Tuesday, May 26, 2009

math

(fourth grade) Math Problem:

A mother is 25 years older than her son.
In 7 years, the mother will be 5 times older than her son.


Where is the son's father?










































Answer:

Let the child's age be c years and the mother's age be m years.
Now, m = c + 25.
In 7 years, m + 7 = 5 * (c + 7).
Substituting the first equation into the second one, we get
c + 32 = 5c + 35, from which 4c = -3, or c = -0.75.

So the child is minus nine months old, therefore the father is most probably in the mother.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

sex

After vast experimentation, we found the optimal parameters for sex:
* frequency: low, around 0.8 Hz
* amplitude: as large as possible (e.g. 15 cm)
* waveshape: approximately square wave
* duty cycle: cca. 80%
Something like this:

Monday, May 18, 2009

brideparade

I came home this morning looking forward to a good sleep, only to see the news: there's been a "Brides' Parade" in Bucharest! Now I can't really understand how I missed that, given that I crossed about half the city... maybe it was because we were busy spending meaningful time together instead of dressing up and parading... maybe it was because I was too drunk... I don't know. The Brides' Parade featured "past, present and future brides" (basically any woman would qualify) in wedding dresses parading on some street, possibly in a 1900s car. I hate it when "historical cars" run on the road, they're ugly, obsolete and environmentally unfriendly (mwahahaha). But I digress. The fun part was watching a relatively young girl in a wedding dress being interviewed by some reporter: "So, are you married?" "No, no :)" "Are you getting married today?" "No, no! :) No guy will take me! :) Heeeey! Guuuys! Take me! Take me!!!! I'm [fucking] yours!!!!! Take me!!" Yeah. Yeah. Ok. Great for you.
Parade. Feel fine. Waste time. Feel good. Exhibit yourselves. Feel nice. Display your young, succulent flesh on the counter. Feel great. Spend. Feel wonderful. Burn, age, wither away,... death of the soul, indoctrinated in false grace. Be happy.

One six six! The number of the bitch!
One four four! The number of the whore!

Friday, April 24, 2009

bits

I've had to learn the hard way that whenever you're taking a business trip (or a leisure trip for that matter) there are certain essentials that you have to bring with you, such as your towel. While having a laptop with your familiar environment and your favorite tools and music can make your life easier, it's not absolutely essential, given that you probably have an Internet-accessible box at home or at work. What is essential is a quick, straightforward way to get the job done. You need to be able to link your bits with their bits and measures. A simple way to patch your technological know-how into their system. Thanks to Microsoft et al deprecating "legacy" serial and parallel ports, now there isn't any simple, immediate way to interface stuff directly to a PC-class computer. You usually interface stuff directly to a microcontroller-class computer, but even that needs to be PC-linked to be programmed. So even if you're certain that you can find all the needed parts on-site, you still must always bring your own USB AVR programmer.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

please

I see more and more people embedding phrases such as "Please consider the environment before printing this email." near the end of their e-mails. I can only agree: please consider the environment before printing anything. For instance: energy/cut trees/oil/whatever needed for printing the document versus energy spent by you turning on your laptop to read the document while traveling (by train, of course). Stuff spent for printing and reading by daylight (or by incandescent light (inefficient) or econo-bulb (mercury-containing)) versus reading on LCD (or CRT) monitor, in darkness or in lit room. Think before you (don't) print. If I could be bothered to dig up the data, I'm sure I could find at least 8 cases in which it would be more "environmentally responsible" to actually print the fucking paper. I saw a documentary about loggers recently. Their company administers a huge area of forests, cutting down old trees and planting new ones instead, continuously. They claimed that younger trees absorb more CO_2 than old trees, therefore they're actually helping the environment. So there, when you're feeling lonely and depressed and nobody likes you because you're an environazi drone, go print a nice flower or something.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

foolcoffee doubleclock

I had a Digital Computers course where we had these logic design and implementation lab classes. We had to implement various modules in Verilog and run them in a low-end FPGA. But during the first lab we weren't yet familiar with Verilog, so we were supposed to enter a digital schematic graphically. The schematic was designed the hardcore, old-school way, by building a state machine on paper, assigning bits to states, writing equations, translating them to flip-flops and gates et cetera. The state machine was for a (famous with past and current students at our faculty) "coke vending machine". It never worked as supposed and I suspect (being too lazy to prove though) that the equations suggested in the lab documentation were wrong. Years have gone by and, while having a break in the faculty hallway, I found that maybe one of our graduates, now employed at a vending machine company, has finally got it working:

Sunday, March 29, 2009

vi

vi in an ancient text editor present on Unix-like operating systems, known for its two modes: a normal mode where letters and numbers mean commands such as move one word to the left, delete 3 lines et cetera, and an insert mode where chars are inserted into the text. Normal chars can also be deleted with backspace, but somehow \n (newline) can't. If you accidentally press q in the middle of the line, you can press Backspace and undo that. If you accidentally press Enter in the middle of the line, or for some reason you want to join two lines, you hit Esc to exit insert mode, then Shift-j to Join the lines, then i to enter insert mode again. That's wonderful ain't it? Now, on large computers people can use whatever editor they want if they hate vi. But on small embedded systems such as home routers and set-top boxes, vi seems to be preferred (due to its inclusion in the BusyBox userland, which is probably due to it being part of the UNIX standard), and even though there are ways to install other software, it takes time which I may not want to waste. Therefore - fuck vi, vi sucks.