I thought I was done, but I have to link to this: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/04/1439222

Honestly, the fact that people who try to make an awareness of a vulnerability should not be punished. The people who seek to exploit the vulnerability should. Yet, here we have an example of someone who got punished for publishing a vulnerability after it was patched, and thus, no longer exploitable. Sometimes, just when I think our government has taken a step forward, it seems to take 2 steps backwards.

Courtesy of NFL.com:

4-6-CHI17(1:49) D.Rhodes left tackle to CHI 16 for 1 yard (L.Briggs; B.Urlacher).

And with that there was a turnover of possession and the score didn’t change, giving me the fourth quarter prize.

Now for some classroom quotes from the week

“It may be that TF will commit suicide if there is no grader” -Levin on what would happen if there was no grader for the course. Fortunately for all of us we won’t get to see the results of that one.

“Your program sits waiting for something to happen. It watches it’s navel.” -Devlin on what happens when a program is idle.

“Shh, I’m just stating an opinion… A small opinion. It’s not on the exam.” -Devlin after ranting about copyrights, patents, trademarks and all else.

“I talk about it as if it’s great. But when I’m alone, late at night, ::old person laugh that sounds kind of like they’re coughing up a lung::  I think in horror as to why there are true and false operators.” -Devlin going on about overloadable true and false operators in C#

“It is very hard to read help. Just go and read help!” -Devlin on the usefulness of Visual Studio’s help for teaching yourself C#.

“C# has double doses of headaches. A headache on the left and a headache on the right.” -Devlin on issues with C#.

“You know, you’re taking a C# class, so we should, once in a while, talk about C#” -Devlin with a quote that requires no explanation.

Blogging will be light until the end of this week due to the Beanpot being tomorrow, plus some HW, the BUCD site redesign coming to it’s final stages (or at least until we do something about the small layout),  and just general procrastination.

Well, I got my Beanpot tickets, but not much else seems to be in order, these days. It’s probably some of my unhappiness that causes me to procrastinate even more than usual, but sometimes it seems like there’s nothing I can do about either. I’m kind of happy to have this blog as a way to just get my feelings into words, even if my only consistent reader seems to be my mom. But hey, that’s how Aaron Gleeman started also, right?

I’m a bit worried about the Terriers without John Curry in net. Gillespie did a fine job against UMass after Curry was pulled, but that’s UMass, not a team like UVM or UNH. I know Curry is still the starter, but I have to wonder if he’s hurt or just worn down from playing a lot of games.

The Perl tutorial I went to on Friday might’ve been the most boring thing ever. I know it was an introductory tutorial, but they need to decide whether they want it to be for people with programming experience or not. The first hour was basic programming language type stuff, but the instructor made comparisons to C, in which case, if people should know C for the tutorial, then why are we spending an hour on maybe 15 minutes of material? Oh well, the regular expressions thing was interesting, at least. Hopefully tomorrow’s CSS tutorial is much better.

One last note: It prides me to see Philip Hughes show up strong in this study of types of minor league pitchers. I am excited for his major league debut, when it happens. I think the kid will easily make everyone stop talking about Roger Clemens.

I expect one of these days George Bush will just come out and claim that the earth is flat. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if he lacked the foresight on that one.

Anyway, my first 4 day weekend was a success in getting nothing done. I spent most of Sunday watching the football games and then playing the Wii. (The Wii is undoubtedly awesome. I recommend you all pick one up along with Zelda, Madden and Wario Ware). But things are going pretty well with the semester. BU beat Merrimack on Saturday 2-1 behind Eric Gryba’s first goal, freshman Brett Bennett’s first win and forcing a lot of neutral zone turnovers.

The next two days I don’t expect to post. Tomorrow I’m going to the gym, then class, then to wait in line for the men’s basketball game vs. Albany so I can be in the first 200, then CS Fun Night at Unos (Definitely the best thing us CS majors at BU collectively decided on). Thursday I’ve got the 4 and a half hours of class, the BU College Dems are having a dinner then going to watch An Inconvenient Truth, plus there’s UFC Fight Night Live.

For those interested in baseball prospects, Bryan Smith of Baseball Analysts did his annual top 75 prospects list. It starts here with the honorable mentions.

Finally, the only good quote I heard today was:  “Your program sits waiting for something to happen. It watches its navel.” by Professor Devlin on what a program does if it goes into idle.

