danger smells like clean socks

My muse has left me. I have no inspiration. No drive. To do anything.



I need that spark of inspiration. Return to me, o muse.

So ... apparently UNC is having network problems. Regardless, I was unable to FTP into any of my servers this morning (which was frustrating cause I had a few usericon-related bugs to fix).

So I decided to finally switch to using sFTP (ever since Borst forced me to download the openSSH client from UNC) since sFTP seemed to work.

But in order to get sFTP to work for Tabulas, I had to enable openSSH on the account.




Big mistake. You see, I'm using Ensim to manage the server (which is a control panel to add/remove/edit sites). The problem is when I enabled openSSH, Ensim deleted about 50 lines of custom code that told Tabulas that http://www.tabulas.com/~roy/ is actually http://www.tabulas.com/home.php?user=roy

All those profile.html, gallery.html, etc.html all link to some PHP page, and those commands vanished. Needless to say, I swore a few times.

So I spent some time remaking those lines of code ... and restarting httpd, until httpd gave me a semaphores error (it seems to occur if I restart httpd too many times). So then I had to reboot the friggin server.


But I think I got everything fixed and working. Hopefully ...

"you just talk about nonsense and it's so funny to hear you talk about nonsense."
- my ex-girlfriend


i really do talk about nonsense. if you think my journal is disjointed and random, try talking to me in real life. it's 10x worse.

To allow or not to allow... I would abuse the heck out of this feature if I did...

I wonder if there are any legal ramifications to allowing users to post a mp3 attached to an entry. Anyone know?

Update: Dodo brings up a good point. So what I should do is allow for uploads of media files, and ZIP them while they are being uploaded. This would save on bandwidth but also would prevent streaming.

I'm leaning towards allowing uploads of 3 media files with max size at 10 megabytes ... you would find the downloads on your content pages. This would be a nice way to share songs that you're listening to. I know Daniel had suggested this feature a long time ago, but I originally discounted it because I couldn't imagine how useful it could be... but the more I use Tabulas, the more I want to attach media files to my posts.

I've also been messing around with the IMAP functions in PHP, trying to build a "post-by-e-mail" feature. It should be pretty nice if I can get it done; you'll also be able to reply to comments directly as an e-mail instead of having to use the web interface.

At the request of some people, I also looked into attaching images to moods... a request for "freeformed" images was made, but I think that'll be a bit complex. I downloaded a bunch of mood icons (which are actually the ones that LJ uses)... now the hard part of sorting through them and associating moods with each image.

Boo.

I have some advice for you fledgling webpeople out there.

Do not let your mySQL databases get too large. AudioMatch recently reached 10,000 users, of which more than half are very active.

Our database, as optimized as it is (it uses a lot of keys) was sitting at 1GB this morning. I thought it would be an easy task to delete all the older data entries and move them to an "archive" database.

Boy was I wrong. First of all, I left the "move IDs to new database" query running last night. It was still running when I woke up this morning. Ridiculous. It only transferred about 8 million ID points (~500 megs) ... so I decided to run with that.

Now, if you're familiar with SQL language, you'll think that it should be easy to delete all the old entries.

"DELETE FROM data WHERE songid < 8000000"

Heh. I can't delete that many at once without locking out mySQL queries from Tabulas and AudioMatch. I have to run them in short increments of 250,000 queries, and even that takes forever to run.

So the lesson here? Don't let your mySQL databases get too large. Once you hit 500megs, transfer the sucker over.

I'll be up most of tonight running my scripts in short increments ... trying to clear out the AM database. The problem is that as mySQL locks up trying to handle a 1gig database, it locks out all AM and Tabulas queries, which is crappy. Oh well. Live and learn :)


(But good news! We reached over 11,000,000 data entries for AM with 10,000+ users! Too bad we make no money...)

Edit: All done :) AM database is now down to a lively 600 megs. Yummy.

I was typing at the computer and needed someplace to put my UNC id. Naturally I stuck it in my hat.

It's a bad habit. I'll stick stuff in my hat so I don't have to hold something (like a pen), but then I'll forget about it.

So naturally today after I stuck my ID in my hat, I forgot I had put it there. I frantically went searching for my ID, thinking I had lost it ...


The sad thing is that I've done this multiple times before. Sigh.

currently sipping on some fruitopia, chilling to mint royale's "from rusholme with love" (which was the song playing in vanilla sky in the scene when tom cruise is running through the deserted times square) while programming for tabulas.



life is good. mp3/movie upload should be arriving soon. i've had to do a nasty shortcut to get around the safe mode restrictions on the primary tabulas server (boo to safe mode).

I had written a rather long entry. It was filled with information on future features and answers to philosophical questions while being balanced with a few wry cynical jokes. It had perfect flow and good structure to give it a clear message. It was the best entry in the world.

But MS Windows decided to bluescreen me and so thus post is forever lost. I'm kind of sad, as it was a really nice long post. Oh well.

So this post only exists to serve as a tribute to the best post in the world. In the words of the great Jack Black (ok so i modified it, who cares):

This is not the greatest post in the world, no...
This is just a tribute,...
You gotta believe me,
and I wish you were there
Just a matter of opinion...
but it was the best f'ing post in the world!

I don't believe in re-writing posts; I just lose the motivation and I just seem to "force" the meat of the post out without the flow.

