crazed monkey

Here’s another annoying robot to add to Mark’s list of robots which should be told to go to hell: NaverRobot. This robot ignores the Robot Exclusion Standard and rudely downloaded 200 pages in five minutes. It’s banned.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} NaverRobot
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Posted on July 25th, 2003 in computers, internet - No Comments »

Thirty days before he was supposed to move in, Vic found out that his apartment is to be bulldozed in 60 days. One has to look on the bright side: at least he was given 60 days notice. There are much more severe ways in which his landlord could have fucked up. Vic could have woken up one Thursday morning in September, only to look out the window and spot a bulldozer lumbering towards his apartment building.

All I’m saying is that one needs to dramatically lower one’s expectations of others in order to avoid disappointment. My rule of thumb is to think of the worst way in which someone could fuck up, then lower the bar by some fudge factor. I’m still trying to work out the exact value of that fudge factor. As far as I’m concerned, that value is the holy grail of universal happiness, possibly even the answer to the ultimate question of life.

Posted on July 25th, 2003 in meta, person - No Comments »

Victor Ng: Eeek… India invades my space:

I just came face to face with a product (and a dev team) that I’ll most likely be competing with. I was also told that the entire team is located in Bombay India. [...] The demo today wasn’t some shoddy piece of work either – it was good – better than any of the stuff I saw from the UK, the US or Australia. I cringe when I think of what will happen once China gets it shit together and start churning out programmers.

While I know of several adequate programmers trained in China, all of them emigrated to the United States. Still, the deluge of programming jobs heading to China and India has already begun.

This threat to my livelihood has occupied my thoughts for the past couple of years. (For the record, my father raised this concern while I was still in university. Like a naive child, I shrugged off the threat saying that our developers would always be superior. Was I dumb kid or what?) As a result, I have decided not to work for companies which rely on a software product (off-the-shelf or otherwise) as their main source of revenue. I feel that working for companies which provide custom software “solutions” and services will partly shield me from the coming exodus. Perhaps I am in denial, but I believe that one cannot adequately manage custom software development when your developers are half a world and twelve time zones away. Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, Steven Schuldt has some good advice:

Since the future of professional dev work is very obviously headed to Bangalore and Beijing and wherever else poor saps are willing to sling Java or C# for $10 a week, and worse still that horrible, broken technologies like .Net and J2EE are going to be crammed down everyone’s throat, I would strongly suggest pursuing other interests. Become a teacher. Work for a social cause. Write.

Posted on July 22nd, 2003 in computers, programming - No Comments »

Frozen In Montreal (via Canadians Are Smug): This Asshole just had to be involved…:

It was Jackson who legitimized both Liberian strongman Charles Taylor and his protégé, the machete-wielding militia leader in neighboring Sierra Leone, Cpl. Foday Sankoh. The two hacked to death several hundred thousand citizens of their respective countries.

Oh, please. If there’s going to be finger-pointing, it should be directed at those who had a much larger influence, namely Pat Robertson. This voice of the Christian right-wing was not only more heavily involved in legitimising Charles Taylor, but still defends him to this very day. In addition to currently owning a gold mine and an oil refinery in Liberia, Pat Robertson also heavily supported a massive three-day long “Crusade” which featured Charles Taylor front-and-centre. And this wasn’t back in 1997 where it could be argued that Jackson may not have known about Charles Taylor’s true or eventual nature, this was last year. Furthermore, Pat Robertson defended Liberian President Charles Taylor only yesterday:

“So we’re undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country,” he said in the broadcast.

Robertson also wrote a letter to US Secretary of State Colin Powell questioning his country’s desire to interfere in Liberia:

May I respectfully inquire as a taxpayer of the United States and one with significant financial investment in Liberia why the State Department of the United States of America is determined to bring down the President of Liberia who was elected in 1997 as president in elections which the ICG reports that the United Nations, President Jimmy Carter, and all other neutral observers determined were substantially free and fair?

On a related note, you should also check out the This Modern World strip from January 6th, 2003 which deals with this very issue in addition to opening up another huge can of worms.

Posted on July 11th, 2003 in politics - No Comments »

So far this summer I have been able to ride roughly 1100km on my bike. True, the odometer reading displays 955km but I rode 150km or thereabouts before installing it. At this rate, I should be able to meet my goal of 3000km before the weather turns cold. Of course, I won’t be able to do that on riding to work along, and still intend on attempting some longer (eg. 100km) rides on the trails within the city.

Riding to work has become easier, faster and, dare I say it, unchallenging. Since I began taking the bike to work, I have managed to reduce my travel time by more than 25%. Most people would probably congratulate themselves on the achievement and proclaim it to be smooth riding from here on in, but not me. Instead, I fully intend on putting the challenge back into my almost daily ride. I can accomplish this by either carrying more weight, thereby increasing the resistance, or travelling a longer distance in order to get into work.

Voluntarily carrying more baggage whenever I ride to and from work sounds like an ideal way to sprain something, so I’m leaning towards increasing my riding distance by 1/3 to 20km. Rather than turning south on the Don Valley Trail when I reach Pottery Road, I will instead go north towards Sunnybrook Park and then turn around and head south.

While intentionally making my ride longer may sound a little crazy, it is little challenges such as this which have probably kept me sane all these years. After all, rather than opting to coast straight down Yonge to work, thereby shortening my current ride by over 40%, I instead chose to go out of my way and head down the Don Valley Trail. And if that wasn’t enough, I started to mentally keep track of the times it took me to reach various checkpoints so that I could aim to beat those times the next day. To top it off, I carry a pack containing a change of clothes, some toiletries and food for the day on my back, thereby slowing me down significantly. (You wouldn’t think so, but that pack probably decreases my average riding speed by some 20%. While carrying it, I can forget about making zippy turns and coasting down hills of any kind.) Of course, my little challenges pale in comparison to Vic‘s plans to ride 40km into work with a laptop on his back.

If you had approached me back in April and said that in three months I would be addicted to cycling and making my life more difficult, I would not have believed you … well, about the cycling part anyway.

Posted on July 8th, 2003 in meta, person - No Comments »