Some Tech News

IBM claims supercomputer speed crown - An IBM supercomputer still under development has set an unofficial new world speed record during testing, the company announced on Wednesday. IBM says its Blue Gene/L, sited in Minnesota, US, attained a sustained performance of 36.01 teraflops when performing the standard benchmark used to test supercomputers, known as the Linpack test.

Scientists Invent 1TB Optical Discs - The 1TB disk would be double sided and dual layer, but even a single sided, single layer, MODS disk could hold the Lord of the Rings trilogy 13 times over, or all 238 episodes of Friends. MODS disks will not be the first to challenge DVDs domination of the audiovisual optical disk market. BluRay disks, which have five times the capacity of a DVD at 25GB per layer, are expected to be released towards the end of 2005 for the home market.

Dick Cheney is a stupid poo poo head

Saddam...had a relationship with al Qaeda."
- Vice President Dick Cheney, 9/29/04 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/09/20040929.html)



VERSUS



There was no "collaborative operational relationship" between al Qaeda and Saddam.
- 9/11 Commission Report (http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=133128)

H-1B Visa Changes

Senate Weighs H-1B Visa Changes"
CNet (09/27/04); Frauenheim, Ed
The Senate is mulling a revision to the H-1B visa program that would add an exemption for foreign-born U.S. graduates with master's or doctorate degrees, which has earned the ire of labor groups and the approval of the business community. WashTech President Marcus Courtney claims the exemption is a senseless measure, and cites a recent study indicating that unemployment among tech workers has significantly increased, refuting assertions that skilled U.S. workers are in short supply. The proposal is also opposed by the U.S. branch of the IEEE, whose representative, Vin O'Neill, argues that guest worker visas are sparking an increase in offshoring. On the other hand, Jeff Lande with the Information Technology Association of America contends that the United States channels a sizeable amount of resources into foreign grad students, noting that "If they can't stay, we're wasting that investment, and we're losing access to some of the best and brightest around." An anonymous aide to a Democratic senator says that the package Congress is considering would also require the institution of additional worker protections, including authorization for the Labor Department to randomly audit companies that may be in violation of the H-1B program. The chief sponsor of the bill, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), says he also wants to halt the practice among U.S. companies to bring in professional workers on L-1 visas so they can displace employees at third-party companies, and has called for a requirement that companies employing workers overseas have them on staff for at least a year prior to transferring them to a U.S. office on an L-1 visa. The anonymous aide says the package could be promoted as standalone legislation by the Senate Judiciary Committee, or be included in a larger bill.

Bill O'Reilly's Audience Compared to John Stewerts Audience

DAILY GRILL

"I mean, you've got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night...you know the research on your program."



- Bill O'Reilly, 9/17/04 (http://www.wonkette.com/archives/the-ostewart-factor-021688.php)



VERSUS



"Viewers of Jon Stewart's show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch 'The O'Reilly Factor,' according to Nielsen Media Research."



- AP, 9/27/04 (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6117542/)

No Luck with the Job

Well I went to the interview today and had no luck on the SQL test. She stated the first one is the easiest and if you take more then 15mins to do then you probably will not succeed in the other questions.

The first question asked for me to search the employee database and return people with the same name. I had no clue how to reference the same table without ambigouty. Of course once I got home I think I figured it out.

Another question asked for me to find the sale date's month and return any that are 4 or more. At the time I was thinking of using some of the date functions, but they wouldn't help in this situation. Once I got home I figure using a function that allows me to read the first three or four letters and then count them could be an easy solution.

Another asked me to just return the employees information of who sold a certain product. This was like #4 and I thought this one was easy, until I saw a problem in the table's name. It had a space in it, how the F**K do you put a space in the name? It was something like "Order Invoice", and couldn't just put the words there. The word order is a key word. I also try dragging the name over to the query area and it did give me a solution.

After try these questions for an hour(time limit) and having no luck, I gave up. There were a total of 6 questions and I know I can figure them out.

Some interesting news....

Jail time for California file swappers? - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law Tuesday establishing fines and potential jail time for anonymous file swappers.The new law says that any California resident who sends copyrighted works without permission to at least 10 other people must include his or her e-mail address and the title of the work. Swappers who do not include this information will face fines of up to $2,500 and up to one year in prison.

Hackers use Google to access photocopiers - Using Google hacks -- requests typed into the search engine that bring up cached information on networks -- hackers are discovering and using login details for networked photocopiers so they can watch what is being copied. "You don't have to be a genius to do this," said Jason Hart, security director at Whitehat UK. "You can see what people are photocopying on your monitor. You just have to search for online devices on Google."

