There is no magic in programming. Secluded towers of cables and equipment. Chairs suspended on beams from the wall. Men in black exploding shit with their furious key-mashing. Lines of random gibberish with occasional sequences of 0’s and 1’s. Movies might exaggerate the capability of guns and modern medicine, but it’s nothing like how computers are portrayed

Guys in trucks can’t blow up your computer by hacking around. You see, computer parts that explode just doesn’t fly with the FCC. Here’s a theory: CG guys and animators don’t get famous doing movies. So management satisfies them with computer-smart characters that can blow stuff up.


Believe me when I say programmers are all perfectionists. Naturally, people are used to super-high standards with computers. Dreams of utopian societies where computers make everything painless are inherently flawed. Most things can be taken care of by machine. Farming, construction, retail. Programs can handle all that. But who’s there to make the programs? If life becomes so convenient that higher-education becomes obsolete, nobody will know how to do anything anymore. A common motif: the doers, not the thinkers, will change the world. If so, the only jobs that will be relevant in the future are science-related ones. No more politicians, no more lawyers, no more businesspeople. But with these seemingly essential jobs removed, could a society function? Even the best of programs require constant development. Thus, a constant slew of programmers is required – required to maintain a perfect life-management system. But even with months of work, even the ideal program will wither.


A famous example of this: Google Wave. What happened? In a practical sense, Wave didn’t help the average consumer. It didn’t do anything for them, because it overlapped with existing services. We already have IM, text messaging, social networking and email to communicate. To the non-programmer community, Wave didn’t have anything particularly “new”. But in a technical sense, it was a breakthrough in web application programming. Only Google would have the server-power to match the bandwidth of the world – bouncing back data between users in real-time. Only Google would have taken on such a demanding project: inventing a protocol that would replace email. There are tons of practical applications for Google Wave (I can think of 10 off the top of my head). But above all, the UI was detailed beyond description. From embedding custom scrollbars to inline replies and editing, Google did a lot of scripting work that nobody really notices. It’s been more than a year since Google introduced Wave, and unless they a major comeback is around the corner, Wave is dead.


Second example: Internet Explorer. Why people still use it? I don’t know completely. But the main reason is: it still works. But at the same time, it doesn’t work at all. The paradox lies in the perfectionism of programmers. In this case: Wikipedia. The massive online encyclopedia recently went through a UI overhaul, but nobody really noticed because it looks exactly the same. But the proof lies beneath the surface:

Visit Wikipedia with 9-year-old piece of rubbish, Internet Explorer 6 and you’ll see that it looks just fine. But the truth is Wikipedia does a lot of background work to make it that way. See the code snippet? The lines of green text are called IE Conditional Statements. They link to other files that will fix problems with Internet Explorer.

In each of the Wiki-themes, there are separate Javascript and CSS files that fix problems in Internet Explorer. Only Internet Explorer will see load them, and therefore, use them. Because a huge website like Wikipedia can’t afford to lose visitors over browser-issues, they put in a lot of unnecessary effort to achieve this perfection. This process isn’t unique to Wikipedia; all major websites have some form of compensation for IE. Overall, so many websites have Internet Explorer-specific hacks that IE6 users still have no problem browsing the web. They’re so used to the extra effort web designers put in that they’ll never have reason to switch browsers.


If you haven’t noticed by now, this entire post was a scheme to lure in IE users with an interesting article description. Then as credibility was established, I would subliminally convince them that they need to switch to alternative browsing. Now, I’ll get back on topic:


Magic doesn’t exist. Seems like a simple concept, but it’s one that I keep forgetting. For instance, URL’s made to look like directory paths were genius when I first saw them. Does the script actually generate thousands of static pages for the sake of neater URL’s? Or perhaps, they’ve rewritten the web server software to use their custom file system they invented complete with indices that resolve URL’s to dynamic scripts? No magic there. Its basic regex url-rewriting.