Then again, my entries don't seem to flow normally anyways.

Played football with some NC State and one Dukie... and of course, about 10 UNCers :D

3 hours! 3 hours!!!! Totally grueling. But I had a blast, even though I'm gonna be sore as a mofo tomorrow morning.

In any case, I've been listening a lot to Yellowcard (still).

Lyrics to "Only One:"

Broken this fragile thing now
And I can't, I can't pick up the pieces
And I've thrown my words all around
But I can't, I can't give you a reason

I feel so broken up (so broken up)
And I give up (I give up)
I just want to tell you so you know

Here I go, scream my lungs out and try to get to you
You are my only one
I let go, there's just no one that gets me like you do
You are my only, my only one

Made my mistakes, let you down
And I can't, I can't hold on for too long
Ran my whole life in the ground
And I can't, I can't get up when you're gone

And something's breaking up (breaking up)
I feel like giving up (like giving up)
I won't walk out until you know

Here I go, scream my lungs out and try to get to you
You are my only one
I let go, there's just no one who gets me like you do
You are my only my only one

Here I go so dishonestly
Leave a note for you my only one
And I know you can see right through me
So let me go and you will find someone

Here I go, scream my lungs out and try to get to you
You are my only one
I let go, there's just no one, no one like you
You are my only, my only one
My only one
My only one
My only one
You are my only, my only one

Currently feeling pretty discouraged with a lot of things. Won't really get into them right now. Maybe later.

I wanted to write an entry about a fortune I used to carry around, but I cannot seem to find this fortune. Instead I found the following items:

3 receipts totalling ~60 won spent on photo development while I was in Korea for pictures of that summer ... and this was only over a span of a week. I must of spent close to $300USD at that one place at CoEx in Seoul...

One ticket stub for a flight from Seoul to Narita for that same summer. Realize that these two items are from the summer of 2002 ... I really need to clean out my wallet.

Anyways, back to the fortune. One time while we were eating at Eastern Lights, Sung (one of my roommates) got a fortune that said "Give a kiss to the person next to you." Unfortunately for him, the only people next to him were guys.

I stole the fortune from Sung just in case I find myself sitting next to a cute girl. I would pretend to get this fortune ... I mean, who argues with fortunes? She would be forced to accept a kiss from yours truly. It was a foolproof plan.

Until I lost the stupid fortune. Instead I found another fortune I saved (that I had actually gotten) that said "You are the guiding star of his existence." This is quite troublesome. I mean, I seem to have trouble attracting the ladies, but when it comes to men ... OH BOY. NO PROBLEM!

Just kidding. The ladies love cool Roy. (LL Cool R.. HAR HAR).



I also found $20 hidden in a "secret" part of my wallet. I have no idea when I put it there ... but it made me very happy. I love it when I find money in my pants pockets ... I should hide money from myself so I can "find" it more often.

Yes, that would a good idea.

There's a video of me that was accidentally shared when people tried the "Get File" feature for AIM of me on my old webcam, singing along with Baby Vox's Ya Ya Ya.

Well, I'll let the conversation speak for itself:

DaDuCk: my friend saw the yayaya video
thug4life roy: uh oh
DaDuCk: a friend from school and he was like
DaDuCk: haha its funny how it seems like hes singing the girsl voice
DaDuCk: i was like hes not lip syncing hes really singing
DaDuCk: and he kinda opened his mouth
DaDuCk: in shock
DaDuCk: for like 5 secon
DaDuCk: haha yea
DaDuCk: and then laughed

Yes, it's true. I do have horrible videos of me singing in pitch with the chorus of that Baby VOX song (download above and just listen to 30 seconds).

I really need to hit puberty soon.

Being typical males, me and my three roommates (jeez, I'm starting to say that although Crisp isn't really a real roommate) are always jockeying for the "alpha male" position. Of course, it's always amusing because they KNOW that I am the ultimate alpha male ... in any case, we've grown quite accustomed to putting each other down and talking trash to one another (all in good fun, except when it comes to Sung of course, har har).

We've decided that when we fight, we're going to have a "fight song." And guess what song it is?

Black Eyes Peas' Where is the Love. Har har.

(boring stuff ahead about Tabulas)I really need some sort of "account reclamation" sort of thing. A place where users who have not even verified their accounts can remove themselves from the databases, and a place where new users can just "take" their IDs instead of being issued a higher-number one that you'll never take. This, of course, would not work for those users who have created entries or posted images. Only those who had not verified their accounts. I mean, what is up with almost 2000 users not verifying their accounts? Jeez.

A suggestion was made today that I allow for a css tag into custom templates that would allow you to still use the interface (so you can "plug-and-play" CSS files into custom templates). The only reason why this hasn't been implemented is because the default Taublas templates.. well.. suck. I really want to move them over to completely CSS-driven with semantic markup. But I'm too lazy. So there goes that plan for a while.

ARGH THERE'S SO MUCH TO DO. I need to do a 'feature freeze' soon and work on making the existing features better. But I just get so excited on working on new features ... blech. [/break]

So I have to defend myself from these LIES perpetrated by the evil Seongjin.

So apparently I'm the "biggest baby" cause I'm still sore from football. Well, let's take a look at WHY I'm sore.

While we were playing, I suggested that Seongjin take over the helm of the quarterback for our team for a little bit (our offense was stagnating and at least if Sung sucked, I could talk trash to him).