Build-your-own solar scooters - A couple of entrepreneurs in Montreal are teaching people how to build their own solar-powered scooters by making the instructions freely available on the internet. Many people are looking to alternative fuels but solar-powered vehicles are often too expensive. "The total cost of the project was probably about $600,000," said Paul Glass, project manager for McGill University's solar car. The Biomod company in Montreal said it can build the vehicles for much cheaper. By using surplus parts, a solar-powered scooter costs $1,600.

Biggest cosmic collision - An international team of scientists have discovered a head-on collision of two galaxy clusters, one of the most powerful collisions ever documented, China Radio International reported Saturday. cientists have called it the"perfect cosmic storm." The galaxy clusters collided like two hurricanes, tossing individual galaxies out into space

Backward Compatibility? Xbox Next could support Xbox games - Xbox specialist site xbox-scene.com reports that Transitive has announced QuickTransit, an application that would allow for software to be run across different processors and operating systems without any source code changes -- boasting "100 per cent functionality, transparent interactive and graphics performance" and "near-native computational performance."

LA County Fair

Went to the LA County Fair today. Ate food, saw events, saw vendors, etc.... A good 8 hours walking around.

Windows causes plane pile up in Southern Cali

Microsoft server crash nearly causes 800-plane pile-up - A major breakdown in Southern California's air traffic control system last week was partly due to a "design anomaly" in the way Microsoft Windows servers were integrated into the system, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The radio system shutdown, which lasted more than three hours, left 800 planes in the air without contact to air traffic control, and led to at least five cases where planes came too close to one another, according to comments by the Federal Aviation Administration reported in the LA Times and The New York Times. Air traffic controllers were reduced to using personal mobile phones to pass on warnings to controllers at other facilities, and watched close calls without being able to alert pilots, according to the LA Times report. The failure was ultimately down to a combination of human error and a design glitch in the Windows servers brought in over the past three years to replace the radio system's original Unix servers, according to the FAA.

Reading up on SQL

So to prepare for the job interview I am reading a book I have on databases and taking a couple courses on SQL from SUN[TM]Learning Center, which is free for ACM members. YEAH, a good value when you look at the cost of some of the courses ($300+).

Job Interview scheduled for Monday.

I finally got a job interview in Glendale, CA for this Monday. I have to touch up on my SQL since I will be tested on the subject. YIKES, its been awhile since I touched the subject. The company is Macro Firm. Check out the website and hope I get the job. The area should be pretty nice and about 1/2 hour drive on 3 major freeways.

Politics: The poor gets poorer.

Everybody knows that Bush's tax cut to the weathly left out the poor, and only houses that made more then 30-40K a year got some tax break. This of course outraged me since a majority of the poor make under 20K a year from minimal wage jobs. Anyway lets fast forward to today....

Congress is thinking of lower the child tax breaks. Currently the tax break set in 2001 states that each child in the household of the poor (thats under $10,000) is allowed a tax break per child upto $1000 or %10 of the household income. So a single house hold family making $9K can ask for $900 back in taxes.

The inflation of course should take account and should be raised upto $10,750. However the tax break will increase to 15% meanwile that max is lowered to $700/child. In 2011 it is expected to drop to $500/child. Now keep in mind that minimal wage hasn't been increased since 1997.


"According to the Joint Tax Center, it would cost approximately $4.3 billion to fix this inequity for the millions of families who are currently seeing their child-tax credit shrink. That's less than 5 percent of the total tax bill. (Doing this would also simplify the tax code.) As it stands, the cost of the tax credit isn't paid for, meaning the cost is likely to fall directly on the backs of the middle-class and poor through future spending cuts."

"IT'S A PATTERN: This is part of an overall pattern (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040906fa_fact) in which the lower and middle classes are being left behind to pay for tax cuts for the rich. The alternative minimum tax (AMT), for instance, is increasingly falling on the shoulders of the middle class (http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/local/sfl-ybsternspot20sep20,0,7479557.story?coll=sfla-business-front) . Last month the Congressional Budget Office revealed President Bush's tax cuts since 2001 "have shifted more of the tax burden from the nation's rich to middle-class families (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/08/16/politics/main636398.shtml) ." And as the Washington Post reports, the effects of these policies are coming home to roost: "Income inequality has grown. In 2001, the top 20 percent of households for the first time raked in more than half of all income (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34235-2004Sep19?language=printer) , while the share earned by those in the middle was the lowest in nearly 50 years." (Meanwhile, President Bush has refused to close loopholes or roll back tax cuts for those earning over $200,000 a year because he acknowledges "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway.")"