At a simpler level: No. Facebook doesn’t hire people to type up every web page you see when you login. It’s dynamically generated. It’s fake. No. Youtube didn’t reinvent HTML forms when they did the posting-comments-without-stopping-the-video-or-changing-pages thing. It’s called AJAX. And guess what? It’s free (and it has been around for 15 years). To date, the entire concept of the magic key to programming has been the biggest source of procrastination.


And no, programmers don’t think with 0’s and 1’s scrolling in their heads. Nobody does that. A bunch of 0101000100 on a computer would be absolutely meaningless. At the very least, hexadecimal or some kind of grouping system is needed. Unless you’re planning to be a optimization analysts, you don’t need to bother with the details behind programming.


But Roger, this is so obvious. What’s your point? Well damn, I never had anyone telling me this stuff. There was no “Introduction to Programming” seminar for me. So for years, I wandered around like an idiot wondering “wtf is a loop?”


Oh yes, and that IB letter that came today. The money for being in IB increased by $200-some dollars this year (because of the financial crisis, apparently). They sent out a letter along with a list of things that we have to pay for. It didn’t list the individual costs, but only the final price. But with the numbers there and a little algebra, anyone can figure out what each of the items should cost. (Assuming their numbers are strait) It comes out toabout $4.86 for each of the overnight shipping things. 12 shipments sums to $58. But the price increased by $261. So more than $200 is going to wait… Extended Essay Advisor? CAS Advisor? I don’t know who those people are yet, but I’m assuming they’re teachers at school. So they get $100 per kid that joins IB ($200 if you count both years). That’s a heck of a deal. It makes sense that teachers get paid for helping out with IB. So did the state stop paying teachers $100/kid for their help? If so, that means the state was paying $100/kid before. If not, they’re just squeezing us for money. Of course, money squeezing could be justified easily. Free Home-Remodeling when you help overworked asian kids deal with their anguish. Wonderful.


I was watching this show called “Design For Life” on the flight back to LA. It completely changed the way I saw engineers. Go check it out (episode 1):

Customary blog updates about vacations are so expected that they’re almost a requirement rather than a rarity. But this one lasted a mere 9 days, which took up the bulk of my school-free summer days. It’s almost hard not to write about it.

14 hour flight to China. Not too bad.

Boeing 777 9-seater (wow) and little TV things. Oh cool, it has entertainment.. and a credit card reader. Oh great.

But wait! Man, these movies are free? Oh crap, suddenly I feel like this flight won’t be too bad. I watch TV there till the pus is leaking from my eye-sockets. Then I doze off, while listening to their inadequate selection of asian pop music.

Off the plane, to grandma’s house. On the inside, it’s huge.

Even though it’s next to a dump..

But it’s a pretty nice dump. (as opposed to my ten-pounders from all the food)

I did a lot of screwing around there. Since there wasn’t much else to do, besides eat. In retrospect, I should have worked on my website. Then, I wouldn’t have had to cram it in with physics class.

I was going to use a silhouette of me as part of the new RogerHub design. I need to have: Twitter, Robo.to, and Dango somewhere in the design. But I eventually just drew a dango into the O, because I’m uncreative like that.

The countryside still exists. Who knew?

Public restroom... not really.

Big river that runs down Fuzhou.

Another view on the river... and on your right, a couple pissed about how lame their river-date turned out to be. Well, it was rush-hour and the river was virtually running right beside the street.

Oh, and I found the door to Narnia. Didn’t have time to go in though. Maybe next time!

Another view of the river. The cityscape doesn’t detract from the picture much.

Man Photoshop CS5 is stupidly awesome. I took out the street lamps on the right and the city-scape on the left. Zaneta, your turn.

Took 2 shots: same background, same angle, one with me, and one without. Aligned them on Photoshop so I could make myself transparent! Then, I did some weird effects because the transparency was boring..

