Zuf's Blog : Zufolek's Blog on Computers, Politics, and Life

Suicide

2010-01-27T22:54:01Z

So I'm sitting here thinking about bludgeoning myself with a can of ravioli, and I end up on a suicide prevention site. It's telling me that a brain disorder called depression is the cause of this problem. I guess it couldn't be the fact that YOU PEOPLE ARE MAKING MY LIFE A LIVING F***ING HELL.

It's always the same crap with these anti-suicide people. They think they have a clue.

To die, to sleep⎯
To sleep, perchance to dream.

The Seeker Crawler

2010-01-17T08:02:28Z

I've made a web crawler that is designed to allow you to hone in on topics of your choice. It's a work in progress, but you can download the latest version from here. It's free, and has no malware or adware.

The idea is it scores every page according to the words it contains, and saves only the pages with positive scores. It also scores links, so it takes less time to find good pages. You can even have it penalize spam pages or other pages you dislike.

Trans Fat - Killing You Softly

2010-01-08T22:54:48Z

I heard Science Friday on NPR today discussing (among other topics) obesity, a common problem in certain countries. There are many factors, but I was almost surprised they didn't even mention trans fat. (Maybe I missed that part.) I was almost surprised that the People's Pharmacy (another NPR program) only gave trans fat passing mention in a recent show on healthy eating.

Most people don't know much about trans fat, so let me tell you: It's unnatural crap in many foods in some countries since the mid-1900s that basically only makes people unhealthy. It is produced when oils or other fats are hydrogenated.

Hydrogenation is a process that makes liquid oils become more solid. This is how most margarines are made from vegetable oil, and this poison is promoted as a supposed alternative to butter.

There's apparently no scientific consensus on the matter yet, but a 6-year experiment showed monkeys fed a trans-fat diet gaining 7.2% of their body weight, versus 1.8% for monkeys on a mono-unsaturated fat diet. That's four times more weight gain.

In addition to obesity, trans fat causes heart disease. According to the New England Journal of Medicine:

"On a per-calorie basis, trans fats appear to increase the risk of CHD [coronary heart disease] more than any other macronutrient, conferring a substantially increased risk at low levels of consumption (1 to 3% of total energy intake)."

As if that's not bad enough, it may also increase risk of infertility, liver dysfunction, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer. Unlike other fats, trans fats are not essential, and do not promote good health. No sane person would choose to eat trans fat. There is no justification for putting hydrogenated crap in food. You might think the FDA in the USA would ban this substance, but no.

Most food products in the USA now list the trans fat content on the packaging, but they're allowed to round, meaning they can say they have zero grams of trans fat if it's less than a certain amount per serving. For food like perhaps Kellogg's "Honey Smacks" that have few calories per serving (and even claim to be healthy foods), I imagine these "zero" grams can be quite a high percentage of your caloric intake. Due to these misleading labels in the USA, the only real way to avoid trans fat is to avoid anything that has the word "hydrogenated" in the ingredients.

The USA taxes and oppresses those people who choose to smoke tobacco, but it's perfectly fine to put into everyone's food and water unnatural substances like this that most people don't even understand.

To learn more about trans fat, try here.

Get Rid of All White Backgrounds

2009-12-30T14:15:21Z

I hate white backgrounds. Trying to see something on a white background is like watching a solar eclipse. Trying to see a dark picture on a white background is like trying to smell a delicate flower whilst immersed in a vat of ammonia, trying to feel an ant on your elbow whilst being kicked in the groin, or trying to hear a whisper next to a jet engine. Our senses can be very sensitive, but not while there's another extremely high-intensity stimulus that can't be turned off.

If you hate white backgrounds like I do, here's what you can do in K-Meleon. It might also work in Firefox - I haven't tried it, but the browsers have the same core.

Type "about:config" in the URL bar (without quotes) and press Enter. Type "color" in the Filter box.

Change only these:

browser.display.background_color = #000000

browser.display.foreground_color = #FFFFFF

browser.display.use_document_colors = false

The 0s in the values are [em]zeros[/em], not the 15th letter of the alphabet, O.

