the corner office

Part of me is itching to invest in a laptop. If I did, getting a ThinkPad would still be first prize. This eWeek article is a little disconcerting though: Lenovo is still facing shrinking market share and growing losses.

An organisation trying its damnedest to be more competitive and reduce costs is likely to be very tempted to start cutting corners, and I wonder whether a new ThinkPad is quite as solid as one from a year or few back, and what they'll be like in another year or few's time?

An interesting conspiracy theory at Linuxwatch: is Microsoft doing some jiggery-pokery to encourage hosting services to lump their brazillions of parked domains on IIS servers, to make their Netcraft survey figures look better?

The other stats in the survey are quite interesting. Blogger added 660k sites in one month. How many of those will be abandoned within days or weeks, but will clog up Google's DNS servers in perpetuity?

I'm sure Americans could have a lot of fun with this chart: Loss of Natural Teeth By State (via Marginal Revolution).

This reminds me of an old joke.

Q: What has 100 legs and 3 teeth?

A: The front row of a Bles Bridges concert.

(The effect might be lost on non-South Africans).

I guess it's a bit rude to joke about Bles now that he's no longer around. It's one of my very few um, celebrity experiences, but I actually went cycling with him a few times when I was in high school, and he turned out to be a really nice person. There was a small cycling fraternity in my home town of Carletonville, and a member of the fraternity was the man whose wife Bles eventually had an affair with. In the pre-schtumping days, they were all family friends. This bloke was an ex-Springbok cyclist, and got Bles into cycling too. A group of us would get together and go training in the afternoons. One day we all pitch up at this dude's house, and there's a Beemer and this ridiculously expensive bicycle in the driveway. Whose bike could this be, we all wonder? Next thing Bles Bridges walks around the corner, kitted out in his cycling gear (and bright red towelling socks, though). Some of my Afrikaans compadres were well stoked. I got a bit of a ribbing at school but got some mileage with my mates telling them about the red socks. He joined us once or twice after that, and then the affair skandaal hit the news and well, we didn't see Bles after that.

But as I said, notwithstanding the casanova bit, Bles was a really nice bloke.

Right. Enough blogging for one night.

My RSS reader went bing! bing! this weekend as the news broke that there's a decades-old bug in most Binary Search implementations. Joshua Bloch's blog post about it sparked what looked like near-hysteria in some quarters. Wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes as the IT industry was forced to stop and take stock of the fact that integer operations are susceptible to overflows.

Shock horror.

Well, technically, it is a bug for large values of n, and yes, as time passes, it's more likely that this 'ceiling' will be encountered. How often, though? As this TSS article points out, the Java API's bug only gets triggered if you have an array with over a billion elements (1,073,741,825 to be exact), and only then in limited circumstances. When last did you need to search a billion-element array?

As another poster points out, an int array in Java (4 bytes per element on 32-bit systems) with 1 billion elements chomps up over 4 gigabytes of memory. Statically initialise that puppy in C or C++ and your compiler would probably spit out sparks and die.

In other words, it's all a bit of a storm in a teacup. No doubt, the more overflow-friendly implementations should be used, but it's not like the world would fall apart if people didn't bother. I think we can safely predict, though, that no algorithms textbook will ever use the 'overflowing' implementation, ever again.

Saw X-Men 3 last night. Good, enjoyable, but imho a bit of let-down after X2. In places it just got a bit too dramaties, as they say. At the same time, many of the characters and plot lines felt a little underdeveloped. The movie felt rushed. Another half hour of story-telling would not have gone amiss. Will there be an extended DVD edition?

On the upside, the X-Men appeal is that it's not the usual one-dimensional goodies-vs-baddies fare, and X3 stays true that. And in the end, it was a good action movie. The highlight had to be watching Wolverine get to work on some of the baddies. Mean. Made me want to walk around the mall and randomly thump shifty-looking people and roar at them while doing it.

On a side note, I noticed while doodling around IMDB.com that Rebecca Romijn, who plays Mystique, was born on exactly the same day as me - 6 November 1972. That explains a few things. If she was in the front of the Looks queue on that day, then it's no surprise that some of us got left with scraps. Pfeh.

There was no bloggery last night (there was moviery instead), so I missed the opportunity to mark the passing of this millennium's Devil's Day. Better late than never.

What were you doing at 06:06:06 06/06/06? I was brushing my teeth. I'm hardcore.

My car radio has that traffic report doomajiggy feature enabled and Classic FM are about the only station in Gauteng who use it, so I get to hear Tony Blewitt read the morning traffic reports.

Normally his sing-song speech gets a bit annoying, but I had to chuckle at a line of his from last week:

[Blah blah N1 N2 blah N3 blah accident blah blah.] There are goats grazing on the side of Somethingsomething road. (silence) Um... uh... no... that isn't a poem. It's... it's a fact.

You had to be there, I guess.

McDonalds is releasing a World Cup burger which is 40% bigger than a Big Mac, (which will probably nudge it into the realm of respectable-sized burgers in this country), and this Sky News article (via CherryFlava) details how there's a big outcry in the UK about it.

I have two comments on the article.

First, a hamburger is not a frigging sandwich! A sandwich is one or more slices of bread with stuff on or between. Something wedged in a roll is, well, a couple of things depending on what you put in it, but it's not a bloody sandwich. I don't know if it's just a foreign turn of phrase where people in the US or the UK go around saying 'ooh, I'd like me a tasty McDonalds Quarter Pounder With Cheese sandwich today', or if it's just stupid-ass marketing-speak, but it must go.

Second, Liberal Democrat MP Steve Webb and the 'outraged' health campaigners can all just sod off. It's not even a polite 'people are concerned' anymore, it's fury and outrage. People enjoying themselves? People making unhealthy lifestyle choices? Oh, the humanity! Woe! How dare they!

Yes, we all eat too much and we're all fat and unhealthy. That's irrelevant. How long before quaint notions like 'freedom' and 'personal responsibility' become nothing more than outlawed anachronisms?

If McDonalds ZA decides to flog these World Cup burgers, I'm gonna buy some just on principle.

An incredible photo essay - (via vowe.net), photographer Michael Wolf has a set of photographs of 100 rooms (and their residents), each 100 square feet in size, in one of Hong Kong's oldest public housing estates.

It's interesting to observe three near-ubiquitous appliances in each 'home', in decreasing order of frequency: a fridge, a fan, and a TV.

Almost no books, though. I don't know what to read into that, if anything, but it was one of the first things that struck me.

From KernelTrap:

Most 2.6 Linux kernel releases have contained a unique name that is only visible within the top level makefile. Some examples, 2.6.17 was named "Lordi Rules", 2.6.16 was named "Sliding Snow Leopard", 2.6.14 was named "Affluent Albatross", and 2.6.13 was named "Woozy Numbat".

Kyle McMartin recently posted a patch to the lkml with the intention of making the kernel name visible, leading Linux creator Linus Torvalds to explain, "well, part of the charm of the name is that it's totally meaningless. I can pick names out of my *ss, and they don't matter in the least, and nobody will ever see it except in the kernel diffs."

If you're using a 2.6 kernel, and you've got the source code, you can probably see it for yourself with less /usr/src/linux/Makefile. I'm still running 'Sliding Snow Leopard' ;-)