The rule is: It’s fine as long as you don’t get hit. Taxi drivers have to weave in and out of traffic. Then, shrink their taxis through ridiculously small widths, avoiding yet another accident. It’s amazing that China has a smaller accident-to-population ratio than the US. Then again, they have fewer cars too..

After, we went to my other (maternal) grandma’s house in Fuzhou.

Took the high-speed rail to Shanghai. Crazy huge seats, bigger than airline’s business class. And some awesome guy that’s sitting in my seat.

That number shows the speed of the train. Kept all the little kids busy for the entire train ride. ”mom MOM, it went DOWN!!”

We went to the 2010 World Expo at Shanghai. Generally, every country as well as every continent had a pavilion (fancy name for booth). They’re supposed to show off their advances in eco-friendly technology and how their nation is so great and peaceful. Yep.. It’s supposed to be a world expo, but nobody seems to know about it, at least in the US.... which is probably why it was 99% Chinese there.

Not sure what this is supposed to be, but it’s probably important.

If you don’t push and shove your way into and out of the subway, you’re not gonna be going anywhere. They even had the Chinese military at the 2010 expo to make sure nobody was cutting in line.

This isn’t the best picture in the world, but that’s not the point. See the strip of pixels that looks odd on the monitor? That’s the result of a common method used to remove watermarks. Basically, you take the left and right pixels of the water-marked area and fill in the watermark with those. It works fairly well.. but can’t a World Expo get their hands on footage thats.. um, theirs? man.

For a country that “looks to the future”, maybe stepping away from Windows XP would be a good idea.

More XP.. and WHAT? Internet Explorer? I’ve just lost all respect I had for this country. There were tons of examples, but the pictures all look the same after a while.

Well, what’s XP without a few BSOD’s, right?

Can you spot the fail in this picture?

Hey! Windows Media Player! I bet they had some trouble finding one of the very few formats that WMP supports naively.. Obviously, switching to Media Player Classic or VLC was never suggested.

Elephant postcard. This was in a full-scale model of a futuristic post office. Though, I don’t think elephant-shaped postcards are bleeing-edge exactly..

Weeeeee! What? It’s just water.

We went to see the Cisco Pavillion too. Some of the bigger sponsors had their own buildings there. We waited 4 hours for the Japan Pavillion and it wasn’t that great. One hour for Cisco, and it was hilarious. They played this brief drama clip staged in a “networked city”.

Korean Pavilion. Afterwards, we had instant noodles on the rooftop of this thing.

Fresh rain droplets on a metal raili—holy crap a UFO.

Some guys got the UFO to land on the specialized UFO dock that was setup for the expo. You can go inside—if you’re willing to wait 9 hours, that is.

Future Coke Machine. It’s touch screen... like everything else.

Taiwan Pavillion. I heard you can actually go inside that giant spherical-TV thing.

Sucks for whoever had to glue each of these letters on the wall. (AU Pavilion) But man, they look crazy awesome.

HDR from 3 exposures. You can see the details of the city while it looks like a nuke just blew up in the sky.

Old people, pregnant ladies, midgets, and... what?

I don’t get it either.

It’s detachable.

And that’s it. Now that I’m back, I have the NHS website to do and craploads of physics homework. Man, screw this.

Commonly used in the music industry, remastering is the process of refining or reviving an old piece of art. Often, remastered pieces have qualities and nuances that are completely original. This is RogerHub Remastered.

It has been nearly a month since I last posted. Perhaps I was too unsatisfied with the state of the website. RogerHub reflects what I did a year ago. Naturally, it’s missing a purpose. Internally, page generation is slow, modulation is nonexistent and the layout is horrid. Mentally, a dwindling hit count sparked a positive feedback loop of steady deterioration in interest.

Rewrite: RogerHub’s internal generator, Boggert, was the cause of a lot of problems. It’s very inflexible and slow. (Kind of like Internet Explorer) So, I’ve made a series of changes and dubbed the new version, Boggert 2.0.

