June 2010 Archives
You're writing a test case, or you want to embed an Easter Egg into your app that your PM won't notice. Or whatever. I'm not judging you. You could write a 5-minute Python script, or you could do what I did and waste half an hour trying to understand the hexdump manual. Here's what I came up with:
$ hexdump -v -e '"(byte)0x" 1/1 "%02X" ", "' image.png
This will spit out something close enough to Java or C++ source code that you can mostly copy and paste it.
A few months ago, Mary and I decided to throw out the booze in our liquor cabinet. She doesn't drink, and I barely do, and we needed the space for dishes. So out it all went, except for one weird little half-liter bottle that I'd brought back from a trip to China in 1994. It didn't feel right to toss it, so I opened it, had a sip, and put it in the freezer, and since then I've been occasionally drinking a shot of it after dinner, mixing it with juice from a lime.
Now, the smart thing to do would have been to keep doing this until the bottle was empty, then throw it out. But no. I just had to look it up on the web. Turns out Moutai is hard to get here in the United States. Moreover, a 15-year-old bottle is going for $450. Mine is 16 years old, and until recently was unopened and in perfect condition.
Whoops.
I'm not a diabetic, but my educated belief is that the best way to avoid becoming one is to eat like one. That means avoiding foods that spike blood sugar. After some tinkering, I've developed the perfect dessert for diabetics.
One ounce heavy cream, well-refrigerated
One packet Splenda
Half-teaspoon of cinnamon
Pour cream in a glass. Then pour in the other ingredients (the order is important to avoid bunching at the bottom of the glass). Using an Ikea frother, mix for a couple minutes until the cream sets. Eat with spoon.
Serves one.
Notes: try with cocoa (though that increases the carbs) unless you're about to go to bed. By happy coincidence, cinnamon is supposedly good for regulating blood sugar, though that's hardly a universal belief, and overdosing on the coumarin in non-Ceylon cinnamon can mess you up.
A while back I bought The Beatles Mono Box Set. When it arrived in the mail, I eagerly opened it, immediately surprised that the cellophane wrap felt thin and fragile, and disappointed that the outer box had already started ripping. I pulled out the inner sleeve of discs and thought, "Wow, these guys really phoned it in, especially for the $150 I paid." The mini-sleeves were unevenly glued. Some of the paper felt thinner than it should have been. By the time I saw that Magical Mystery Tour's sleeve had been manufactured inside-out (so that the outer cover was within the fold), I was upset. Aside from the digital files that I could get anywhere, the whole point of the box set was to have miniature high-quality replicas of the original 12-inch albums. This set didn't fulfill that goal.
It took a couple angry searches on the web for me to realize the set was counterfeit. It's apparently a common problem with this set. Not surprising in retrospect; it overpriced and limited-edition, but missing anything to make each copy unique. Valuable and easy to duplicate -- a great combination for counterfeiters. Fortunately, Amazon's third-party seller guarantee protected me, and the mortified (genuinely, I suppose) seller refunded my payment with little prodding. I refused to mail back the set; I'm pretty sure that knowingly dropping counterfeit goods into the U.S. Mail is not a smart idea, regardless of intent.
Just a couple days ago I got a real set, directly from Amazon. As I said earlier, the real set is overpriced, but I'll admit that it's pretty much as nice as I'd hoped. Still, I think the limited-run idea was poorly executed. If they're going to charge $200 for 13 CDs and some cardboard, why not charge $1,200 and include an individually-numbered certificate of authenticity with Paul and Ringo's original signatures?
