Dave's Archives

Tag: geekiness

  • Old computers

    The Linux boot up message of the moment: / has gone 49710 days without being checked, check forced. This would place the manufacturing date of the computer in question at around 1872 or earlier; a century before the UNIX epoch (the official Dawn of Time for UNIX-based computers) and at least 86 years prior to…

  • Horrible Java

    Apologies to non-geeks. The following Java code determines whether infinity is even or odd. It compiles, runs, finishes immediately, and outputs “false” (meaning that infinity is odd). class Infinity \u007b static \u0062\u006f\u006f\u006c\u0065\u0061\u006e\u0020\u0065\u0076\u0065\u006e\u003b static { // Configure infinite speed System.nanoTime(\u002f\u002a); boolean even = true; double i = 0.0; while(i

  • The university of technology

    All Curtin students and staff know about OASIS. OASIS purportedly stands for “Online Access to Student Information Service” . Is that the best they could do, you ask? Evidentially, that full name is now such an embarrassment that it doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on the official OASIS website. However, I’m still not sure which…

  • Bouncy bouncy

    When my housemate told me of his scheme for constructing a physics simulation, I did the only decent thing I could. I stole his idea. I turned to my copy of Serway and Beichner (a ~1600 page physics book that I keep under my pillow for just such emergencies) and sat down to work out…

  • Window focusing

    The user interface of OS X has many things to commend it. Its click-to-focus function is not one of them. OS X, by design apparently, lacks a click-through capability. As far as I can tell there is no way to enable it. This generally means that when you click on a window to select it,…

  • Cron just keeps going and going…

    What happens when you set a cron job to run every fifteen minutes, generating mail, and then leave the computer in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what a cron job is? 266MB and 54500 messages stuck in a mail directory that would never be read. Today it was turned off, and all trace…