Hollywood

Has life changed enough to be fast pace that we need more TV shows telling us what happen in the past week. Hmmm
We got TV shows like E'sThe Soup and VH1's Best Week Ever. Heck if I missed something good because I was watching something else there is a solution. All I have to do is watch one of these shows and pick up the stupidity of the week.

The problem is that I get sucked into the ignorant, stupid world of "Hollywood". WTF do I care about a stupid ho like Paris is doing? It is an addicting drug and I need help!!!

Hello, My name is William Andrus and I'm addicted to Hollywood Rumors and Fame.

Anime

Not much into the anime lately, maybe because most of them are repeats. G4TechTV sometimes has a descent anime, but they are a little strange. To watch G4TechTV anime, you have to catch the first episode, or they just seem to weird and boring.

Now of course Adult Swim is a better choice, but the repeats of old anime is killing me. Cowboy Bebop & Trigun have been repeating now for probably a year now. It makes me want to scream. Wolf's Rain & Inuyasha are my favorite two animes right now to watch.

Wolf's Rain just makes me sad to see how dreams are easily crushed, and the closing credit songs is just a sad song.

Inuyasha very good story with a good spread of action. It is probably the anime I must watch every Saturday, or I will be pissed off that I didn't.

Now the classic anime: Dragon Ball GT (been watching since Dragon Ball) the stories are of course drawn out to last several months. This is hard for new comers to start watching, especially if they haven't watch much anime before. I been stuck into the story for sometime now, and it is basically a kungfu type cartoon. I try explaining how the characters can do these acts of impossible feats to non-anime watching people, but it is useless. The best explaining I can give is that it is part of the Japanese culture and to be an expert they must use their chi. Then I have to go into explaining what chi is and stuff.

Well that's all I got to say about anime for now.
See You Soon

What else have I been doing..

Well since Job searching can only last so many minutes to hours. I have had to find something else to do. So recently I have been programming in C#. It is a simple basic language that supposoley merges C++ and Java. It is nicer then java, but still has a lot of quirks in the set up, but its nothing I can't get over. I'm trying to convert some of my old programs over to C#. Some are easy to convert, but others are more complex. I'm having a little trouble when I get into structs and classes though.

There are two problems that I don't really care for much in C# so far. One, is the reading in an integer took me awhile to find out how to. I figure using something like:

int x;
x = Console.Read(); //where: it returns an integer

would work, but the value of x was converted to ASCII. This is an integer but messed me up for sometime. I searched the internet and only found one place that even talked about a solution.

int x
x = Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()); //where ReadLine() returns a string

I would have to read in a string and convert it over to a 32bit integer.

The second problem I had was in the Fibonacci program. The program in the C# is a recursive program, but to have it recursive I would only return when it reached a solution. It will not compile unless you obviously return a value. For some reason it had difficutly with a basic C/C++ recursive definition and I had to modify it a little to get it to work.

I'll probably start writing down what I am doing in my programs in the blog to help keep track of my progress and solutions more clearly.

Nothing

Just the usual woke up around 12:32 PST, thats 3:32 for you east coast people. Ate food, watch tv, and submitted a resume or 2. Watch more TV then go back to bed and start the cycle over again. :(

Im bored of job hunting

I figure I can either become a professional bum or go look for a job at a fast food resturant close by my house. At least I would be able to get some money. I figure I will not find a job anytime soon this year in my area anyway. To many places want 3 years experience or know softwares that I never heard of before. Oh well, maybe someplace like Subway or something would be interested in a graduate student. This of course brings up my comic I made last year, which predicted this situation, if it happens.

Riemann hypothesis break through could bring disaster for ecommerce

The solution of finding prime numbers will basically make cryptography useless. Maybe there is still hope, it hasn't been confirmed yet.


I got nothing else to say other then I been programming and looking for a job.

Been Job Searching

Well I have been looking for a job now for 1 whole week now sending out my resumes via online. Here are the places I have posted my Resume and searched for jobs:

Brass Ring
Dice
Yoh IT
College Grad
Monster Trak
Career Journal
Job Summit

Haven't heard back for any offers, maybe it is a little too soon. Most of these jobs I don't qualify for. I either don't have the year experience yet or the right skills they are looking for.

I'll probably look for a job at the career fair, here in Long Beach. Just hope I can find a job there. I'm about to start a wide spread of resume mailing to every business in the local area probably some times next week. I have been reading my book on "C how to program" mostly catching up on the new stuff and reviewing. It goes into java toward the end of the book which I wouldn't mind try to learn.

Aliens??

I guest this SETI@Home thing might actually be working. Of course it is probably to early to tell and probably be a let down. Check out this link.