I’ve recently had a perfect storm of email woes here at this site. Last month, my email servers changed at DreamHost (for reasons I still don’t fully understand), breaking all of my approved SSL certificates (not to mention my SMTP settings). Around the same time, I updated to Thunderbird 3.0 from 2.x. The new interface is bizarre, and I’ve only had problems from day one of the upgrade. As such, I am now actively working towards moving all of Born Geek’s email (including this website) to GMail.

Unfortunately, someone is apparently squatting on my domain over at Google Apps. I attempted to reset the account password there, but no secondary email address is on record, making things much more difficult for me. I have started a manual password reset process (via proving to Google that I do indeed own the domain), and hope to have things up and running by this weekend.

Long story short, any direct emails sent to me through the contact form at this website may not be answered for a while. Please bear with me during this painful process.

It is being reporting that Firefox will replace menus with an Office-style ribbon interface. Personally, I couldn’t be more against this. I’m no fan of the Office ribbon (it takes up way too much screen real estate and looks clunky), and I fail to see how this interface will make things better for the user. Mozilla is known for screwing around with the GUI, however, so I won’t be surprised when something like this shows up. I can’t imagine how this change will affect many extensions out there, like Googlebar Lite, that add UI elements.

What do you think about the Office ribbon interface? And what do you think of this decision? Thankfully for me, someone will undoubtedly come out with a theme to fix this stupid design decision. Consider me signed up for it already!

A recent newspaper review for the new computer animated movie 9 warned that the movie isn’t necessarily kid-friendly, and that young children will most likely be scared from the post apocalyptic setting. Shouldn’t the PG-13 rating indicate that kids under 13 probably shouldn’t be watching it anyway? Why does the reviewer jump to the conclusion that, because it’s animated, the movie is for kids? It frustrates me that Americans think animation belongs solely to children. The medium should be taken way more seriously than it is. Foreign films like Princess Mononoke (another PG-13 film) are proof that animation can be used successfully for adult topics. Someone out there needs to buck the current trend and develop an animated movie purely for adults; maybe something that’s rated R. Though I can only imagine all the angry parents complaining that the movie was “too adult” for their kids.

Why can’t Americans just grow up?

Year of the Code Monkey has been destroyed. I am working feverishly to restore it. Please bear with me during this highly annoying process. I hope to be back up within the next few days.

If you use WordPress, I advise against upgrading to version 2.8. I attempted to do so to this site this evening (via Subversion), and everything appeared to go smoothly. Unfortunately, upon logging in to my admin panel, I noted that everything was broken. The external site still performed as expected, but I couldn’t get around in the admin area.

Zero steps forward, twenty steps back.

Maybe others will have better luck than I did. I have since reverted back to 2.7.1 for the time being, though my database may now be corrupt. If you notice anything funky around this site, please, please, please let me know.

A recent trend among websites for games that have a “M for Mature” (or similar) rating is the use of age gates. These gates require the user to enter their birth date before they can view information on the subject in question. Usually, the user is presented with three pull down menus: one for the month, one for the day, and one for the year. From a legal perspective, I can understand why companies want to use this feature. But who are these gates really keeping out? Every kid should know that by providing an old enough date, they can gain access to the site. After all, this isn’t rocket science.

Every time I visit a website with one of these gates, I enter the most ridiculous date possible by selecting the oldest year offered (usually 1900). Maybe if enough people enter ridiculous dates every time, this annoying website ‘feature’ will go away.

It’s no surprise to anyone that obesity in America is getting worse every year. This animated map shows the progression in the US between 1985 and 2007, and it’s quite a depressing sight. Lots of factors are contributing to everyone’s weight gain: poor eating habits, no exercise, etc., but part of the blame certainly lies with food manufacturers. In recent times, food portions have increased by an incredible amount, and they only seem to be getting worse. Not only are the larger portions contributing to our weight gain, they are also making it much harder for people like me to shop in the grocery store.