Even though Boggert’s technical problems were fixed, RogerHub still had a design that looks like it was made by a 6-year-old with a crayon. The actual page is limited to 800 pixels no matter how big your screen is. Posts only have 500 pixels of horizontal space. The font is tiny and invariable across all pages. The AJAX is old and ugly. Visual effects are missing, and to finish off my list of flaws, it doesn’t validate.

I’m not the biggest standards fanatic, but when Internet Explorer gives up its revolt against the W3C, I’d like to be ready for it.

Ultimately, a design remake is in order. Over the past year, I’ve read a lot on typography, composition and the art of efficient design. There’s a certain irony that surrounds the blogs of design critics. Often, the sages of web design have crappy site designs themselves. I had wanted to make my new RogerHub design as professional as possible. That didn’t work out.

I’m not a freelance designer, nor do I ever hope to be one. But I do want RogerHub to reflect what I do as a hobby. So I tried a more personal approach and drew out a full mockup with a tablet and pen. For colors, I used black and dark blue, my favorites. I’m sick of everyone’s abnormal serif-phobia, so I used the second most hated font of all, Times New Roman. The main content area is 980 pixels wide: small enough for the smallest of screens, yet still able to display stunning photos,

I wanted to break the traditional model of distinct header-content body-footer. I didn’t use borders for any of the sections, and the full-width divides will scale to any sized screen. The design is fully compatible with all major non-IE browsers. Collectively the design is awesome.

The blog scene has been dead lately. Maybe it’s cause of AP testing, or maybe it’s that evil, evil Facebook. (just kidding?) But I’m hoping people will start blogging again. To motivate you, I’ve put a More Stuff section underneath every post. In that section, updates from my partner blogs will be aggregated and displayed for everyone to see. (Kenny I still need a working RSS from you nevermind, i got it) I’ll post again in the coming week to show you how much difference the extra horizontal width can make.



Got a blog? roger (at) rogerhub.com

Man, boggert is so messy and ineffective and full of deprecated tables and such. It’s really amazing how much can change in just 9 months.

That’s right. On May 26th, Boggert will be 9 months old. If it were a baby, it would be due! Okay, bad analogy...

Boggert needs more AJAX, and some sprite-sheets and a more centralized database cache, and a neater design, and more extensibility and tons of other things that I had never heard of in Summer ‘09.

I don’t plan to change Boggert, but I will use those techniques and others the theoretical Walnut NHS Website! Centralized database caching, code optimization, modularization, page buffers, permissions, serialization, and best of all, AJAX! and some awesome JQuery effects.

I really hope this project will go live to completion.. then maybe I can fix up my blog. (and give microsoft their $125)

(sunday..)

We ended at 11:00 even though it was supposed to go till 2:00. After the event, we sorted through trash bags for cans (and our fuze bottles!).. well some of us did, while other people just sat around -_-

Man that song is good..

Oh, and I’m sick

I’m very anti-facebook. But I’m not trying to convince you to stop using it. *ahem*

One of the big reasons why I dislike it is that it’s incredibly difficult to delete your account.

The deactivate button is a trap, because once you log back in, it’s like nothing even happened. And even with your account deactivated, you still get craploads of spam from them.

But wait! I finally figured out how to truly delete your Facebook account. (If you ever decide to smarten up.)

1. Login


2. Go to the Account Deletion Request Page.


3. Submit the form.
   

But wait, that’s not all you have to do. It takes 14 days for them to delete your account, and if you slip-up and login even once, you have to start all over.

See how hard it is?

Man, what a find. I have to thank Dan Yoder and his "Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook" article.

More reasons for quitting: because the internet says so (each word is a separate link btw)

(It actually shrunk after I took out some messy coding)

I’m writing this huge documentation file for my new program. And after researching a bit, I found this awesome CSS script that will set defaults for most HTML tags.

