Look for “factorial calculator” on Google and you’ll take a long time to find a factorial calculator that thinks that 100! doesn’t have an ‘e’ in it. If you’re going to write a dinky little app like that, be aware that there are limitations to it and tell people. I’m not going to link to any of them, they’re all naughty applications that shouldn’t be allowed out in the real world. But Dima Stopel’s large number factorial calculator isn’t afraid to give you all the digits.
Monthly Archives: May 2006
The quest for up-to-date drivers
I use Microsoft products every day, and indeed make my living off them. Doesn’t stop me slagging-off Bill Gates regularly of course, though Danny Katz would like us to leave him alone.
One of my pet hates has been the dumping of support for legacy hardware. It’s not just a Microsoft issue of course; the vendors are equally to blame (often even more-so). My own experience was that an old Diamond Viper V550 graphics card I have in one of my machines would do astounding 3D things when DirectX 7 was the latest version, but somewhere between 7 and 9, the 3D stuff went out the window. (Knoppix Linux didn’t like it, either.)
I’d long given-up on this particular issue, hoping to find the time at some stage to get super-brave and attempt to downgrade DirectX, which is theoretically possible, but certainly not for the faint-hearted.
Then the other day on a whim I decided to go searching for updated drivers for the card. Turns out NVidia (who bought Diamond) have put some new ones out. Well, newish. Okay, three years ago. Did I not find this the last time I looked, or was it really longer ago that I last tried?
Downloaded, installed. They work. Now my kids can play Midtown Madness 2 with fast graphics again.
I’m even pondering upgrading that ol’ Win2K to XP, now that you can get an Academic XP Pro for under $100. 512Mb RAM and a 1.something Ghz processor, so hopefully it should be able to hack it. Would avoid the kids arguing over who gets to use Windows MovieMaker. Must check the driver situation out first, though. That old dodgy TV capture card will be the tricky one…
Towel Day
Dammit, today was Towel Day. Why did nobody remind me? I’ve forgotten every year since 2001.
Database war stories
Databases have long been part and parcel of web development, but it seems that some of the big 2.0 sites have a few things to say on databases. Some love them, others hate them, and all are dealing with really big databases.
Second Life (database has grown and grown and split), Bloglines and memeorandum.com (lovers of flatfiles), Flickr (almost a Tb of data – and we’re ignoring images here), NASA, Craigslist (dealing with masses of data), O’Reilly (doing interesting data mining / transformation), Google (not much gets said here), Findory and Amazon (Findory try to keep it all in RAM), finally MySQL repsonds saying “Flat files suck”
Wikipedia domain worth half a million bucks
The Wikipedia.org domain name has an estimated value of $448,814.
Geekrant’s estimated value is $13,254, while hotblowfishdogcat.com may be worth as much as $1,176 – given it costs like $10 to register, you’re looking down the barrel of a massive profit if you register hotblowfishdogcat.com now!
Protecting yourself against the BitTorrent bandits!
Yet again the internet works around corruption. With the anti-P2P crowd attempting to poison the BitTorrent well, here’s today’s workaround to Wasted BitTorrent data.
Basically, it’s a list of IPs known to host fake/posion BitTorrent peers that can be loaded into µTorrent.
Human to human transfer of Birdflu seen in Indonesia
Human to human transfer of Birdflu has been seen in Indonesia. Six of the seven infected people have died. The infection chain from the index case is three people long.
That which was a matter of time may actually be upon us.
So, what’s your H5N1 survival strategy?
The Gwigle Game
Test your googling skills by playing The Gwigle Game. You need to know a fair bit about pop culture ‘tho. Actually, it’s a rather good training aide. Maybe Google will give the guy a big pile of cash.
I got so far as the paintings before I got bored. What comes after that?
More on human comment spam
Update to this post about human comment spam, about a new trend in blog comment spamming, using real life human spammers, to get around the fact that most bloggers can see the robots coming from miles away.
I’ve had a large number of these come through on my blogs in the few weeks. They’ve all been leaving links to sites like the one pictured. This one’s about antioxidants, but some are purportedly about computer viruses, drugs, whatever.
I really should update all my remaining blogs to use NoFollow, so if any get through, they don’t gain any PageRank. Time to chuck WP-Hashcash into the fray on all of them, as well.
Uh, so many blogs, so little time.
Update 26/5/2006: Another example added.
OmniNerd – Articles: Beating Traffic
Brandon U. Hansen tries to figure out if he can get to work faster – beating traffic.
The world is full of traffic and people who hate it. This article analyzes a year of data to determine if minor tweaks to departure times can significantly impact commute length – or if it is all out of the driver’s control.
Well, duh. Of course it does. But who’s going to go to work at 11:00 and return home at 19:00?
Anyways, looking at his opening figures is weird, because he says that driving to work soaks up 100 hours a year, and involves 15,000 miles – which implies an average velocity of 150mph. Even if he forgot the trip home, you’re looking at 75mph (120kph), which is unlikely unless your cousin is a cop or you live right on top of an Autobahn. Perhaps they’re driving to work in a rocket tractor – which I always thought was one of these, with one of these attached – but it seems most of the net thinks they’re one of these, and that would never work!
Are you referencing sites Banned By Google?
There’s a tool to test a website for references to sites that don’t appear in Google, which implies that the site has been banned. I’m not sure what the implication of referencing such a site is, but it would be reasonable to guess that Google would punish your site for being a collaborator.
Broken URLs still abound
The mob I work for, eVision, are looking for an extra person, so they put an ad on Seek for the position.
Seek’s URLs are broken. The only way to get a URL that you can link to or send to somebody is to use their own “Email this job to a friend” feature and send it to yourself. That way you get a sensible, working URL, such as:
http://www.seek.com.au/showjob.asp?jobid=6946759
rather than the broken one you get by copying it off the browser (even after clicking through the above), which is something like:
which goes to an error page that complains that your browser doesn’t take cookies (even if your browser does take cookies).
Dick Smith Electronics’ otherwise excellent web site suffers from a similar problem.
Jakob Nielsen’s article URL as UI remains as relevant — and as unfollowed — as ever.