Archive for June, 2009

I had computer issues on Friday. I had an old external drive that I had a bunch of files on. The drive is going slow so I think it is about to die. I needed to copy a bunch of the files from the external drive and on to a network drive. I thought it might be a little smarter if I copied the files from the external drive to my computer and then from my computer to the network drive. It was 40 Gb but I thought it might be less time doing that. I was wrong. Apparently it was going to take 11,305 hours. Except it errored out after abut an hour.

At the same time this was going on, I decided to empty my trash. It usually takes me a while to empty so it can get pretty big. This time I had 32,047 files in my trash can.

Generally random number functions pick a number between 0 and another number. Every couple of months I run into a case where I need to pick a random number between two numbers. For example I need a random number between 5 and 10. I always seems to have a tough time finding one online for some reason so I am posting this in the hopes it will help someone else or even me when I need to use it again later.

This function also allows you to specify the decimal places for your random number.

function randomBetween(minV, maxV, floatV)<br>{<br>	var randV = minV + (Math.random() * (maxV - minV));<br>	return typeof floatV == 'undefined' ? Math.round(randV) : rand.toFixed(floatV);<br>}

You can use something similar with Flash as well. I have a class that extends the Math class but I haven’t uploaded it yet.

Prime numbers are a lot less common than you realize. In fact, the only way to discover new prime numbers is to use a computer. The most common way is to use distributed computing from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project.

On April 12th, 2009, the 47th known Mersenne prime was discovered and verified. It is a 12,837,064 digit number discovered by Odd Magnar Strindmo from Melhus, Norway.

Odd Magnar Strindmo is an IT professional whose computers have been working with GIMPS since 1996 testing over 1400 candidates. This calculation took 29 days on a 3.0 GHz Intel Core2 processor.

This is the 13th Mersenne prime found by GIMPS in its 13 year history.

Before Microsoft released Silverlight, it was dubbed the “Flash Killer.” We all know that never even came close to happening. Most of the sites that switched over to Silverlight, eventually switched back to Flash.

If Microsoft wants people to take Silverlight seriously, they need to pay attention to the small details in order to draw people over. Case in point:

At work on Friday I was downloading all kinds of software so I cold make some custom SharePoint webparts. I ended up downloading close to 2Gb worth of software only to find out in the end that I needed to be on Windows Server 2003 or better to instal what I needed. So that was a little irritating but beside the point.

When I went to the SharePoint section on the Microsoft site I saw something strange. The SharePoint site was using Silverlight and had to load in the Silverlight file. It had a percent that was being loaded. That number was 4294967295%. Of course I laughed. I even took a screenshot of it.

Then I thought maybe the developer messed up and that was displaying the size of the file in bytes. But then that would mean that each of the files was about 400Mb. I’m also not sure why the navigation bar and the content area are both displaying the same number either.

At work we use SharePoint for our site. Not by my choice though. I think it’s a bloated program that barely works the way it is supposed to. Well, today I decided to download Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 so that I could create webparts. Creating webparts involves me creating a .dll file and a couple other files that are basically XML formatted.

Since I can’t install Visual Studio on the Mac, I jumped over to my PC to download and install it. I got on the Microsoft site and clicked on the link to download the Express version. Broken link. Fine, I’ll download the trial. It’s good for 30 days and I won’t be using it for any more time that that. I clicked on the link to download it. Broken. I tried for 10 minutes to find a link that worked. All of them were broken links. I can’t download Visual Studio 2008 anywhere on the Microsoft site!

So I got irritated and jumped back over to my Mac. I decided to give it a shot on the Mac site just for fun. The exact same link that I clicked on to download it when I was on the PC I got a 404 error. On the Mac side, the download went through. It’s downloading on the Mac right now.

Then I thought that maybe in the time that I went from the PC to the Mac the link came back up. So I jumped back over to the PC to try to download it. The links are broken still. Apparently the only way I can download Visual Studio is if I am on a Mac.

Congratulations, Microsoft on a site well built.

According to Wolfram Alpha, what is best in life is to “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”

Below is the screenshot of the search. Or click here to see the results yourself. You can even download the search results as a PDF. How cool is that!

On a little bit of a side note, you should check out Wolfram Alpha. It’s a pretty interesting project.