However I became ambivalent as Baron Davis’ personality (as well as Stephen Jackson’s) came out. That elbow to Derek Fisher’s face? Unnecessary to the extreme. To say that I gained a lot and lost a lot of respect for the Warriors would be fair to say. I enjoyed their playing because they were passionate and energetic. I started to disapprove of them because many of them turned out to be a bunch of no-class, cocky-without-rights-to, complaining-to-no-end players. And that is not a team that I want to cheer for. So they’re out, and good riddance.

A lot of people disliked Derek Fisher when he was on the Lakers. I never felt as strongly about him. In fact, I kind of liked him. He had spirit and he played hard. Plus we share the same first name. He’s by no means the best at his position, but he’s definitely shown in the Jazz vs Warriors series that he’s got lots left in that tank. To see him also having to deal with everything going on with his daughter makes him an especially easy-to-cheer-for player. Bravo on being an impact player in the series.

There sure has been a lot of testiness in these playoffs. Is it just me or does it seem like there is more this year than in recent history? Pretty much every series has had some episode of a flareup. LeBron is stepping up, the Pistons are never exactly clean, the aforementioned Warriors and Jazz got it on, and of course the Suns and the Spurs have no love lost for their fellow Texans. It all makes for exciting and emotional games, but I kind of wonder why this year is so.

I’m cheering for the Chicago Bulls to beat the Pistons. I’m not a huge Bulls fan, but I have enjoyed watching them play this year. Unfortunately they seem like they go very cold at times, and that led to the Pistons taking a (seemingly) insurmountable 3-0 series lead on them. They’ve fought back to 3-2, and everyone has been singing their praise. I’d like to see them down the vaunted Pistons myself.

I barely even hear or see much from the Cleveland Cavaliers side of the bracket. The Wizards series went down very quietly. It’s no surprise, but the West seems to definitely be the better conference.

Robert Horry’s forearm to Nash’s face was pretty poor. I always kind of liked Horry because I enjoyed his late-game heroics. I’m not really sure what the beef between the Suns and the Spurs is, but I know this: they don’t like each other. I’m not a fan of many of them myself. Many of them (Manu Ginobili, Bruce Bowen, Raja Bell to name a few) are aggressive bordering on extremely dirty. And that’s no good. But I like watching the series because both of these teams are pretty good. They have different styles but they both have multiple superstars who combine to do amazing things sometimes.

Conclusion

The NBA Playoffs 2007 are definitely interesting. I like seeing people get emotional, but there’s no need to be a jerk about things. Keep it coming. I’m going to enjoy watching more.

Chopped Returns (In Perl)

Files on computers are made up of different characters that are interpreted by whatever it is that you are using. That means that no matter what file it is, it is essentially a string of bytes that are interpreted by the program opening it. This means that your music program tries to interpret whatever file you open with it to be conformed to some audio standards (mp3, wma, etc.). Try to open the same file in a text editor, and you’ll find yourself looking at (apparently) junk characters. But then you’ll realize that the file is still just a bunch of characters.

I bring this up because

1. It seems as if people don’t realize this.

2. I encountered this while writing a Perl script today.

Something else that you should read even if you don’t know what Perl is: Windows and Unix-variants (including Mac OS X and up) do not handle files the same. I’m not talking about Fanaticism (because I’ve already posted about that). Windows uses characters that are referred to as the Carriage Return and Line Feed in order to represent a newline. These names originate because of their original use in the typewriter which actually had a physical mechanism to move. In any case, Unix-variants utilize the line feed character to distinguish its newlines. This can obviously lead to some problems if you use the same files on both systems.

If you don’t know what Perl is then you can fairly safely stop reading this article now because the rest won’t help you much. I know that it was hard for me to find and I’d like to make it available if anyone else so happens to run into the same problem.

While writing a script in Perl today, I had a seemingly strange problem where I would do some processing on my Windows machine and then transfer the file via FTP to a Unix-based server. However I noticed that I had a string that when printed to the screen on my Windows computer would display correctly but would display incorrectly in the file put onto the server. I could not figure this out for quite sometime because it seemed as if some of the lines were printing correctly and some were not. Alright enough explanation. Essentially I thought that the last character was getting chopped off in some way that I did not understand in Perl. However it had to do with Perl assuming that the lines has both a carriage return and a line feed on the lines and then chopping them off when the file was being sent via FTP. The fix that I ended up using was simply a one line regular expression like so (a suggestion from a co-worker):

$output=some action; $output=~ s/n/rn/g; print $output; print FOUT $output;

Hope that this helps someone searching for an answer. I know that I would have liked to have happened upon the answer while searching for it.