Yeah, last semester wasn’t so cool for the most part (besides getting to be good friends with Anne and Jackie and having an AMAZING 21st birthday [Couldn't have happened without the awesome friends to come out for it]). However, I think this semester will be much better for me. Just have a look at my schedule:

So yeah, time to party it up I say.

I’m going to try and keep the posts shorter so that they happen more often and are centered around mostly one topic.

Some interesting quotes from my professors before I end this post:

“You look at the web page for a while, I don’t know, you might look at it for a long time.” -Matta trying to describe why a person might not be done with a web page after a miniscule period of time.

“It was called a game because it was a waste of employers’s time and money, but not an actual game” -Levin on the game of Life

“No, No, I was lying.” -Levin backtracking after making a mistake in describing something.

“Oh yeah, they had a police force in the computer room. Oh yeah.. one of them was an ex-Nazi.” -Devlin describing his experiences programming when he was in college and having to deal with staff running the programs for him

“I’m very proud of that. We respresent a problem to the industry.” -Devlin on the fact that programmers almost always miss their deadlines no matter what.

After my CS411 class this week, I am completely inspired to post what must be made clear as a message to the world courtesy of the teachings of one John Keklak. And that is coding standards. So here we go:

1. Indentation with discipline. Not only must you indent every time you start a new line, but you want to make sure your code makes the person who reads it feel like they’re being punished by reading the code. After all, we don’t just write code. We go through a process. For example:

int getNumTasks(table){
int a = numRows(table);
return a;
}

Now this, who can read this? I mean it’s a bunch of gibberish and really, what do I get out of it? But take this example:

int getNumYOUREANIDIOT(GO TO THE CORNER OF THE ROOM){

int YOURENOTALLOWEDTOWATCHTVTONIGHT = YOURE PATHETIC!;

return YOUREGOINGTOBESERVEDTOTHESHARKS;

}

Not only is that readable, but it tells you a message. And it disciplines the reader. I can’t tell you how much that makes coding in real projects go much quicker. Pink slips have disappeared thanks to this method.

2. Match your curly braces and make sure that braces have their own lines to add whitespace. You cannot even begin to understate the importance of white space. The program is much more readable when you have much more white space. Take this example:

int getRow(int mat[][], int entry){
for( i = 0; i < N; i++){
for( j = 0; j < N; j++){
if(mat[i][j] == entry){
return i;
}
}
}
}
Not only is this not only not indented, but man is that hard to read. And those braces, can we get them a new line please? They’re much more important than the actual code written below them. Let’s try again:

int getRow(int mat[][], int entry)
{

for( i = 0; i < N; i++)
{

for( j = 0; j < N; j++)
{

if(mat[i][j] == entry)
{

return i;

}

}

}

}

Wow, that is so much better. In fact, I think I’m starting to like your coding. But we are still not readable enough yet. I mean, I can still very easily glance over minute insubstantial details that I don’t need to know how they work because of this. Let’s look at this example:

int getRow(int mat[][], int entry)
{
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace

for( i = 0; i < N; i++)
{
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace

for( j = 0; j < N; j++)
{
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace

if(mat[i][j] == entry)
{
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace

return i;

whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
}

whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
}

whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
}

whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
whitespace
}

3. Now we know that it is of utmost important to have organized code. But we also want to push down any irrelevant information. We must oppress that information, because obviously it is not as worthy of being in the code. We could define r = arc->radius; but that’s just very unclear compared to r = arc->getRadius();. Now I know you’re looking at this and saying “Gee, they seem to be the same.” But that is where you are mistaken. We never want to directly reference an object data member because we just don’t know what people put in them. It’s like a guy’s pornography collection. When I worked for this Russian guy, he had a porno stash that was so vile I can’t even begin to describe what was in it. So instead we just assume that the getRadius() function is much more supreme and flawless and reference that.
4. Finally, we must decouple our logic and our objects. I won’t even define what it means to decouple, I take it for granted that you know what I mean. We want our ship and message handler to be separate. The ship’s not the one making the messages. Let’s say we have a function on a list of objects, and in this function, for each object, we save the object then we free it. Are you just going to write the function like that? The answer is no. If you have not found a way to decouple the functions so much that you can no longer recognize what does what in your program, you have failed to write good code. Remember, if we don’t have at least 5 functions to do 1 line of code, then you haven’t decoupled enough.

And that, students, is coding 101 from your CS411 professor.

(It was very tough to remain in his voice. I had to resist many many sarcastic and smart-aleck comments.)