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,<br /> h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,<br /> a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,<br /> del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,<br /> small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,<br /> dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,<br /> fieldset, form, label, legend,<br /> table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td{<br /> margin: 0;<br /> padding: 0;<br /> border: 0;<br /> outline: 0;<br /> font-weight: inherit;<br /> font-style: inherit;<br /> font-size: 100%;<br /> font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-seif;<br /> vertical-align: baseline;<br /> }

(get rid of the line breaks <br /> because boggert’s parser hates me..)

Man, that was helpful like no other.

RogerHub’s Boggert Blogging System is very outdated technology.. the code is really decentralized and messy and blksadoadajsd.

With this new program, I’m using AJAX and JQuery and a really REALLY nice centralized MySQL Smart Cache thing and a mildly nice (not very secure) authentication system and (X)HTML5! and visual effects like fading and (that stupid animated gif loading icon).

I really hope I can get a nice elegant front-end design for this project, because man, it’ll look awesome.

More awesome than my dango.

Yeah, I said it.

And I’ve been seeing really really far into the future with the memory limitation and whatnot. (Those sorting algorithm efficiency problems from APCS have been bugging the hell out of me)

So now, I have made room for 4 billion members, 2 billion events, 18446744073709551615 signups/messages/news articles. (how the heck do you even say that number?)

It’s really not that far away when you think that IPv4 and its 4294967295 (minus the craploads of reserved blocks) IP capacity is quickly running out.

Oh no! The internet is in crisis!

Not really, because a brilliant solution has been around for.. um.. 12 YEARS man -_-

Except, not everyone’s gotten around to using IPv6.

MAn, and microsoft is bugging me again for my $125 that I gotta give them for a windows 7 test. Should I even take it? So much studying ._. that i really don’t have time for.

I was listening to the radio (first time in months) and I found this guy, and his music’s pretty good. Listen (if you haven’t already)

When I first saw the band name, I’m like, what...?
Yeah, you probably (we/a)re too.

Alright..

AP Computer Science AP test was beyond ridiculous. Especially for me, most of it was CASHEE-level crap. Every time I have to waste hours taking computer-science tests, I always think:

Why did I take this class?

Logically, I could have five-d the AP Test with a week or so of preparation. And instead, I could have taken Physics or something more.. worthwhile.

Though, without APCS, I wouldn’t have gotten a volunteer position at Collegewood. And screwing around during lectures wasn’t bad at all..

It’s annoying how these things work out.

But actually, I DID learn stuff in APCS.

• I learned sorting and searching algorithms. Mostly because, I would usually use language-presets.
  

• The FRQ’s about writing huge problems were really daunting.. until you see the actual questions. I’m more open to big programming projects now.
  

• I finally found a programming language that I hate with a passion.
  

• HASHCODING! Even though it’s not part of the curriculum, I should probably credit APCS for introducing me to this amazingly impractical concept!</sarcasm>

WEE! And Adobe Creative Suite 5! How wonderful! The CS5 Trials from adobe.com are just 4GB (for the Master Collection). So, you can burn the entire thing to one standard 4.7G DVD. Awesome right?

Well, the only differences I’ve noticed (from CS4) are that Photoshop’s zoom is smooth now and Dreamweaver’s code-highlighting scheme has different colors.

Yes. DIFFERENT COLORS

Crazy right?

Maybe coding in sky-blue function headers instead of navy-blue will increase my programming skills by 26%!

Or, maybe not.

Oh and another thing. I can do PPro/AfterFX on my 64-bit rig because the codecs work!

A few days ago, Microsoft revealed a new website called Where’s the ‘Any’ Key?. IT guys post funny/fail tech support stories. I think that made my week..

At callbacks on Thursday (NHS), they switched me so that I’m running for parliamentarian. Apparently, parliamentarians manage the website and newsletter. (What does that have to do with parliament..?)

