Space Meat

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

If you watch Extended Play you may note that their website lacks an overview of all the games reviewed, indexed by score. So I present the Extended Play Review Index. Updated regularly.

Posted by jrray @ 11:26 PM PDT [Link] [Karma: -2 (+/-)] [No Comments]

Friday, January 17, 2003

In one of my regular channels on IRC the subject of Sam's Club comes up, they're having some anniversary and are distributing some propaganda out to the masses. I have a very low quality fax of a page from that flyer, it contains a fun fact that I repeat here:

"Over the past year, 10,182,853 hot dogs have been sold at the SAM'S CLUB Café. If laid end to end, these hot dogs would stretch from the moon and back over 13 times. Laid end to end, they would go around the world 254.5 times."

It just so happens that I discovered the 'units' command today, a program that converts between units of measure. I'm part of a very small percentage of people who would enjoy playing with such a program. Upon seeing these facts, I immediately thought to plug them into 'units' and calculate the one unknown: how long is a SAM'S CLUB hot dog?

Units has a unit called 'moondist' already programmed into it, this is the "mean earth-moon distance." As the fun fact states, this chain of hot dogs goes to the moon and back over 13 times, so this is over 13 * 2 * moondist.

bash-2.05a$ units -v "13 * 2 * moondist" miles
        13 * 2 * moondist = 6210232.2 miles

So the chain of hot dogs is 6,210,232.2 miles long. To figure the length of each hot dog, we simply divide this number by their quantity:

bash-2.05a$ units -v "13 * 2 * moondist / 10182853" miles
        13 * 2 * moondist / 10182853 = 0.60987154 miles

Ah, interesting! Now we know why Paula Puckett thinks these hot dogs are so great. These very affordable hot dogs are over a half mile long.

We can double check this figure with the corroborating world encirclement number. Units also has a unit called 'earthradius.' To calculate the circumference we have to remember that c = 2 * Pi * r. The hot dog chain is 254.5 times Earth's circumference.

bash-2.05a$ units -v "254.5 * 2 * pi * earthradius" miles
        254.5 * 2 * pi * earthradius = 6330659.5 miles

6,330,659.5 miles is relatively close to the first result, and if you consider their moon figure is "over 13 times," that can account for the difference.

bash-2.05a$ units -v "254.5 * 2 * pi * earthradius / 10182853" miles
        254.5 * 2 * pi * earthradius / 10182853 = 0.62169802 miles

That's a big hot dog. [more]

Posted by jrray @ 02:20 PM PDT [Link] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Comments]

Monday, October 7, 2002

Quick entry, I created a webpage that ranks my music based on the ratings I give each track while listening to them, via the jukebox program I wrote: Check it out.

It's generated each time it is viewed based on the current ratings, and changes all the time as I score new songs.

Posted by jrray @ 01:35 AM PDT [Link] [Karma: 3 (+/-)] [1 Comment]

Monday, September 30, 2002

Quite a number of days ago I went to a vending machine in my apartment complex to buy a Pepsi, I fed the machine 4 quarters and pushed the Pepsi button, and normally I hold the button down until the bottle pops out, but this time I let go right away... and nothing came out.

This demonstrates why I normally hold the button down.

I must've had some sort of subconscious precognitive experience because I left my apartement for the sole reason of buying a drink, but I grabbed two dollars in quarters for the trip. After feeding the machine again (yes, I tried smacking it a few times first), I pushed and held a different Pepsi button, got my drink, and left.

Last night, as I was heading out to go visit my parents, I grabbed some quarters and walked down to the same machine to buy a drink. This time I pushed and held the Mountain Dew button, and as I kneeled down to fetch the bottle, I was astonished to find both my Mountain Dew and a bottle of Pepsi!

I think for some people this would qualify as a religious experience. The machine owed me a debt and by some miracle the debt was repaid. But, I think it just goes to show that I'm the only person in my apartment complex who is willing to pay $1 for a bottle of Pepsi.

Posted by jrray @ 12:28 AM PDT [Link] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Comments]

Monday, August 26, 2002

I spent yesterday evening driving around with my friend Tim looking for wireless access points. I usually read about people doing this with fancy external antennae, but we just used the equipment we had on hand, which was a simple pcmcia 802.11b card. This turned out to be perfectly adequate. After we were done, we had found 79 access points, 52 of those did not have encryption turned on.

Our two favorite network IDs found were "bridaljewelry" and "MyHomeInIrvineCA92618." Then, the most amusing moment was when we were driving around a business park in Irvine and found an open access point outside a business called "Wireless Car."

A partial map of the networks we found can be seen here.

31 of the access points we found were still using the default network name, although four of those had encryption turned on. But any of the remaining 27 would likely allow us access to the internet. If you have a wireless access point, you should secure it by making it a "closed" network, so it can't be seen by software like Netstumbler; enable WEP encryption so that only people with the key can talk to the access point; and configure the access point to only allow wireless cards with the specific MAC addresses of your cards to communicate with it.

Posted by jrray @ 08:21 PM PDT [Link] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Comments]

Sunday, August 11, 2002

It turns out that the person I emailed in the last entry hadn't uploaded his public key to any keyservers because he didn't know how or where to do so. The irony here is that his guy has two 18-month old keys on several keyserver networks, just neither are the key he is using now. But, happy ending, the situation is sorted out and his current key is now out in the wild.

I found a nice HOWTO that does a decent job explaining what you should do with your key once you have it. It stresses two important things: make your key available and create a revocation certificate.

Posted by jrray @ 04:42 AM PDT [Link] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Comments]

Saturday, August 10, 2002

"Bitches, come!" Maybe the least forgettable line in XXX, it's amazing the actors were able to remember their lines at all. Lots of explosions but not much else. A solar-powered, jet-propelled boat?

I'm going to try this "blog" thing out for a while. If this turns out to be the place I go to complain about everything, I apologize in advance. Nothing much else in the way of potential content comes to mind at the moment.

So on to the complaining. Recently I've been obsessed with encryption and have started using GnuPG to sign all my email. A PGP signature tells anyone who cares to verify it that the message was written by the sender and has not been modified. I've noticed on the mailing lists I read that a fair number of other people also sign their messages. In order to be able to verify the signature you must have the person's public key. There are keyservers where you can publish your public key to make it easier for people to find it. Well, a depressing number of people are signing email they send out, but haven't published their key on a keyserver, and do not provide any url or hint of where their key can be found.

Without their key, I cannot verify the signature on their message. Don't they know this? I decided to email one person I found and find out. No reply yet.

Posted by jrray @ 06:39 AM PDT [Link] [Karma: 3 (+/-)] [No Comments]