First play .. I take 4 steps out then look. Seong throws the SLOWEST pass at me and LEADS ME INTO A GROUP OF DEFENDERS. Needless to say, the moment I touched that ball, I was wrapped up and slammed to the ground.

Second play, Seong does the SAME THING AGAIN. He leads me into a group of the defense (he lead me by throwing the pass ahead of where I was running so I would HAVE to run and catch it ... in the middle of the defense).

Now I wouldn't suspect anything, except he's throwing these passes extra-slow, as if he WANTS the defense to get a chance to react.

So sorry Seongjin. Sorry if I'm sore. I'm sorry if you led me into the defense and got me torn up >:O






:) We're doing football again fo'shore. I had a BLAST.

I'm slowly starting to make Tabulas better. The paid beta accounts are almost all out... down to 5. Hopefully I can sell those by Friday.

I'm working on two new features for Tabulas, and then I'm going to go into a feature freeze to fix up some of the existing problems with Tabulas. There's been a lot of pressure on me to conform to some standards.

I really want to make Tabulas completely standards-compliant on all levels. Adopt CSS 1.0, XHTML 1.0 Transitional, RSS 2.0, Atom/Echo ... make it all nice and easy to use. But that takes a lot of time. A lot of it requires overhauling the existing systems.

But in any case, once i get done with these two features (one for paid users, the other for free users), I'm going to revamp the default templates for Tabulas; try to make them semantically and technically XHTML 1.0 Transitionally correct. Then I'll fix up the RSS feeds to conform to RSS 2.0 (instead of the outdated 1.0).

Gosh, I've been so busy. Lucky for me, my next set of exams doesn't fall until October, so I have a lot of time to work the kinks out on Tabulas and TokkiProject. I haven't done an ounce of work on Tokki, and I feel incredibly guilty - I feel like I'm leaving a lot of people hanging on that project. Well, maybe not.

A friend of mine wanted a website done for her organization on campus, so I'm doing that as a side project. It's actually a somewhat complex project, but it's so nice to start on something new ... a clean slate... something that doesn't require hacking code to make something work with past coding.

Sorry for the long boring post. I'll get around to writing funny stuff again once again.

I'm currently masquerading as a student at a grossly overpriced school in Durham. And as a student who pays too much, I'm attempting to get my money's education by using these nice computers at Perkin Library.

Hopefully my friend Hao gets out of his exam soon so he can rescue me from this hellhole that is known as Duke University.

I've been pondering this post for a while, but finally decided to write it after reading ben and phil's respective posts...

My carefree nonchalant attitude that dominated the first two years of college have been swept away by the lapping waves of reality. I'm pretty concerned about my future and what I'm going to be doing in the future.

It's never really occured to me, but I've always viewed certain things as being a "end" to it all. For example, during this summer, I was thinking that if I get a good MCAT score, then I could get into medical school, and then I would be "set."

It's akin to rock climbing, thinking you've reached the summit, and realizing you're only at a small cliff. Just taking a short breath while you continue your climb.

It's disheartening to me that no matter what I do, I will probably never find the closure in life that I want. No matter how successful one becomes, our human nature demands that we do more. That's why these celebrities and rich CEOs never find an end to their lives. They have to always push forward or they'll feel like a failure.

Maybe this is why so many find comfort in religion. Maybe that's why I've been slowly creeping back towards the church. Maybe I long for some type of greater reason, something that'll bring closure. BOOM, you're dead, and you're judged. There is your closure. You either make it into heaven or you don't.

This has been the real big thing on my mind lately - just realizing that there is no short answer ... no shortcut through life to that "nice" job where you can just live. We'll always strive for more. I can say right now, "I want to just find a $50K/year job with health and dental." But it won't be enough. I fear I'll fall into the trap of becoming a corporate drone and becoming bored with my job.

These problems I have now of the future are not going to be solved by getting into medical school or finding a job. They'll only be solved when I realize that I need to happy with my life. Take comfort in the fact that I have loving parents, great friends, and some skills I can apply to make my miniscule contribution to humanity (har har).

But yeah. It's been a downer.
----------------------------------------
Lucy Liu... Is she hot or not?

The jury remains out (in my mind, at least). I keep gravitating. Her freckles are so cute.






Kill Bill was amazing. The soundtrack was amazing as well.

Kill Bill was amazing. The amalgam of genres... the style... the movie was short of the witty dialogue I had expected (ala Pulp Fiction), but made it up so much in the action and the music.

I've uploaded the song that plays in the final scene when Lucy Liu and Uma Thurman fight in the snow... the song is amazing. It's a mixture of the Western gunslinging feel ... perfect for that final scene.

I've also uploaded the trailer song in Wonderful Days. I'd been looking to download it when it first came out... I finally got it. It's called "Mother Universe." Go check it out in my content page.

In any case, Chris and Yush have been talking forever about writing a screenplay. I'd like to write my own screenplay sometime. Not for the purpose of making it into a blockbuster... but just to. It'd be fun.

feeling pretty depressed.

so much potential. potential that's not even remotely been fulfilled.

I went home today to mow the lawn and vacuum the house since my dad's in Korea.

There's some joy in doing menial tasks - it's just you and a simple task. A beginning and an end. You get such satisfaction looking back at your small task ... seeing it completed. It also gives you time to think about stuff.

