Random Links

I surf (A LOT) and collect links. Sometimes I put them on my blog:

This is a funny cartoon about Kerry and Bush.

Too bad I'm in Waterloo, because I miss out on Summerlicious. Kitty has already tried one restaurant this week while I'm stuck in Waterloo with my big pot 'o pasta. Unfortunately, it's already over.

Here's a set of pictures about Saddam Hussein making his court appearance. Although this is a serious matter, this page is still pretty funny.

I have cable in my Toronto home now. I now waste watching MXC (and the food network). Food network has 5 episodes of Iron Chef America, where American chefs "battle" Japanese ones. I caught one episode and it seemed like the judging was pretty unfair to the Japanese ones. But it must have been unfair to western cooks when it was shot in Japan. I wonder if they'll make more episodes.

Here's a critique on Brian Greene, a famous physicist. I think that trying to rouse the general public's interest in physics is generally a good thing. Unfortunately, it sounds like he may be getting carried away a little. Read the article to find out more.

Here's a disturbing article about the phallic properties of a wiener/hot dog and how a commercial highlights this fact. What a way to sell hot dogs. Good thing I didn't click on the link to watch the commercial before I read it or else i'd be totally ruined. And when it was on the front page of Slate, it had such an innocent title (which I have since forgotten).

For any software developers out there, here's an interesting article on Microsoft Windows API. The author has some interesting points, and makes some predictions that may seem outlandish, but are plausible. The following is an interesting excerpt:

I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1. In fact if you poke around in the AppCompatibility section of your registry you'll see a whole list of applications that Windows treats specially, emulating various old bugs and quirky behaviors so they'll continue to work. Raymond Chen writes, "I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95."

Wow. I can't imagine the resources it takes for Microsoft to look for so many bugs in third-party programs and fix them from the operating system. That's just crazy. I think they're the only company that's big enough to do something like this. But it seems like it was worth the effort.

Here's a subservient chicken.

Here's a site/survey about money/income. Try it out to find out where you rank. (if you're not working yet, try out your parent's income).

That's all for now.