I guess everyone thinks they’re good with computers, so they apply for parliamentarian.

HMM, well good luck to you all.

Anybody care to tell me what these lyrics are about..?

Do you know Jason Chen? Probably not. Not unless you’ve been on Gizmodo sometime this afternoon. (April 26)

He’s the one that published the controversial article about the lost next-generation iPhone. And just last Friday, police raided his house (presumably in search of other lost Apple prototypes). You can read more about it here.

There’s been a lot of bad air around Apple lately with the new developer policies and such. But this is ridiculous. (Almost as funny as Stephen Hawking and the alients) This sort of stuff is happening right up in San Francisco. WTF man. Just how messed up is our legal system?

Anyways, I have been playing with CG graphics because it is just too awesome.

Soo.. I am creating a video converter entitled Roger’s AVC. (Awesome/Audio Video Converter!)

The key points on Roger’s AVC will be simplicity. Choose file, choose format, go. But now that most video editing software handle most formats and such, there isn’t really a need for video converters.

With bitrates and fps and codecs and other nonsensical things, it’s tough to get a good loss-less conversion that doesn’t take up gigs of space. So, RAVC will have enough options to tweak, yet be simple enough for (stupid) people.

Yes? No?

Poll

Q: RAVC?
yes	2	50%
no	2	50%

Anyhow, I don’t feel like talking now.

Catchy song. right? Man, don’t judge.

The contest is over! Thanks Allan, for trying.. because they weren’t really that hard. I’ll get you something for your effort.

Here’s the solutions:

1. otoborsirewsnaeht
Flip the order of the letters, you get "theanswerisroboto".

2. botxfsjtuxjuufs
Change each letter to the letter that comes before it alphabetically. (So B changes to A and F changes to E)

You get "answeristwitter".

3. %54%68%65%20%70%61%73%73%77%6F%72%64%20%69%73%20%64%61%6E%67%6F

There’s many ways of decoding this. Basically, this is hexadecimal ASCII. Try pasting it in your URL Bar:

4. This one is encoded in BASE64. (according to the hint i gave you)

So, first thing to do, is to google "Base 64 decoder". I’m gonna use this one (http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/base64decode/)

So, to find the mime type, we can look for clues within the file. Open it up in a hex editor, or even notepad.

So yes. Don’t you feel smarter already?

Hmm, so on Friday, I went to NHS Idol and saw some people perform. No, louder doesn’t mean better. Those 5 guys at the beginning turned their amps and effect pedals all the way up, and it sounded like crap. Yeah, goodjob emily and willa and waverly and everyone else.

Saturday morning, I went to Diamond Bar Birthday thing, and there were literally like 6 people from Walnut (of over 300 volunteers).

I heard a lot of DB people go "if they’re from Walnut, why are they at Diamond Bar?" Oh, and I had this crazy awesome (and fattening) bacon dog, which is like, a hotdog, but the sausage is wrapped inside bacon.

Afterward, I went to the Operation Smile concert thing with jeremy/waverly.

Poll

Q: bieber...
BLAST!	1	14.3%
gtfo	6	85.7%

At one point, this guy got so excited, he decided to raise the roof, literally.

Okay. So, my latest program idea is something called Haze. You can use it at rogerhub.com/haze.

It’s basically a dictionary, but it’s also so much more! It actually has around 5000 SAT Vocab words, along with a ton more in the dictionary. So, you can use it to.. uhh study! How fun -_-

Tell your friends:

And one more thing. No Internet Explorer on Haze! I wrote you a nice little letter in case you try using IE to use HAZE.

So, on thursday, I went to ASI Techexpo 2010, and it was like nerd-heaven.

All the new crap that you hear about on Digg and Engadget. Yes, well I’m not gonna go into that.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t completely devoid of girls. Though, most of them were there as attractions for guests.