It's been a pretty interesting few days ... nothing life-changing, but I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. I'm pretty happy with my life at the moment, but there's a lot of grey areas ... no definition yet. Originally this worried me, but I'm not going to sweat it anymore. I'll be alright.

I've always had a charmed life - luck always seems to be on my side. Nothing really bad has ever happened to me - the bad things in my life are a direct result of my stupidity more than anything.

In any case, I was thinking about how luck and life seem to run in parallels - it's so much easier to deal with life when luck is in your favor. Kind of like poker.

Thinking about my obsession with poker ... I've come to realize that my love for poker has a lot to do with the fact that poker is a microcosm of life. The game relies heavily on intuition - the gut feeling. But, it is also incredibly helpful to have a good string of luck. Anyone can do well in poker (life) with the right luck, but certain people with good intuition can also do well in life even without luck.

There's some solace in leaving things to fate (God) to deal you a good hand of cards (events). And when those good cards (events) fall into place, everything seems to be perfect. You're on a high. But when you get bad cards (events), then you have to be sure you can remain your composure; you do not want a bad even setting off otehr bad events so you play on tilt (act like a whiny bitch whenever life does't go your way).

Ok, time for some Neochina with Alex, Neeraj, and Xun.

Here are the top few ways to get on my nerves:

#1: BECOME UNRELIABLE!

I cannot STAND people who back out on plans. For real. I'm a pretty laid-back guy most of the time, but I cannot stand it when people back out on plans. It aggravates me to no end. Do NOT make plans you cannot stick to! I have un-friended people over this pet peeve. This causes tons of problems to planners ... when you expect X people to attend, and then people back out. RSVP is for a reason!

#2: NEVER BE AVAILABLE!
If you're a friend, I would imagine that you should ... well.. hang out with your friends. I realize that some people are really busy with their lives, but I find it hard to believe that people cannot come out to events with their friends when asked. This specifically applies to guys who suddenly decide to immerse themselves with their studies and never be available to do anything regardless of how early we make plans (or how much we try to accomodate them)

#3: DON'T FINISH A JOKE
I really really really really cannot stand it when people start telling a joke or start talking about one and then won't finish it. Really. I get angry over this. It bothers me to no end. I don't care if the joke sucks, TELL IT TO ME. I NEED TO HEAR THE PUNCHLINE.

#4: TALKING IN MOVIES
I have paid $7.50 to watch a movie in silence. I don't care if you're having a baby girl or if your long-lost friend has called you on your cell phone. SHUT UP. I also hate it when people "shout" to the screen during the movie. Idiot, they can't hear you. Clapping and talking during credits is ok.

For some reason, I've been wanting to go out and start taking pictures again. I was looking at some digital cameras online (noteably the D60 and the 10D). I was seriously thinking about saving up for the 10D when I noticed this tidbit:

The EOS-10D has a metal EF mount and thus supports all Canon EF group lenses (plus some older as manual focus and compatible third party lenses), remember that because the sensor is smaller than a 35 mm frame all lenses are subject to a field of view crop (focal length multiplier) of 1.6x, thus a 28 mm lens provides the same field of view of a 44.8 mm.

Whoa, nelly. That really sucks.

Then Borst reminded me that if I wanted a full-35mm CCD, I'd have to pay $11,000 for the other Canon camera...

Of course, this led to a discussion between Borst and I of whether or not this was advantageous ("it's a feature, not a bug, damnit!"). I mean... you're getting 48mm from a standard 24mm lens! Free zooming!!! Haha. Who wants all that extraneous information on the outside of the frame ANYWAYS?

"Roy, you're all hype. Nothing but hype. " - Crispdawg

Ain't that the truth...

So Tabulas has started to get slower. Besides saving up to rent out another new server for a year to help alleviate the load on the site, I've been looking at huge bottlenecks within the site.

The primary users table is an incredibly high-probability place for clashing locks. I've had to move the user status information to the sessions (which helps alleviate load on the user). This helped the performance of the site minorly, but I'm more interested in larger gains ... until it hit me.

Duh, why don't I just cache the main page? There are seriously some high-level queries on the main page (which displays the most recent data) that I could move to a cache that would improve performance. Each time that page was getting loaded, there were something like 60 queries sent to mySQL. Not very efficient.

So I did. The main page is now handled by a 2-minute cache (which helps performance A BUNCH). This got me to thinking though ...

How nice it would be to start storing the more requested data directly in the RAM instead of storing files on the disk. Even spinning up the disk drives for data is slow for a flat file (on a widespread server level) ... ideally the most recent data could be stored directly in RAM (at most it would take ... 10K of RAM, which is nothing). This would help a bunch in performance, but I'm not sure if PHP can handle this. Ill have to take a look into it.

I know LiveJournal's Brad moved a lot of stuff over to memcached, which I believe is a system to help alleviate mySQL loads by storing the more-recent data directly in RAM. This is a good idea, although I would be skeptical to move a whole site over to it, it would be nice for storing highly requested lookups like userid -->>username lookups on Tabulas.

Let's put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men -- the poorest -- would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1, the sixth would pay $3, the seventh $7, the eighth $12, the ninth $18, and the tenth man -- the richest -- would pay $59.

