It’s almost impossible to avoid sounding pretentious when you’re telling your own success story, and I really am sorry for the way my writing sounds. Some of you may even chide me for such a relaxed definition of success. Say what you will, but for the past year, I’ve heard countless mom-and-pop recounts about this website given to older cousins, reunited classmates, and complete strangers (strangers to me, at least). Parent’s eat that stuff up. They love hearing how little kids find ways to make a bit of income, or how they are so lucky to have economically-applicable talent so long before most teenagers start thinking about their careers. All this, and the reverie of extraordinary overnight success, is quite pleasant to hear, but fundamentally ignores reality by reassigning to luck, credit rightfully due to hard work, befittingly so, as… more →

As human beings, we have misconceptions of the nature of randomness. Try it and write down a sequence of random digits. You’ll notice that certain numbers tend to be repeated, or that no two consecutive digits are the same. Maybe your numbers tend to go up and then down and then up again, or that you’ll use all the digits before repeating any. It’s simply our natural tendency to look for patterns where there may not be any. All cell phone numbers appear, to the human mind, to exhibit patterns. Some follow a circular path around the keypad and the digits of others are contained within an unnaturally small subset of the ten possible digits. It is the same reason why we cannot at first understand how a group of only twenty-three people have a 50% probability of containing two… more →

It seems like the next big thing is always trying to combine the knobs and buttons of your life into a single revolutionary new paradigm of luxury. Especially exemplary are the new developments in heads-up display devices1 and the various misnomers for cloud computing. At a primitive level, we understand the advantages. It’s integrated. All of it is, like a strict building code in a top-dog neighborhood. As human beings, we’re predisposed to patterns because it’s part of our innate behavior. The predictability and uniformity of life comes from the hunter-gatherer era when fewer things to worry about meant an easier life. But, humans, as usual, make bad choices for themselves. Think about every invention in the world that has stood the test of time. Each does only one thing and it does it well. From the resistors and capacitors of integrated… more →

It’s the end of spring break already. I was on BearFacts yesterday researching about class registration when it occurred to me that they were telling me about picking college courses and planning out a schedule for the first time for courses that will be taught by strangers hundreds of miles away. By that time, everything will have changed and everyone will have moved away. Most of my spring break I spent shut-in cramming physics because of my ridiculously short time frame, so I haven’t really seen anyone for a week now. For brief periods, I could almost pretend that everything and everyone outside of my textbook and notes didn’t exist, as if the big change had already happened. Right then and there, I realized that it’d be no different were I studying three hundred miles north in a smaller room… more →

It’s not surprising that online security is a commonly misunderstood and confusing topic to most people. Our news media throws around big words like cyberbullying and cyberattack, so much so that laymen are discouraged from sorting through the madness themselves. But honestly, it may not be their fault. Computer security has only recently become relevant to the average person because so much of our lives have moved onto the Internet. Whether or not humans are prepared to handle the gradual eradication of human interaction is a different matter. As for now, I just want to explain the nature of security and its relation to what happened in 3rd period today. See, the Internet is inherently insecure. Each request you send goes through several computers, all of which can read or alter the data if it wants to. Originally, when networks were… more →

It was such an idyllic scene outside the MPR today at 4:46pm. It was still raining slightly and I had my umbrella out. The umbrella blocks the upper part of my field of vision, restricting the foveal viewport to bounce around the boundaries of the lower latitudes in such a way that, when the veil is finally lifted, the extended range appears foreign and startling. Here around me existed a number of characters whose traits could be summarized in the color blue, deep with compassion and kindness. Perhaps this perception was one of circumstance—relative and not absolute, that is. But no matter, it remains that this was not an atmosphere of competition nor indifferent apathy. It was brotherhood in its purest sense, if the word can be applied to more than the masculine. Man with his technology—cell phones and heptagonal… more →

I never thought to try this until now. I will leave this running overnight: #!/bin/bash while [ `curl www.pottermore.com | grep “registration is now closed” | wc -w` \ -ne “0” ]; do echo [`date`] Checked pottermore.com: Registration is still closed. sleep 20 done echo [`date`] Message has changed. Check status at [http://pottermore.com/]. mplayer “$HOME/Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - Prologue.mp3” \ > /dev/null 2> /dev/null Yeah? yeah? And this. chmod +x ./pottermore.sh;./pottermore.sh Alright. Let’s do this.

If you’re reading this, it must mean that everything turned out correctly1. I just migrated RogerHub to a new webhost, for the next two years. Why? Because competition. Fuck yeah. Not many things in this life tend to just keep getting better and better. How it feels to be on the other side of competition, you must know already. Isn’t it great? The simple logic that better things succeed and crap fails. Let’s see what happens. The domain transfer succeeded. The nameserver updates propagated to all hosts, and the DNS records are pointing to this new server. Great! ↩︎

When I first saw the term gaslighting1, I thought it referred to igniting one’s farts, which made absolutely no sense at all in context. So I did the logical thing and copied it into Google, which actually meant I wanted a Wikipedia article. Gaslighting is actually a form of psychological torture where you trick someone into doubting their memories. Click* click, and before long, it was 1:30AM and I had 4 tabs of Wikipedia articles about psychological torture open in Chromium. I don’t know about you, but staying up till post-midnight just creeps me out. I’ve got this circle of light coming from the desk lamp while through the window outside, it feels like everyone is dead. Nonetheless, there is no better time to think than during the silence of the night when everything else is muted. Look at this here.… more →

In May 1996, a bunch of computer geniuses got together to write RFC1945, an informational document on the HTTP/1.0 standard1 that was the foundation of protocol that defined the World Wide Web. Apparently, somebody noticed that referrer was spelled wrong2, but by that time, it was already too late to change it. As a result, the HTTP specification indicates Referer, with 3 r’s, as the correct header, even today. I guess it shows that everyone can make mistakes. You can see the full document here. ↩︎See the email here. ↩︎

I thought I would never find a word to describe this one thing I had when I was little: whenever I had lots of time to burn, like on the toilet, or walking home, or trying to go to sleep, I would dream up an entire universe with characters and landscapes. It would incorporate everything, from books I read and games I played to the car on the other side of a street, which would actually be a space transport in its hangar. So I’m reading Wikipedia’s article on Paracosms when I notice that their font is ridiculously small. F12 tells me that it’s 0.8em which makes for a measly 13px. For a website that’s all about sharing knowledge with the world, you’d think they’d tailor their web design to more than my grandmother’s SVGA CRT monitor1. See, normal people… more →

Sometimes, I notice that when people use the computer, they do this fidgeting thing. Knees are throbbing up and down. Head scanning side to side. Compulsively selecting the copy then zooming in and out. It’s not exactly the perfectly calm end-user imagined by UX1 designers. Because most people are alone when they’re on the computer, they don’t consciously check their appearance, and these weird habits build up quickly. Not completely unrelated, people in movies always look awesome when they’re using the computer. They’re all doing important stuff and shooting people, when some guy sits down and brings up these nice translucent terminal windows and monochromatic data visualizations with units on a battlefield and mission strategists working around. It’s always the same thing, and it makes normal people feel inferior with their boring desktops and the ridiculously small amount of work they… more →