9/11/2001 changed the politics of the whole world. After all, the leading nation of the world had a very costly attack on their own soil. But it also changed every day life. When I walked up Wall Street to work every day this summer I would see the American flag draped over the NYSE. I would see the police by Federal Hall, and those by the entrance of the NYSE. I got to see the bomb sniffing dogs and the checkpoints on Broadway that made traffic on that block basically gridlock even at 12:00. You can’t drive by Police Plaza anymore without a police pass. We have increased security now, because we didn’t act to have increased security and protection then. The day for me is still pretty vivid in my mind. I can remember how my professors acted, and how some of my classmates acted. I remember the really loud sound of a plane flying right over my high school. Not one student thought it was an airplane. I remember my economics teacher, Mr. Mirer shouting for us to get to the other side of the room after the second plane crash. The extended homeroom because not one person in the school was sure what to do nor whether classes should go on for fear of the World Trade Center collapsing and causing problems. I remember our evacuation, and every student stopping because the second tower was in midst of collapsing. You could feel the building shake. That’s probably the closest to a feeling of an earthquake I’ll get on the East Coast. There was subsequent large amounts of dust when we got outside the building. Everyone began walking up the West Side Highway. For some reason, even though I could’ve left at any point, I continued walking with the members of my homeroom, all of us sharing shock. I had a tape casette with FM/AM radio and I listened to the AM radio for a bit to see what was being reported, and remembered hearing the name Osama Bin Laden for the first time. I couldn’t stand to hear the same thing reported every 5 minutes, so I turned it off. Many of my friends were really shocked and unsure of how they would get home as many trains were not running and a large percentage of my school was kids that came from Brooklyn and Queens. I guess I continued walking with them to try and be a friend and help them out until they figured out a way home. I remember when I got home and signed online seeing my friends truly express that they care for me as I got instant message after instant message asking if I was alright. 9/11 really is a sad day to me, but one that also woke me up to the politics of the world. Hopefully we truly can continue to understand the lessons that have come out of it and avoid having any attacks of this scale ever again.

This week also happens to be the anniversary of another sad event in my life. That being Ariel committing suicide. I’ll always do my best to try and prevent my friends who are hurting themselves from getting to that extreme, as life can be enjoyed and should be.

Finally, one last note. I actually have the header pretty much done. But I forgot to make a copy of it for my laptop, so I’ll have to get someone to email it to me from my home computer one of these days. Otherwise, it won’t be up until Columbus Day weekend.

I had a pretty odd dream last night. In the dream I had just gotten out from a dentist appointment in NYC, and I was in the neighborhood of some girl that I had recently met and was really into (and I can’t remember what this dream girl’s name was). So I gave her a call while walking over to her building to see if she’d want to meet up and, even though I don’t remember hearing in the dream that she told the dream version of me to come over, the dream version of me somehow knew she said so. So dream-me continues talking to her while walking over to her building and at some point she puts dream-me on hold, then it sounds like she picks up, so dream me starts talking again and then gets to the girl’s building. At this point the father of the girl starts talking on the phone saying he overheard the conversation and was impressed with the maturity of dream-me. So dream-me finishes talking to him while walking into the building and see a doorman, but couldn’t remember the girl’s last name, so dream-me keeps the phone up while stalling for time, and just when dream-me remembers her last name and then hangs up and turns to go talk to the doorman, the girl appears with another girl. Dream-me taps the girl and she waves hello as she is on her cellphone and her friend introduces herself to dream-me. We all go over to some dining area and sit down at some tables. At this point the girl is no longer on the phone and we each say something, then dream-me for some reason looks at her then looks around and some other guy and girl are looking at me and at the table and the guy asks dream-me if dream-me is tired and dream-me looks at the girl and she says something to the effect of “We’re going to have to pull out the air mattress.” At this point I woke up from the dream. Hey, I warned you about it being crazy. I appreciate any thoughts on the dream. Even ones as simple as saying “It’s obvious you yearn to have your college life in NYC.”

In other news, Google apparently thinks it has even more rights to invade your privacy than the government does. This isn’t the first time Google, who for the most part has done good things, but once in a while will do something sketchy, has attempted or created a program that does some sort of spying on you. Google Desktop and Google Earth both send back information to Google that you would only know if you were insane enough to read every line of the EULA.

Guitar Hero II’s confirmed song list is now up to 23, and I’m already pretty hyped up for it. I can already see myself rocking out to this one.