That's what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement -- until one day, the owner threw them a curve (in tax language a tax cut).

"Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20." So now dinner for the ten only cost $80.00.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So the first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free. But what about the other six -- the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his "fair share?"

The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, Then the fifth man and the sixth man would end up being PAID to eat their meal. So the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so the fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid $5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $12, leaving the tenth man with a bill of $52 instead of his earlier $59. Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to eat for free.

But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. "I only got a dollar out of the $20," declared the sixth man who pointed to the tenth. "But he got $7!"

"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man, "I only saved a dollar, too . . . It's unfair that he got seven times more than me!".

"That's true!" shouted the seventh man, "why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!"

"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison, "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn't show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered, a little late what was very important. They were FIFTY-TWO DOLLARS short of paying the bill! Imagine that!

And that ... is how the tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table anymore.

Where would that leave the rest?

I've been watching an inordinate amount of movies and TV lately. This is probably the reason why I've had a dropoff in my web productivity. In any case, I watch a lot of TV. And lately McDonald's has launched a new campaign to seem "hip" by hiring a bunch of hip-hop artists to dance around and sing in their commercials.

Now I would like to think I'm not a mindless lemming; that my eating habits are not controlled by some ad executive in Manhattan, but by my OWN VOLITION. Damnit! I'm a MAN!

Unfortunately, ever since these McDonald commercials have started airing, I've had a craving for some McDonald's. Damnit.

Of course, I could try to pass off the craving by saying, "Oh, they're doing the Monopoly promotion" or "Oh, I can get free Best Buy Bucks!" But I'm a man, and I will admit it: those damn advertising executives have trapped me in their mind trickery.

So I walked about 20 minutes to the closest McDonald's for some lunch. I enjoyed a Filet O'Fish Meal (Supersized, of course, I am, afterall, an American) with a side order of six Chicken McNuggets.

I don't care what you haters say, I *love* Mickey D's Chicken Nuggets! LOVE!

So for the advertising agency that does McDonald's commercials, congratulations. You managed to ensnare me with your "cool" commercial. I can only hope to be "cool" by association now.


McDonald's: I'M LOVING IT!

So UNC's e-mail has been down since yesterday. For those of you who are not tech-savvy enough to follow the status of UNC IMAP e-mail, I'll provide a synopsis.

Update 1:
E-mail is down. We've called up the one person who knows how to fix it. The rest of us are busy playing Snood. We're sure it's not a big problem.

Update 2:
Whoa, the hardware failed! Lucky for us, we have backup servers to... oh sh't. Wait. No, we don't. F'ck.

Update 3:
Sorry, we were playing Snood all night. Who checks their e-mail in the middle of the night anyways? Um, we better get back to fixing the problem. We're sure it's not hard to fix...

Update 4:
Read Update 2. But we better explain more. We found out now only was it hardware, but the underlying programs were corrupted. But luckily we have uncorrupted backups of ... oh sh'it. Wait. No, we don't. F'ck. We're beginning to think this is a serious problem.

Update 5:
Ahh, we still can't fix it! We've decided to play "pass the blame game" by now bringing in every company that had a role in servicing the original server (4 companies in all!). Now we're all sitting around the room while one person attempts to fix the damn thing. Thank goodness we have backup servers... oh sh'it. Wait. No, we don't. F'ck.

We're not really sure when e-mail will be back. BUT DON'T WORRY, YOU CAN STILL SEND E-MAIL!!

So we're (UNC guys) are playing football against a combined Duke/NC State team this Saturday since they backed on out last weekend.

I was thinking of ways to HYPE our team up, and I suggested we sing the Monday Night Football theme when we get there so we could be HYPED.

But my ROOMMATES THINK IT IS A STUPID IDEA. BUT I THINK THEY'RE STUPID. MY IDEA IS AWESOME. When they originally expressed negativity towards my idea, I was willing to compromise. Maybe they wanted to sing the Fox Theme song... ARGH.

So anyone who wants to sing the Monday Night Football theme with me, can.

What do YOU think?

I've discovered a new "virus" on Tabulas. I have called it the "flooded posts virus." While scouring through Tabulas' for some juicy gossip on my friend's Tabulas', I decided to look at their "friends page."

To my dismay, all my posts came up (ok well... maybe I wasn't really dismayed). Basically for anybody who lists me as a friend, their "friends" page became the "flooded roy posts" page. Haha. Sucks for YOU!

. . .

The other day I was in the Undergrad Library comp lab, trying to print out some documents. Apparently half of the printers were broken, so each printer was servicing about 40 computers. What's horrible is that on my side of the comp lab, an Adobe document was stuck in the printer queue.

Here's the printer queue:
[img:44801]
What's weird is that some Adobe documents will take forever to print (send to printer) while others go really fast. In any case, I was getting tired of waiting for the printers. I wanted to get back to my room and watch TV.

I waited about two minutes, said "screw this," then bumped the priority on my document to high. This allowed my document to print right in the middle of the other print job. Ha ha!

I love knowing how to do stuff like that. Those other suckers were left waiting for at least another 5 minutes while that Adobe document was printing!

Heheheheh.

(P.S. If you wanna know how to boost your priority levels at any UNC comp lab so your document will print before everyone else's, let me know).

