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badcomputer.org

thursday, august 17, 2006

bigger, better, fatter, faster rrraaaauuuuuurrr...

Anyone who attempted to access my site yesterday between about 10am and 4pm Pacific Standard Time will have noticed the site was down. My cable modem decided to spontaneously die. A quick call to Shaw support revealed that a tech would not be able to visit until the next day (today!). Luckily, the modem decided to spontaneously reanimate itself, and I was back online. Not knowing how long this good luck would last I decided to secure myself the services of an offsite backup MX server, lest I attract the ire of several mailing list administrators with a flood of bounced messages.

The Shaw tech just left my place about an hour ago, and I am happy to say that I am the proud owner of a brand new modem (at no cost), and as a result my download speed has roughly doubled what it was yesterday. I guess my old modem really was flaky. I have just finished downloading a 500MB AVI file from MIT at a constant 600kb/s, which took all of 15 minutes. Not so impressive to all you lucky bastards with an OC3, but _I_ for one am happy.

On a related note, if you live in Canada and are trying to decide between Shaw and Telus for your internet just use Shaw already. They have been nothing but fantastic to me the last 4-5 years I have used them as an ISP. My mom was uing Telus, and let me tell you, free computers and cutsey commercials aside, these guys are totally evil. And I mean worse than Microsoft evil. I mean worse than old beelzebub himself evil. Case in point: I set my mom up with a Linux desktop (because I refuse to de-virus infested Windows machines, even for a home-cooked meal) and I phoned Telus to get the name of their POP3/SMTP servers so I could set up kmail to gather her mail.

The Telus tech-support drone starts reading from the script, telling me to "...click on the start menu, click this, click that...". At this point I politely interupt her and say that I know how configure the mail client, I just need the address of the servers. I made the mistake of mentioning the computer was not running Windows. The rest of the conversation went like this:

Telus drone: Sir, you are running Mac OS then?
Me: No, Linux actually
Telus drone: Sorry sir, we don't support Linux.
Me: I understand that. I am not looking for support, I just need the address of your POP3 and SMTP servers so my mom can send and receive her mail.
Telus drone: We don't support Linux sir...
...click...

Needless to say, after several minutes of spouting profanity I gave Shaw a call. Now: You may not think this is so evil in and of itself, after all, they can support whomever the hell they want right? But this is evil: A few months (half a year?) back a large amount of Telus employees were on strike and Telus decided that they would censor the internet by blocking access to the Telus employees' union website (to _all_ Telus customers). Impossible you say? Well it's true. Go ahead and read about how Telus is evil.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

...is the name of MIT's first semester computer science course, and also the name of the textbook used for same. Both the textbook itself and the accompanying video lectures are available for free online. You can download the lectures but the book must be read online. I actually just went ahead and purchased a hard-copy from amazon.ca.

In a perhaps naive attempt to be a better code monkey I have taken to reading a chapter, watching the lecture, and writing some Lisp. I am finding it quite enjoyable and enlightening, and would recommend this to any aspiring armchair computer scientist. As an added bonus, I find that the professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Sussman are freakin' hilarious. I especially like when Sussman dons a suitjacket and fez to "show a certain amount of reverance and respect" when getting close to "the spirit of the machine".

Whether it will enable me to write better code remains to be seen...

--

Note to self: Consider Mutagen as the one tag library to rule them all (for dir2ogg)

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