Finally, I apologize for the delay between updates once again. Turning Stone gave me over 48 hours without internet access and then moving in to BU and seeing friends I haven’t seen in months took away a lot more time as well. Plus I had to catch up on news and such. Turning Stone ended up pretty good for me as I netted $100. Hopefully AC during my winter break is even better.

I’ve got less than 2 weeks until I move back to Boston, which is a very scary thought. But the past few days have been pretty good, so I just need to take care of some business before I move back up to Boston and all should be well.

I added a few links over the past few weeks to my already huge list of links. They’re good ones though, so I can’t hold them back from the people.

I was working on the header image earlier, but Photoshop Elements crashed. And I hadn’t saved my progress. . Oh well, I’ll continue work on that in a little.

I’ll be at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino from August 27th through the 29th, since my dad wanted to take a small trip and get a chance to go somewhere with me. However, him prying me away from the poker tables should prove to be a job in and of itself. Maybe I can go around claiming TV show characters were based on me when I didn’t really even hold the job they are portrayed as having (Yes, I am looking at you, Mr. Jamie Gold).

Now as to why I’m so happy, well, there’s nothing like winning the first 4 games against the Boston Red Sox for a Yankees fan. Boy is that extra breathing room necessary, so that Torre will maybe use guys in the 6th and 7th that are not named Villone nor Proctor. Still, good to see the hitting showing up the way Cashman expected it to. And that lineup will be murder next year with Matsui healthy.

Finally, I’ll conclude with my much delayed Eric Duncan update. Of course, once I started hyping it, he decided it’d be time to cool down and move back to third. Still what he’s done is an improvement on his numbers before his demotion to AA Trenton. Courtesy of The Baseball Cube (I’m going to use numbers from leagues higher than the NY-Penn League):

• 2004
  • Battle Creek
    • .260/.351/.479 in 288 AB with a 84/38 K/BB ratio (that is slightly above .29 K/AB)
  • Tampa
    • .254/.366/.462 in 173 AB wth a 47/31 K/BB ratio (that is slightly above .27 K/AB, still a pretty high amount, though his BBs went up, showing an improving eye)
• 2005
  • Trenton
    • .235/.326/.408 in 451 AB with a 136/59 K/BB ratio (that is slight above .30 K/AB, and the walks went down a bit as well)

So coming into this season, the prospect status had worn off a bit from Eric Duncan, but he is still 22, so there’s time for improvement. His numbers in the Arizona Fall League, which I don’t have in front of me, showed some progress, though that league is a huge hitter’s league since not many big pitching prospects are sent. So those numbers to some effect had to be taken with a grain of salt. Yet, the Yankees organization felt a big need to prove their farm system is fine (what, Cano and Wang were not enough proof?), so they irrationally promoted him to AAA where he put up this line: .209/.279/.255 in 110 AB with a 24/9 K/BB ratio. Yes, the K’s were down, but so were the hits and walks, and it was obvious the guy was overmatched. After an injury, and Melky proving that there’s still some depth to the system, the Yankees demoted Duncan to AA Trenton on June the 8th. Since then Eric Duncan has put up the following line: .248/.355/.485 in 206 AB with a 38/32 K/BB ratio. The strikeouts are down to less than 20% of his at bats, which is a HUGE improvement on his past numbers. His BABIP is close to .300, so he hasn’t gotten unlucky. So obviously one of the keys in improving, for Eric Duncan, will be to further cut down on his strike outs. Also, his power, which has improved from last year (Homering in about 4.9% of ABs as opposed to 4.2% last year, both from his Trenton numbers, that is) will need to continue to develop, and his patient eye will need to maintain it’s ability to discern strike from ball. Still, it’s obvious that Duncan has finally started to develop some of his skills this year and with further development, he may be less than 2 years away from the Bronx.

Due to my desktop having all sorts of problems at the same time as when the hugh heatwave passed through NYC, plus me having gotten sick last weekend, and my laptop’s screen not being as big, plus dealing with an AJAX interface for posting with a touchpad being rather unpleasant (and my laziness to take out my laptop mouse from my computer case), I’ve been unable to post for a while. Plus my desktop has Photoshop and Illustrator, making progress on the logo go slower.  I still want to look at what Eric Duncan has done in AA that he didn’t do at AAA due to his being rushed too soon.

Oh, and I had won $5 in a Freeroll on Full Tilt and have been trying to turn that into more. So, that takes up time as well. .