Instructions for boosting your document privileges so you don't have to wait in line to get your document printed (use only if you're in a rush):

Step 1: Set document to print
Step 2: Go to Start » Control Panel » Printers
This should open up a screen that displays all the documents waiting to printer in the printer queue.
Step 3: Find your document and then right-click the document. It'll pop-up a window.
Step 4: One of the options is "Priority." By default the scroller will be all the way on the left (1). Scroll to the right (highest priority) then hit "Ok" to close the window. Close out of the printer window.
Step 5: Walk over to the printer and grab your paper :D

Enjoy.

. . .

X-ClientAddr: 127.0.0.1
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 00:01:14 GMT
From: admin@localhost.net
Subject: Site Usage Notification for site tabulas.com


To XXX@XXXX.com:


Your site tabulas.com has exceeded its
bandwidth quota in the period beginning on 2003-10-01.
Your quota is set to 52554629120 bytes (48 gigabytes), and
your site has consumed 1323995104 bytes beyond that quota.

And there's still a good 13 days left in the month... I guess this is a sign that the MP3/MPG/misc file uploading feature is working a little bit _TOO_ well...

It's one of those glorious fall days. The sun's out, the air's crisp and cool, and you can feel change in the air.

But for some reason, it seems to be a downer day. Nothing in particular, but just the mood of the day seems burdensome. It's one of those indescrible feelings you have ... one where pangs of guilt from past wrongs mixes in with the regret of missed chances and the jealousy towards those more "successful" of you...

You try your best to keep your head up and to keep smilin', but it just does no good. The burden just hangs over your head. Maybe it's the lack of progress. Too much routine becomes boring. You need excitement. New people.

You just want something new. You don't know what it is. But just ... something different. Nothing like the life you have now. New people. New situations. New outlook on life. New skills. The constant self-doubts and self-questions over. You have something new. Something real. You have new people to trade wits with. New situations. New comedic moments. No more of the drudgery of your life. A new slate of problems. The ones you have now you don't feel like you can solve. But perhaps a new set of problems and drama and life difficulties. Maybe you can solve those!

come on, Roy you can do better than this YOU cannot continue to write esoteric posts in order to vent our your frustrations in life YOU have to man up life will not wait for YOU quit waiting for a silver platter with everything handed on it quit running from the truth quit running quit running quit running quit running face your problems analyze solve solve solve solve

Game over man, game over!






Changes?

Me, Yush, Chris and Nasty Nate decided to hit up the NC STATE FAIR. Apparently it was the first time FOR ALL THREE PEOPLE... why?! The State Fair is an event that EVERYONE should go to, especially freshmen. It's a once-a-year event ... where you can go and have some fun and waste money on GREAT food.

(Note, ALL pictures (and MORE) are posted at my tokkiproject account.)

Of course, we decided to do a "pre-game" at Bojangles (reasoning: if we get semi-filled stomachs, then we won't waste so much money on overpriced food at fair ... of course this turned out to be a false assumption).

Once we got to the fair, I kicked things off with a huge corn dog.

Yush took this picture, but the funny thing is not the fact that I'm making a stupid expression, it's TONYLEE's expression. I think he hates me :(

(Why do I always look so stupid on the Internet? I think this might be the reason people are never impressed to meet me. I mean, I dork it up big time on the Internet; girls probably have the WORST image of me. I NEED TO WORK ON THIS. GIRLS === GOOD)

Back to the State Fair ... me, Chris and Yush:

Chris winning a nice big dog after ONE shot on the basketball game. He made it look SO EASY!! One shot ... IN!!

The irony is that Crispdawg (Chris) was commenting earlier about how much it would suck to win one of those huge dolls cause you would have to carry it around all night. Haha. He got what he deserved.

Dude, Chris Y. is crazy.

He found one of those water gun games that cost only $1 (special for yesterday; all the other games were $2). He kept playing the game and kept getting really hyped about winning... I think he spent at least $8 on thet game while I was with him; he kept going back again and again. Hilarious.

FINALLY THERE ARE MORE ENTRIES (34673) IN TABULAS THAN IMAGES (34390).

This has never happened. And it took 7 months+ for this to happen.

hahahahahahaa.


Man, the weather is beautiful outside. Don't want to study. But so much to look forward to once I'm done with my exam tomorrow:

1.) Poker with the BOYZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
2.) Drafting for Fantasy Basketball (Soob is gonna get pwned this season)
3.) FALL BREAK (WASHINGTON D.C. WITH YOUR KOREAN ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BBQ, HERE I COME)
4.) Life :)
5.) Time to release Tokki (all you "friends" of mine will be granted nice fat free accounts) (Side note: Tokki is a cool online gallery system so you can post your pictures online)

Note: Sung has joined the ranks of the Inextricables.

Ah, this just happened. Our dear roommate Sung, upon watching the "Radio" movie trailer on TV, said the following:

"Man, I would watch that movie if it were NC-17."

. . .

Today while I was studying, I caught myself thinking, "Jeez, it would be so cool to have these chemistry notes in XML format!"

Yeah, just another sign my life is dominated by web development.

Sometimes you're at the top of your academic game. You're in the groove... you study well and you blow exams out of the water. Nothing can stop you!! POW! Another exam down! BRING IT ON.

Unfortunately this is not one of those days for me. I had an advanced organic exam today ... and let's just say that the test was impossible.

