Pug’s Place

I designed a new website for the freeglut project. The old one was powered by Typo3’s content management system, and was overly complicated… but more importantly, it kept breaking randomly. I wrote a series of simple pages powered on the back-end by some very simple PHP, and kept in a CVS repository. It’s functional, and clean.

Take a look, let me know what you think.

There’s nothing I can say about this to make it any more hilarious, so just go and read the article but make sure you’re sitting down, and I’m afraid to say, it’s NOT A JOKE!

(Apparently.)

An article at The Guardian today that I saw featured on Slashdot says what most of us already know: Nerds own the planet, and we shall become the most powerful movers in the world! All the non-geeky shall be built into giant albino shouting gorilla monkeys. Muwhwhahaha!

No, seriously, it’s an article on culture’s shift away from beating up nerds and geeks to flocking in record numbers to see The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the Internet, and other pieces of entertainment… And, like, junk, and like, ya know? *ahem!*

Amusing to read, if just for little quips like:

“Nerds are highly intelligent but they have no social skills whatsoever. You can’t hold a proper conversation with a nerd. Geeks are very intelligent too, but a geek can hold a conversation, and have a girlfriend and an active social life. So I freely admit to being a geek. I have no problem with that label at all.”

Heheh. Well, I’m happy to be called a geek or a nerd. But I’m strange.

I posted a few pictures of neat poinsettias in the Around UF section of my gallery. Also, there is a picture of how James and I locked our bikes up without a bike rack. Consider the technique proprietary. Patent applications are in the works.

Wired has an article about how the Arctic ground squirrel is capable of entering a sub-zero degree temperature hibernation for months. As in, it’s internal temperature is lower than freezing, lower than the point where fluids normally freeze in the veins, yet its fluids keep right on going. Its metabolism slows down that much. The article points out that this would be great for space-flight!

I say, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these operating as a refrigerator! Just pack them around a box and put your Mountain Dew in the box! Chilled for free!

What? They don’t actually absorb all the surrounding heat? It has to be cold for them to be that temperature? Oh.. Well, maybe we need to do an experimental trial to make sure!

James and I spoke over dinner tonight of James’ chili about various subjects involving the military, including the more modern and civilized methods of torture of this twenty-first century. He brought up our Geneva-convention-compliant methods of extracting information from prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq:

Metallica, Drowning Pool, Sesame Street and Barney’s musical creations were used to wear down the mental defenses of the prisoners before interrogation.

“In training, they forced me to listen to the Barney “I Love You” song for 45 minutes. I never want to go through that again,” one US operative told the magazine.

Ouch. This is both criminally insane, and the best use I’ve heard for Barney. The only problem with their implementation is that they aren’t advertising this wider! If the punishment for murder was to be locked into a 3×3 cube with 10″ speakers blasting “I LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE ME…” 24 hours a day for weeks… well, we’d have fewer murderers. James points out that they would find new and innovative ways of killing themselves. This kind of treatment probably qualifies as “cruel and unusual punishment,” though… so we need to roll it out fast, and then it won’t be unusual!

If little Jimmy is thinking of shoplifting that coach shotgun from Wal-Mart, and he thinks “Oh, if I get caught, they’ll force me to listen to Barney’s Sing-Along for days on end…” and decides the punishment is too vicious, then that’s one more coach shotgun that can be purchased by us law-abiding citizens.

James pointed me this morning to a Rush Limbaugh transcript from yesterday where he discusses yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to uphold most of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform act of 2002 (Washington-Post Link). Basically, he points out all the flaws with this bill, and that it just absolutely trounces the first amendment, and he’s right.

This morning James asked me if I thought the reform act was a good thing, and I initially said “Yes.” I have this idea that if we took money out of the picture, then more people could run for the presidency, and we might get an independent in office for a change (which would be quite interesting). I’m still not certain that putting strict finance restrictions on political campaigns is a bad thing, but banning political commercials before an election is wrong. It makes the media even more powerful (yay).

I really suggest you read Rush’s transcript. It’s enlightening.

I took some pictures of the Reitz Union Christmas Tree tonight. It’s sooo huge! You can find the pictures in the “Around UF” gallery.

Done with 4 of my 6 classes. Woooooo!

Well, today I have my final exam for Computer Organization and Design. I’m studying. I got my Calculus final back today. Professor Emch told me that I just must not test well. He said that I’ve obviously a talented mathematical mind (blush!), but that I must need less stress to use it properly. Strange, I thought I tested real well. Maybe he’s just incorrect, but hey, I didn’t try and correct him. Anyway, my final grade for the course was a nice happy “B”. I’m happy. Whee!

I’ve almost got Lucene working as I want — The engine works now (find the link on the right side-bar), but it has some quirks… like, on a query with no returns, it gives an invalid page error. Also, I want it to say “X number of results found.”

I’ll send my patches to the PyBlosxom people once I get it working nicely.