So you think you’re good with tetris? Try this version:

http://l0ser.net/src/as3/bastet/bastet-new.swf

I could only get 2 lines on this.. (source)

Microsoft sent me an email about how XP was outdated and how I should go take the Windows 7 Tests... I think they just want another $100 from me.

A plastic card and sheet of paper. DEFINITELY worth it, right? Either way, I think I’m still gonna take 70-680 in a month or so.

And I’m gonna leave the contest thing open for a while.. and here’s a few more hints for the 3 that haven’t been solved yet:

• #2: No real skill needed, just play with the letters.
  

• #3: people taking AP Comp Sci, you have learned this
  

• #4: Base 64, MIME-type detection. James/Kenny, you guys definitely can do this.

Edgeworth game was so disappointing.. he doesn’t even go to COURT at all =_= and half the time he’s defending people. How.. wrong. And that creepy pffftttt lady..

Damn, school go away -_-

Yay! It’s easter. I went ice skating today and afterwards, went to dinner with small group. And um.. apparently, there was an earthquake.

Originally, it was like 6.9. But I guess that number was too provocative so they bumped it up to 7.2.

I didn’t feel it.

All these earthquakes lately have been scaring people.. I mean come on:

If there were a huge terremoto right here in LA, that would really suck. I mean, we’re the ones who usually get earthquakes. You can feel it coming can’t you?

javascript:function ds(){ var newx=Math.floor(Math.random()*20); var newy=Math.floor(Math.random()*20); for (var i=0;i<document.images.length;i++){ document.images[i].style.display="inline-block"; document.images[i].style.marginLeft=newx+"px"; document.images[i].style.marginTop=newy+"px";} for (var i=0;i<document.anchors.length;i++){ document.anchors[i].style.display="inline-block"; document.anchors[i].style.marginLeft=newx+"px"; document.anchors[i].style.marginTop=newy+"px";} setTimeout("ds()",30); } ds();

Copy+Paste this code into your URL Bar and press enter. All the pictures and stuff should start shaking and whatnot.

If not.. uhh, sucks.

This way, you can feel like there’s an earthquake! Although.. there’s not much point beyond that.

Hmm.. my new favorite song:

Ooh.. And I think I’m gonna be doing a contest or something. Here are 4 phrases that have been scrambled in one way or another. They range from really really easy to medium-hard.

So try to decode them!

First correct answer gets... uh something cool. I’ll think of it later.

Just leave your answers in the comments section... or email roger(at)rogerhub.com

The hints:

Number 1:

otoborsirewsnaeht

Number 2:

botxfsjtuxjuufs

Number 3:

%54%68%65%20%70%61%73%73%77%6F%72%64%20%69%73%20%64%61%6E%67%6F

Number 4: (this ones kinda long)

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

(extra hint for #4: Base64)

Ughh.. AP Comp Sci. I thought it would be a chill class because it’s all basic Java. But I seriously, seriously hate it.

It’s not hard. And I BS all the homework and projects. For an AP class, it’s on par with Environmental Sciences. But we’re just wasting time in that class.

The methodology and thinking process might be good. But seriously, who uses Java? You don’t see multi-billion dollar companies based on Java. Normal people tend not to have JRE. What is the friggen point. You will literally hear me say "stupid waste of time" ten times during any given class period.

(I will not complain about specifics, so I don’t bore all of you.)

But there’s one language that’s very very useful. Unless you were hiding under a rock for the past ten years, you have heard of it.

It’s... JavaScript! Yes! Ten times more useful than Java. Why? Well simply put, the only similarities that Java and JavaScript have in common is.. their name.

Java	JavaScript
Runs by itself.	Runs in your Internet Browser
Coffee Cup thing.	No real logo.
You might hear once in a while.	Major fighting point in browser wars.
Taught in AP Comp Sci.	Uh.. Not taught in AP Comp Sci.
A programming language.	Awesome.

See the difference?