I also do this to make links more visible:

browser.anchor_color = #00ffff

But I might be somewhat colorblind. I have trouble seeing blue on dark backgrounds.

You may also try changing your system colors and editing the "html.css" file in your "res" folder in whatever folder your browser is located.

Zufolek Is Famous!

2009-12-29T14:24:29Z

I lost easy access to most of my passwords when I reinstalled Windows twice this year, and I've been reluctant to try to determine which remaining password went to which account and so forth. I didn't annotate them very well.

So a few days ago, I tried to finally log in to MySpace to wish everyone there happy holidays and add more stuff, but it seems they deleted my account, probably after my mail.ru account was deleted. (MS wouldn't accept my normal e-mail.) (If you want to mail me, use the Soviet Union address.)

I'm angry with MySpace for deleting my stuff. I have half a mind to join FaceBook.

This morning, I decided to make sure I don't lose all my Narod.ru stuff if I hadn't already, since I'm not sure how much of it I still have backed up. Plus, I wanted to update it and remove the crappiest stuff like that horrible traffic simulation and maybe the disk image for the operating system, since it's kind of big. I was able to log in; the Russians hadn't deleted me.

I decided to check my stats just for curiosity. I really don't promote myself much, nor do I keep up with my popularity. I wanted to make the site better before I really promoted it, and I don't like people who self-promote too much, so I would probably just add a link on a few sites and make sure search engines know where I'm at.

I don't collect stats, but Narod automatically collects the number of hits (no personal information). In the past on Narod, I usually had a few hits on a few days a month, which was really pathetic, but I don't care. In 2009, it appears I've had hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hits most every day.

One day, I had 11648 hits.

I don't believe this nonsense. It must be a stuck robot or a persistent but ineffectual idiot trying to DOS me without realizing that the site is not hosted on my computer.

I was going to put up an "Under Reconfrobulation" page while I redesigned the site, but now I'm afraid to change too much or I might piss off thousands of people. Oh, the woes of being famous.

Censorship Is Not Eco-friendly

2009-12-21T07:03:10Z

Being forced to encrypt and route connections all over the world via TOR for real freedom online surely uses a lot of electricity. Not only does it use your own CPU and bandwidth, it uses CPU and bandwidth of every person in the circuit, as well every computer in every hop between TOR users. I think I heard a while back that an Internet connection uses about as much power as a typical refridgerator, so I'd guess that one TOR connection uses at least several thousand watts of electricity, maybe even 10 kilowatts or more.

Power is also wasted by the increased traffic caused by longer searching on the web due to the inability to easily find desired information because of censorship.

There are many other ways in which censorship wastes power, but I'll leave that for you to contemplate. Censorship is definitely not a "green" choice.

Crikey 6502 Interpreter

2009-12-21T06:37:43Z

I uploaded to here the interpreter thing I was working on. It's knd of cool, but it needs just a little more work for decimal mode and some other things. I've since deleted my SF account, thus there'll probably be no updates there lol. Besides being amazingly slow, SourceForge.net seems to be owned by Geeknet, Inc., and they're total nazis for censoring projects on Freshmeat.

Politically Correct Activism

2009-12-21T06:25:49Z

I've decided to become an activist for issues that everyone already agrees with. This way, I can avoid controversy while appearing to be a noble, caring activist. Forget about social advancement - I'll be a politically correct revolutionary, supporting no significant societal change at all!

Zuf's Inter-universal Communicator

2009-11-12T12:47:29Z

A few years ago, I started designing and building a device that could have� hypothetically allowed me to communicate with other universes.

I was inspired by the idea that gravity can probably travel between universes, which could mean that information can travel between universes via gravity.

I intended to use a small lead ball and some optical devices from a junk VCR as my receiver. The lead ball would be suspended by a hair or string, and would move slightly under the influence of changes in the local gravitational field, interrupting, or more accurately occluding to a varying degree, an infrared beam. I chose lead because it has the highest density of common substances, which would help maximize signal-to-noise ratio. The sensitivity could be further improved by reflecting a laser off a mirror on a suspended weight.

For my transmitter, I intended to intermittently swing bottles full of water, simply stand in certain locations, or move a vehicle periodically. These actions would cause minute changes in the gravitational forces on objects in other "nearby" universes.

