infojunkie's blog

You know you're an infojunkie if...

Submitted by infojunkie on Wed, 2007-05-16 20:05.
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10. The main intellectual activity of your childhood consisted of making lists, from airplane models to French words of Arabic origin.
9. Your parents took you in their Trivial Pursuit team, encouraging you to memorize all the cards.
8. Your high school teachers gave you books that you keep rediscovering every decade.
7. Now that you've grown up, your innocent list-making has turned into an addiction for collections: music, books, films, whatever can be acquired into a hierarchy of categories.
6. With the advent of the Internet, your addiction has taken a turn for the worse. You've now become a multimedia pirate but you're spending unreasonable amounts of money on bandwidth and disk space.

Computer Science Fiction has been merged

Submitted by infojunkie on Sat, 2007-05-05 16:41.

For those of you who bookmarked my Computer Science Fiction wiki, please be advised that its content has been merged into the present site. Just click on some Dimensions (like Informatics) to find the articles.

Number systems

Submitted by infojunkie on Fri, 2007-04-20 00:31.
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" A binary digit is a bit,
a ternary digit a tit!
- Oh, quit it."

The ASAP syndrome

Submitted by infojunkie on Fri, 2007-04-06 09:14.
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One of the most frustrating phenomena of business is the ASAP syndrome. No matter how high or low in the corporate hierarchy, every task is urgent, and no time can be spent thinking about it with the team. Decisions are made on the fly, with little regard to their side effects or dependencies. All the recipient of the request has to do is comply, putting aside his own plan and adopting blindly that of the manager to get to work NOW NOW NOW.

My feeling exactly

Submitted by infojunkie on Tue, 2007-03-20 11:57.
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Thanks A.K.!

The natural groove

Submitted by infojunkie on Sat, 2007-03-17 13:06.
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We (humans) use many expressions in our everyday life related to rhythm:
"Miss a beat"
"Find my rhythm"
"Go at your own pace"
"Get into the groove" ;-)

In my experience, I've noticed that external events can happen either on the beat or the off-beat. Which beat you ask? Well, take a conversation between two people for example. When we speak, we do so at a certain pace, which immediately implies a beat (and associated off-beat). If I want to interrupt you while you're talking, I should choose an opportune moment where you'll be least likely to react in time to continue talking, which is on the off-beat of your speech. There are classic movie moments that illustrate this phenomenon:

More accurate node view statistics

Submitted by infojunkie on Wed, 2007-02-21 00:19.
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I noticed that the Drupal content view statistics increments the view count even when the author of the node is the one viewing the page. That's not very useful is it? I decided to change that:

In statistics.module, function statistics_exit(), add an extra if statement before updating the totalcount on {node_counter}:


if ((arg(0) == 'node') && is_numeric(arg(1)) && arg(2) == '') {
// Discard count if current user is the same as node author.
$author_uid = db_result(db_query('SELECT uid FROM {node} WHERE nid = %d', arg(1)));

The dilemma of racism

Submitted by infojunkie on Tue, 2007-02-20 23:43.
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Humans seem to organize their thinking in terms of hierarchies, classes and levels. This particular structure is quite useful in tackling problems related to the physical world, where manifestations exhibit a natural order that is intelligible to us. Specifically, manifestations seem to exist as clusters of mostly similar patterns, with few features distinguishable across the classes. This is obviously a computer programmer talking.

Like man organized for example the order of life forms in the phylogenetic tree, it was natural for him to undertake an organization of society, the grouping of man. And thus men were organized (by man) according to their geographical location, state allegiance, ideology, bank account, favourite soccer team, and physical features.

These balloons are gonna pop!

Submitted by infojunkie on Wed, 2007-01-31 15:55.
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You thought you knew the world map? Think again :-)

Here is a map where countries are resized according to their GDP. Now all we need is a little prick to blow the whole thing up.

Found on Worldmapper, thanks to Omar.

Intel jingle

Submitted by infojunkie on Tue, 2007-01-09 21:01.
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Music is a great mnemonic tool to establish mind share. Technology companies have been using it successfully: the Nokia ring tones, the Microsoft Windows startup and shutdown tunes and the Intel Inside jingle have become almost universally recognizable.

It is a creative challenge to devise a short (~5 secs) musical sequence that has a strong enough individuality to be remembered and associated with a brand. As an amateur musician and professional software developer, I am interested to find the logic/art behind these jingles, so I looked for a transcription of existing ones. Here's what we found:

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