The Hive Archive

Here in Alabama, USA we’ve just acquired the new area code “256″ which means that some lucky (and probably unappreciative) bastard will get

+1-256-512-1024

Which has simply got to be the coolest damn phone number I can imagine.
– David McNett

Can i dial 1-255-255-255255 and make every phone in the world ring?
– Tanuki

Stumbled across a great list of “alternate” terms for Monkey Patching in Ruby:

My Complete List Of Substitute Names For The Maneuver We Now Know To Be Monkeypatching

The true test of Geekdom is whether you can read a bug report on a Saturday evening and find great humor in it. Here is your chance:

Bug 45375 – SeaMonkey-only bug: Long tooltips should wrap instead of being cropped (multiline tooltips)

Look for such “celebrity” appearances as the “xkcd” guy and others. My favorite part, is the bug reporter chiming in each year to wish the bug happy birthday, though there is an inconsistency when he changes the gender of the bug along the way. Maybe I should file a bug on the bug report?

I read way too much and I visit too many random web sites. Today, I was reading the Wall Street Journal online about outsourcing the more common things in your life.

I do a search for Get Friday, one of the Indian firms mentioned, out of curiosity.

Under unusual services they have provided a couple tidbits:

• Apologizing and sending flowers and cards on their behalf to spouses or clients.
• Research on how to tie a shoe lace meant for a kid (client’s son).
• Talking to parents in our client’s stead.
• Reading bedtime stories to a young kid on phone

What kind of person thinks it would be a swell idea to have someone in India read your kid a bedtime story on the phone because they are too busy? Although, it would be fun to have everyone route their requests to a personal assistant, just to see the looks on their faces.

Wes: check out introducing pipes
Matt: “Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.”
Matt: I hear vista finally has symlinks. Wake me up when they invent mount points and finally kill drive letters
Wes: I think you can do that somehow.
Matt: yeah sure, and break everything *nerd rage*
Wes: yeah, junction point. junction points (technet)
Matt: “Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.”

Update, Wes says, if you want to know more see his blogs at:

• www.brokenbuild.com/blog/category/windows-unixism
• www.brokenbuild.com/blog/2006/12/11/is-there-a-windows-equivalent-of-mount

They have their very own Class A IP space assigned to them:

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IP_address_blocks

Today I found out that Jabba the Hutt is a hermaphrodite.

A hermaphrodite is an organism that possesses both male and female sex organs during its life.

Umm, thanks Wikipedia?

Canada blows my mind. My Canadian friends tried to explain their magical blinking protected left traffic lights, and I didn’t quite get it, but I remember thinking there was some logic behind it. Today, driving in Vancouver, I came across regular blinking green traffic lights. I asked my friend about it and after five minutes of explaining, all I got was to go forward on green, I think. Metric continues to blow my mind, even though I spent some of my formative years in Europe. Google Maps automatically switches to metric if your starting position is in Canada. Nifty.

Overall, the most baffling thing I have experienced in Canada is the hotel room key. The hotel is nice, but it has a dated feel to it. At one time, you can imagine that it was all very hi-tech, but parts were just never upgraded. Surprisingly, one of these parts is the hotel room key. While most hotels have chosen to go with magnetic swipe cards, this nameless hotel has kept with punch cards. No kidding.

Check it out:

Yes, just by posting this image, the key could probably be copied. All I could find about this on the ‘Net comes from a 1989 Usenet posting:

There used to be only one kind of Ving card lock. Now there are two kinds,
as I discovered to my horror a while back while at a convention. The first
and possibly “classic” version is all-mechanical, while the second is optical
with an electronic controller. I did a longish article on the mechanical
one back when I got to take it apart, which I will send to anyone who asks,
and since the time of that writing discovered a few more things about it.
I believe this article was sent to this very list years ago…

I love stuff like this. These things were spoken about on a security list in ‘89 with horror and how they ran across them a while back and discussed them “years ago”. Not only do these things seem trivial to copy, but seeing the regular pattern in the holes seems to suggest you could easily reverse engineer the algorithm and make keys for every room in the hotel given the room number. I guess you don’t need high security in a country where people say they don’t even lock their front doors. Good times.

I recently ran across some rather amusing Amazon reviews from some madman genius. Here is a sample:

Margaret Dickenson is the wife of a Canadian diplomat. I learned from her book the hierarchical placement of guests around the dinner table that diplomats use. The most important sits to the right of the host, the second most important to the left. I have used this dinner table tactic to divide and conquer my guests, making them jealous of each other for my attention. I had Jeremy Saltmaven over for vermouth the other day and made him sit to my left, leaving a vacancy to the right. With this subtle trick I suspect I probably let Jeremy Saltmaven know he needs to give me more finery to secure my favour. Margaret Dickenson also explores dinner party themes, but this is where I went soft on the book. For my Hieronymus Bosch themed party, I assembled a nice costume from one of Bosch’s panels. I heard the first knock at the door, and hurriedly threw on my bird mask, mounted a copper cauldron on my head, and leapt up onto my stilts. In the process of taking my first step I spilled headfirst into the front door, misjudging the weight imbalance of the cauldron on my neck. My guests later told me they first heard some shuffling, the single sonorous knell as of a large bell, and then nothing. After waiting patiently on the porch for 5 minutes, it took them a few moments longer than normal to open the front door, heaving it, unwittingly shifting my dumped motionless body across the vestibule floor.

So, Margaret Dickenson, that’s why I can’t give this book anything higher than 3 stars.