I guess the first omen of things to come was the fact that our professor had written "Good luck" in the instructions.

The exam was _impossible_. Nothing in the outline was covered in the exam; it was all this other crap that I had no idea how to do.




This was really the hardest exam I had ever taken in my life. I was worried that maybe I completely missed a chapter and that everyone else was doing all the other problems; when we went to turn in our exams, I noticed that almost everyone else had a blank first page, just like me!

So yeah. I'm gonna go sleep. When I wake up, I will pretend this was all a bad dream and go on with my day :D


(But the weather rocks! I love beautiful weather).

There is a great website called GroupHug.us where people post their deepest secrets (anonymously).

I cannot stop reading these. I doubt you can either. It's like reading people's intimate diaries. Wow.

Here is one that I relate to pretty well:

I act like I'm ambitious and hardworking but I mostly waste time and pretend to be going somewhere. I'd rather just sleep and have money given to me.

elliot smith, rest in peace.

in loving memory, the lyrics to one of my favorite songs by elliot smith:

Miss Misery by Elliot Smith
I'll fake it through the day
With some help from Johnny Walker Red
Send the poison rain down the drain
To put bad thoughts in my head
Two tickets torn in half
And a lot of nothin' to do
Do you miss me, Miss Misery
Like you say you do

A man in the park
Read the lines in my hand
Told me I'm strong
Hardly ever wrong I said "
Man you mean--"

You had plans for both of us
That involved a trip out of town
To a place I've seen in a magazine
That you'd left lyin' around

I don't have you with me
But I keep a good attitude
Do you miss me, Miss Misery
Like you say you do

I know you'd rather see me gone
Than to see me the way that I am
But I am in your life any way

Next door the T.V.'s flashing
Blue frames on the wall
It's a comedy of errors you see
It's about taking a fall

To vanish into oblivion
It's easy to do
And I tried to leave but you know me
I come back when you want me to.

Do you miss me, Miss Misery
Like you say you do

I AM POSTING FROM MS. CHANG AND LILLIA'S APT!

More later. I'm coming back home in a little bit :D

I got back tonight from Lillia and Alice's (or as I like to call her: Ms. Chang!) crib up in DC. The drive up there and back was boring. But more on that later.

As a "gag" gift, I got them both t-shirts so they NEVER forget their heritage. Check out the pictures:

HO HO! I LOVE these shirts.

GOT ROY?!

We went to Il Mee Restaurant in Annandale (AND I WAS STUPID AND FORGOT TO BRING YUSH'S DIGITAL CAMERA ... ARGH!!!), which is an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ. You take the meat back and cook it at your table... BUFFET (or as Koreans like to say, bu-phay)! Amazing. I need to go up there again. So good.

We then watched "Bend it like Beckham" and I fell asleep. I never thought driving was tiring... ho ho ho.

This morning I woke up late and then Lillia and I went to Chipotle's for brunch, and then I left. Although I didn't do much, I got to see Lillia and Alice, which was my plan :D. Great times!

----------------

I came back, showered at my dorm, dropped off all the Shilla Bakery bread my mom had me buy when I was up there (Korean bakery), had dinner at home, then rushed over to listen to a speaker at Manna (Duke's bible study). Then I came back, rented a few movies from Blockbuster, and made it a BLOCKBUSTER NIGHT!

I'm pretty exhausted right now from driving all day, but I think I'll go work a bit on Tabulas and Tokki a bit. Don't want to let those projects go to waste :D.

---------------

It's official. I don't hate No Doubt blindly. I really thought I liked "It's my Life" by No Doubt (which would make it the first song I liked by them), but I found out that the song is actually a cover (which makes sense, since the guitar riffs seem to be from the 80's).

I DON'T HATE THEM BLINDLY! I JUST HATE THEIR MUSIC!
--------------

Warning: If you are Roy's mom or dad, please substitute all numbers greater than 65 in this entry to 65. Thanks :D
--------------------------------------------------------
I will start off this post with a story. Two roommates. One driving on I-85 N towards Chapel Hill. The other, driving I-85 S towards Durham.

Our I-85 S hero (we'll call him "Roy") takes great effort to avoid the police: always checking his rearview mirror, checking to see the cars he passes ARE NOT UNMARKED CARS (haha, SOOB), making sure he does not speed too excessively when he sees a suspected speed trap area, always speeding in groups... Our hero, "Roy" managed to drive back from DC to Chapel Hill in 4.5 hours, even with traffic on I-450 and I-95 backed up all the way down to Richmond (meaning he drove very fast from Richmond to Durham). He did not get a speeding ticket, even in speed-anal VA.

Our other hero, who drove I-85 N towards Chapel Hill... we will call him "Sung." Our hero "Sung" got pulled over for driving 70 in a 55. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. And this was a work zone, meaning not only does he have to pay a $100 fine, but a $250 fine on top of it. Ouch.

The sad thing is I bet Sung is more pissed about the fact that we're all gonna make fun of him mercilessly for this rather than the fact he got a $350 speeding ticket. I know I would fear the SOOBER's taunts. Not to mention SARs and Crispdawg's tauntings.
-------------------------------------------------------
So now that I'm driving, I'm beginning to understand some of the "hidden languages" of driving. Driving to and from D.C. gave me some insight to the "law of survival" on the road.