So, now I’m going to show you first hand how awesome JavaScript is in comparison to Java with three practical things you can do with JavaScript:

**No, you don’t need to be super-smart to understand this. It’ll be simple (i promise)**

and you won’t need anything but an Internet Browser

1. Messing Around

At first, this trick seems really stupid. But you wouldn’t believe how fun it is. (see below screenshot)

The idea is simply, Replacing Text. We look for text, and we replace it with something else!

First of all, everything I will be doing in this tutorial will be done, from the Address Bar! (Also known as the URL Bar, the Awesome Bar, and the Omnibar.)

Clear the address bar and type in javascript: into the Address bar. Make sure that it looks like this:

technical explanation: This is the JavaScript protocol. All JavaScript that you type into a Address Bar must begin with javascript:

Use this as a reference later: Lol

BTW Do this on RogerHub.com, not Google.

Now, after the javascript: part, type in:

So.. the entire thing should look like:

Now, press ENTER

Now.. go back to the code! It’s really not that hard to memorize:

Don’t change anything but "Lol" and "l0l". (Make sure you keep the quotation marks in there!!)

The first word is the word you are trying to change. And you are changing it to the second word.

**More Examples:

Get the gist of it?

If you want to change more than one instance of the text, use this code:

Change Images and pix to whatever you want. But keep the slashes and the g.

2. Cheating

This trick is a bit harder and longer to do than the previous one. Don’t even think about "that’s what she said".

Well, first, we need to do some recon. (gathering information)

I will be using Conjuguemos.com for my demonstration:

Click that link above, and do this:

Internet Explorer: Click the View menu and press Page Source.

Everyone else: On your keyboard, press CTRL + U

We need to search for files that have the ending .js So, do a CTRL + F and search for .js

On this particular document, we find 2 instances of .js

Vocabulary313? The number at the end just tells you that whatever’s inside must be specific to certain pages.

So, click on the link (http://conjuguemos.com/home/activities/public/vocabulary/vocabulary313.js) and look what’s inside:

So, nothing too important (lol). Answers might be useful, but we’re looking for something even better.

There’s another .js in the Page Source. (see below pic)

Click on the link (http://conjuguemos.com/home/docs/php/javascript/vocabulary.js) You should see something like this:

These things that look like foo=bar; are called Variables. Just like in Math, Variables store information.

Two of these variables catch my eye: attempted and correct.

You can probably figure out what these variables store. But the question is, how do I change them? Well, Simple:

The variable name is.. well, the name of the variable. In this case, the names are "attempted" and "correct".

Choose any value you want. Values can be numbers like 3 and 4294967296, or they can be text like "Hello" or "ROGER is AWESOME".

Obviously, our goal is to increase the number of "Corrects" and "Attempted".

NOTE: In this special case, you have to press the "START" button first. Or it wont register the changes.

Now, try clicking the View button. Yep that’s it! You can even send the score to your teacher. It looks completely legitimate, (unless you put like 20 attempted 20000 correct)

3. Annoying

This trick spouts a message box that reappears after you try to close it. Very annoying :)

You can replace "Hello!" with anything you want.

It’s easy to do on friends when they turn their backs on their computers. (If you can memorize it)

For added fun, change the message to "VIRUS!" or something.

You can also use prompt("Hello!"); or confirm("Hello!"); for some different kinds of dialog boxes.

-Number Phenomenon-

A Pokémon Soul Silver save file consists of 4 Megabits (4,194,304 bits = 524,288 bytes) of data

The total number of combination of save files is approximately 10^1517824 (99.9% of these will crash your game).

How does it make you feel, that every time you save your game, you are merely choosing one of the 10^1517824 combinations?

How does it feel to know that your name, pokemon (type, level, stats), items, location and progress have all been preset and determined, long before you ever touched the game?

How does it feel that your entire identity along with (hundreds of) hours of hard work can be represented in full with a single number from 1 to 10^1517824?

Can you still consider yourself unique?