I suspected that another universe, if one is nearby, would probably be radically different from our own, but imagine if it were very similar to ours. The Zufs in both universes might be transmitting at the same time, and the masses could be moving at the same time, so no signal would ever be communicated.

However, there would probably be at least subtle differences between the universes, which I could use to modify my behavior. If I determine whether to transmit or receive based on the flip of a coin, for instance, it would probably be a litttle more likely that the two Zufoleks would be able to communicate.

Believe it or not, I gave up on this project as too unlikely to be worth the effort!

Code Optimization

2009-11-12T10:37:49Z

Code optimization is something we super-nerdy programmers do to improve our programs. Optimization usually doesn't add any features, it just makes the exisiting features work better if you're lucky, although it might allow the program to have the capability for more features. Optimization often introduces bugs, and writing or maintaining optimized code is often more difficult to some degree.

For most programs, creating working code is more important than creating optimized code, and optimization is simply a fun way to reduce productivity. You probably shouldn't think much about optimization unless you know that you need to.

Usually, people optimize for speed, and this allows the program to finish working faster, so you don't have to wait too long for all the features you don't use in your word processor for instance. In addition, many PC and console games have required optimization in order to be able to display and implement the behavior of all of the enemies and objects in the game at a decent frame rate.

Most simple utility programs don't really require optimization for speed because they finish woring in a fraction of a second, but I still like to optimize them for efficiency.

There are various methods to get more speed. The first consideration for speed should be the design of your algorithm. For example, if you're using a slow sorting algorithm like bubble sort on a large, unsorted array, no amount of optimization is ever going to make it as fast as an unoptimized quick sort.

Then, we have a bevy of deviant little tricks to potentially increase speed, such as loop unrolling.

Code :
`/* This C program demonstrates a loop */ #include<stdio.h> int main(){ �int x; �for(x=0;x<10;x++){ � printf("x=%dn",x); �} �return 0; }`

Code :
`/* This C program demonstrates loop-unrolling */ #include<stdio.h> int main(){ �int x; �for(x=0;x<10;x+=2){ � printf("x=%dn",x); � printf("x=%dn",x+1); �} �return 0; }`

Loop unrolling is one of my least favorite speed optimizations, because it makes the code bigger and could even make it slower if the loop is larger than the CPU cache.

In addition to optimizing for speed, you can also optimize for size. This is an attempt to reduce the size of the program or parts thereof. A smaller program is usually easier to distribute and store, and might load and run faster.

To optimize for size, you usually just want to reduce sequences of duplicated code by using functions or subroutines, and eliminate unused code, which are good practices anyway.

Some compilers, such as my favorite, MinGW (a minimalist port of GNU GCC), are great at optimizing by themselves without you having to change your code at all. You can simply use the command line option -O2 for speed or -Os for size. -O3 will optimize even more for speed, but usually increases program size. There are some other optimization options that might or might not help. You should definitely use strip.exe to strip out the unneeded crap, and you could use UPX to further reduce size, but UPX might make the zip-archived program larger. Optimizing slows down compiling, so you might want to only use optimization options for a release or a final product.

Optimization is not just for size and speed. You can manually optimize your code for many other factors, such as memory usage, ease of maintenance, or safety. When you optimize for one aspect, you might reduce the optimization of the other aspects. For example, some optimizations for speed make a program larger, and some optimizations for size make a program slower. However, some optimizations make code both smaller and faster.

I was recently reading about "Immunity Aware Programming," i.e. how to make software for embedded systems that is safer from glitches caused by EM noise, power fluctuations, and other unexpected events. This is important for software running in medical equipment, aircraft, spacecraft, satellites, weapons, and any other "important" system where failure is intolerable.

I wonder if there are any software optimizers for safety optimzations. I'll have to attempt a web search sometime. This could be my next project, but I'd have to code it really well to make sure it can't introduce bugs, otherwise the safety optimizations would obviously be pointless.

People have been killed by software bugs. There was a big radiation treatment device used in some hospitals in the 1980s called the Therac-25, and there was a wee bug in the software that caused it to emit lethal doses of radiation into the patient if the operator simply switched between the X-ray mode and the electron beam mode within 8 seconds. Oops!