Before I go much farther, I must confess that I’m not a big eater. Growing up, I knew guys who could eat two or three times as much as I do at each meal. And there are plenty of my peers today who can do the same thing. So I realize that I’m already starting out on the low side of the curve. However, this doesn’t change the fact that food manufacturers have gotten out of control with portion management.

Shopping for one is difficult enough to begin with, but I’ve noticed that it’s gotten more so in recent times. While at the grocery store recently, I picked up some potato chips for lunch through the week. The bag I bought had “20% more chips free,” making it even larger than the normal bag (which is a little too big to begin with). A sign below the bags of chips offered the following deal: buy 2 get 2 free. So, you have to buy four bags of chips to get a deal! Who in their right mind eats four, full-sized bags of potato chips? Even in reasonably sized families, that’s an insane number of chips to buy at once.

Similarly, doughnut manufacturer Krispy Kreme apparently no longer sells their half-dozen doughnut boxes. Instead, they offer a new box of 9. Every once in a while (maybe once every two months), I used to pick up a half-dozen doughnuts and eat them through the week with my breakfast. By the end of that week, the last doughnuts had nearly grown stale, but were still good enough to reheat. A box of 9 would certainly not last the way I eat them.

There are plenty of other examples, but these two stick out in my mind since I encountered them recently. If food manufacturers would provide smaller portions, at somewhat lower prices, I would be able to enjoy their products more often and I wouldn’t be wasting perfectly good food. As an added bonus, I wouldn’t eat as much, and would feel better as a result. Does anyone else feel the way I do?

It looks like Time Warner is expanding their broadband bandwidth caps to new markets. One of those new markets is in Greensboro, NC, about 1 hour from where I live. To add insult to injury, it looks like prices are going up as well. The 40GB tier will cost $55, which is $5 more than what I pay today. As they say, this stuff is getting real.

Back in the spring of 2005, after having graduating from college, I went looking for a job. I got the chance to interview for Microsoft, though I’m not sure what I would have ended up doing had I gotten the job (they never really told me). My interview was conducted entirely over the phone, and consisted of the typical “brain teaser” type questions that Microsoft is famous for. Needless to say, I performed very poorly and was instantly rejected. The guy on the phone said he’d let me know and, 10 minutes later via email, I knew.

One of the questions they asked me stumped me beyond belief, and I butchered my answer terribly. Not only was I embarrassed for myself, I was embarrassed for the interviewer, having to patiently listen to me. Anyway, here’s a retelling of the question I was asked:

Given a large NxN tic-tac-toe board (instead of the regular 3×3 board), design a function to determine whether any player is winning in the current round, given the current board state.

I realize now that I misinterpreted the question horribly. The interviewer stated the question quite differently than I have it written above; I believe he used something along the lines of “given a tic-tac-toe board of N dimensions …” I assumed that the bit about dimensionality meant delving into the realm of 3 or more physical dimensions; essentially something like 3-D tic-tac-toe. Obviously, solving such a problem is much more difficult than solving on an NxN 2-D board.

Tonight, for whatever reason, I recalled this question and the fact that I never found an answer for myself. Happily, I subsequently stumbled upon someone else’s answer (see question 4), which is quite clever. It’s good to finally resolve this problem.

I know interviewing candidates for a job can be tricky, but asking these kinds of questions is silly. Does someone’s ability to answer this kind of question really prove they are a better programmer than someone who can’t? In the end, I’m eternally glad I didn’t get hired for Microsoft; I now realize they are one of the companies I would least like to work for. My current employer seemed much more concerned with real-world problems, my previous employment experience, and the (increasingly rare) ability to program in C++. For that, I am oh-so-grateful.

If I ran the Academy Award ceremony:

• The host would be a news reporter, chosen specifically for their inability to make lame jokes.
• Said host would read the award category, the nominations, and the winner, without any pauses or cuts to montages of said nominations.
• Award presentations that no one cares about (best sound editing, best art direction, best makeup, etc) wouldn’t be televised.
• Award winners would receive their award on a side stage with no podium or microphone, thereby removing their ability to give an acceptance speech.
• The entire award ceremony would be 30 minutes long.
• Nielsen ratings for the event would be at an all time high.

Hold your applause, please.