waider

Apparently, cutting the power to someone's building *doesn't* count as a network-based DoS.

1. Rate in order of speed: read from cpu register, disk seek, context switch, read from main memory.
2. What are the three packets which establish a TCP session?
3. How many machines can you put in a /17 network (method of calculating will suffice)

More news as this story develops.

I am highly amused at the people who were heralding Google's IPO as a doomed enterprise for the last couple of weeks. In particular, c|net and Andrew "THERE IS A CABAL AND IT HATES ME" Orlowski at The Register. I hope they all followed their own advice and didn't invest a cent in Google.

Ok. First impressions of the much-talked-about GMail service, now that I've scored an account (thanks, k!):

• Damn, this is slow.
• Where's the POP/IMAP access?
• How do I delete this mess... oh, I can move it to trash. Now how do I get rid of it from trash? Ah, right. Extra options on the actions menu in the trash folder. Clunky.
• What's with all the new windows? Can't I just keep it in the same window as I'm already running[1]?
• Hmm, I do like the little Loading tag on the top right.

So mostly I don't think I'll be doing much with this: generally speaking, I hate webmail systems, because no matter how much work you do on the UI it's still browser-based which as previously mentioned is something that bugs me a whole lot. I read email in emacs, thanks, and I'd rather I was able to continue doing that. More to follow, I'm sure.

[1] Mozilla allegedly has an option to make this "open in new tab" instead. It doesn't work for me. And if I disable the window.open call entirely I break a bunch of other stuff. So. For now I am concentrating huge amounts of hate on anyone who feels it is necessary to open a whole new window just because I clicked on a link. (for the record, I don't mind discreet popups, such as the Gmail Contacts window. That's fine. Whole New Windows = Teh Bad, though)

So a friend's daughter has Gillian Barre Syndrome, essentially an autoimmune disease of the brain that causes problems with coordination. Consult your local doctor for a better definition, I guess. Anyway, being the curious sort, I plugged "Gillian Barre" Syndrome into Google. From the resulting list of hits, I've determined that this must be a fairly common disease, since it's being used to bait sites in the same way as, say, Brittney Spears or Hot/Live/Wet/Young/Nude/Whatever Teens.

Update: Actually, I'm seeing several names for this. The friend in question told me it was Gillian Bere. Gillian Barre turns up a lot of hits, and it's what google suggests. Somewhere else says Gillian Barré. And I've now seen one that says Guillain-Barre, which seems to be the correct spelling as it's turning up some far more useful hits. Google, spell-checker of the masses.

Dear Andrew, If you don't like Google, use another search engine. Don't try and make out like they're a bunch of crooks just because they're not returning useful results for your chosen phrase. Love, Waider.