Most software used today for such purposes is probably safer. There are supposedly regulations and guidelines, and no one wants to risk bad publicity or lawsuits, but the US FDA certainly lets some businesses get away with a lot, apparently letting them "regulate" themselves and kill people for profit.

Well holy balls, I guess I could just go ahead and make this the longest blog post in the Multiverse, but if the Large Hadron Collder is going to kill us all or whatever it is this week, I may as well forget about this crap I'm talking about and go do something really fun and/or perverted if it is at all possible. :)

LHC Sabotaged by Bird

2009-11-08T08:35:32Z

A passing bird dropping a piece of bread has apparently sabotaged the Large Hadron Collider. Maybe it really is creating some kind of Star Trek TNG-style spacetime anomaly, as I mentioned in a previous post. If the working collider destroyed its timelines, the only timelines that would remain are the ones wherein the collider failed due to random accidents, however unlikely they may seem. At least that's my interpretation of the theory.

Have you noticed how they say it will create conditions that haven't existed since shortly after the Big Bang, but when someone suggests this could have unforeseen risks, they say it's really just doing the same thing that's happening in the atmosphere a zillion times per second? So which is it? If the latter, might it not be easier to study the atmosphere or cosmic rays than to build a gigantic collider? I know a controlled lab environment has advantages over random events, but let's think outside the box.

For the record, my favorite page about the collider is this one.

Why Is the USA So Hated?

2009-11-05T22:35:34Z

"We are not hated because we practice democracy, freedom, and human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in third world countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. And that hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism..."

"We are the target of terrorists because we stand for dictatorship, bondage, and human exploitation in the world. We are the target of terrorists because we are hated. And we are hated because our government has done hateful things. In how many countries have we deposed popularly elected leaders and replaced them with puppet military dictators who were willing to sell out their own people to American multinational corporations?"

"We did it in Iran when we deposed Mossadegh because he wanted to nationalize the oil industry. We replaced him with the Shah, and trained, armed, and paid his hated Savak national guard, which enslaved and brutalized the people of Iran. All to protect the financial interests of our oil companies. Is it any wonder there are people in Iran who hate us?"

Dr. Robert M. Bowman, retired Lieutenant Colonel of the US Air Force.

For more information, see this site

Who Are the Real Terrorists?

2009-11-04T18:33:49Z

Are the terrorists al-Qaeda, which supposedly struck at the U.S. government and global capitalism, or are the terrorists the U.S. government and global capitalism, which are apparently at war with all that is good?

Please examine this site if you are ignorant of how the USA really works. It's been the same dirty game since the land was stolen from the Native Americans.

Learn also about the terrorist training camp in Fort Benning, Georgia, in the USA. Are you aware of the atrocities committed by those who have attended it?

The Internet Is Boring

2009-11-04T01:44:52Z

Just wanted to mention that the Internet is extremely boring, and I may not be able to tolerate it often in the future unless I start hacking everyone, so please be patient when seeking my attention.

Do you feel liberated?

2009-11-01T20:21:55Z

I was reading this article about the "Spiral of Silence" and it made me wonder: Is the Internet really all that liberating? Between the censorship, regulation, monitoring, spam, and countless terms of service for all the sites I've visited, I'm not sure. In fact, one could argue that we are freer offline than online. When you watch television, you don't need to worry about the government busting down your door because of something you viewed, whether you viewed it intentionally or accidentally. When I look out my window, I don't need to enter a password, and there are no cookies tracking everything I look at. When a friend shares a song with me in person, we don't have to clear it with the RIAA, and when I'm offline, I don't have to enter into a legally binding agreement in order to simply chat with a friend.

There are things like TOR and Freenet that allow anonymity online. The nearest equivalent to using those things "in real life" would perhaps be sending snail mail from a public mailbox without a return address, which was never an extremely popular activity.

Do you feel liberated? If the Internet were so liberating, wouldn't the world be quite a different place by now? Could it be that some people, who probably spend too much time on the Internet, are simply clinging to a fantasy of it being liberating, and perhaps those who are making it less and less free would also want you to think it's freer than really it is?