Let us, for a moment, assume we are in Africa; that is, the highway is equivalent to the great plains of Africa. Now, us drivers are the gazelle. The peaceful gazelle who wish to simply graze, live, and prance around in groups. But we cannot. The evil police (aka lions) prey on us for meat. They NEED us.

Now, when driving on long-haul trips, you know how you find a "buddy" to drive with? This buddy is not picked for any particular reason, except that they are going in the same direction and can understand the hidden languages of driving. This "group" that you form is useful for various reasons. Not only does it give you a peace of mind ("oh, I'm driving up with a "friend!""), but this group can also be used defensively against the evil lions of the plains (e.g. COPS and SPEED TRAPS).

For example, on the drive up, I was a part of a 4-car caravan. We all drove up I-85 (notorious for speed traps) in VA ... we all drove on the left hand side in a tight formation. The first car would "lead" and would be responsible for spotting speed traps ahead. We would all follow tightly ...

Now in theory, if a cop was really clever, they *could* catch us speeding. That's why we have the group formation. If a cop were to be hiding well, only the first and last members of the group would be vulnerable; the ones in the middle could not be caught (because the radar detector would only pick up the first one, or the cop would pull out and catch the last person of the group).

Of course, it is required that every car in the caravan at one point be in the front or the back. This system worked out pretty well because now it's not 4 cars that are straining to watch for speed traps; it's only really two cars at a time. TEAMWORK!

(I think the saddest moment though is when a car has to "leave" the caravan. It's like this short friendship that you made with a complete stranger whom you only know by car model ... and you have to leave them! Sadness!)

But be warned! If you leave the safety of the group, you WILL BE CAUGHT. Sometimes going 20+ over the speed limit isn't enough for some people. Two times while driving back on two different occasions; two cars left our caravan to zoom ahead.

Both times, I pased them 5 miles down the road, caught by the po-lice.

The group mentality works, fellas. Stick with the group and you will succeed!

Sometimes I try to fool people into thinking that my car has a remote alarm system by imitating the blip blip sound whenever I walk towards to my car with them.


No one is ever fooled.

I spent the past two days working on a new feature for Tabulas: "blocking" or "banning" users from viewing your journal.

This is a weird feature in a sense because I've never believed in policing the communities I create, but it's become a necessity since there are some people who love to harass others using these online journaling sites.

Implementing this feature was tough: the only way of fully authenticating users (or the best way rather) is to use someone's IP address. An IP address is akin to a phone number; it "uniquely" identifies your computer's virtual location with a series of numbers. For instance, my IP address is: 152.23.203.236.

The problem here is that the IP address information is sent by the browser whenever it visits a site and can be spoofed. This means that the only real way of authenticating users is not really foolproof.

The other pure method of banning a user is using the Tabulas username; if you're logged in and your Tabulas username is listed in someone's block list, you're denied entry into the site. But this isn't really useful in itself; someone can simply log-out and then view the journal.

I was briefly throwing around the idea of sending a cookie to someone's computer if they've been added to a blocklist; this could potentially lock out non-comp savvy users so they can never access the site (as long as they keep the cookie). The only problem is that this requires me keeping a log of cookies issued and to what site they were for; what if someone removes a ban and the person who was previously banned still has the cookie?

Too much work.

You'll also notice that if you're banned, Tabulas simply returns an error message and not a blatant "you've been banned" message. I've learned that it's easier to let people think there's been a error with the system (who won't believe in computer errors this day in age) than to confront someone head-on and say 'YOU'VE BEEN BANNED.'

I find when I do the latter, it's almost an invitation for people to try to get around the banning. Very passive-aggressive of me. Darn.

Edit: Man, I'm pretty stupid. I didn't even talk about what I meant to talk about.

When I was doing this IP banning feature, a big question came up in my mind as to how to store each IP address. I *could* create a full table for it and store each IP address as an entry with a unique ID ... but this would create yet ANOTHER table in the Tabulas database (the Tabulas database has something like 60 tables, it's ridiculous). Instead I attached on two more fields onto an existing table; I store all the IP addresses and banned usernames in one field, separated by commas.

To break down the methodology: (numbers in brackets indicate step number)

[1] Select comma-separated data of banned IPs and banned usernames (two fields in one table) for selected user
[2] Throw that data into memory and explode (create a hash of all values)
[3] Use php in_array() to quickly sort through the hash to figure out if the user is banned. If so, return a "error" page.

I would of used to do it like this:
[1] Take IP address from user and run a SELECT COUNT(*) query from mySQL to see if any IP addresses matched.
[2] If so, then fail.

Although the method I use is a bit "longer" in terms of CPU, it takes a load off of the mySQL database. I can add almost unlimited number of 'front-end' PHP computers to handle the output of the site, but mySQL has poor clustering support. This means that I'll eventually have a server cluster where I have one mySQL server and tons of PHP server. In any case, the idea is to take a load off of mySQL since load-balancing with PHP will be 10x easier.

I finally took advantage of my RSS feed and synced my website with my Tabulas; everytime I update my Tabulas, my website changes too.

And I have the potential of crossposting to my LJ and Xanga :D

Oh the joys of knowing how to set up quick tools to take advantage of your laziness!

(I have decidedly posted this to my Xanga and LJ just so I can have the satisfaction of knowing that with a few clicks of a button, I publish to 4 separate websites)

I've been aware of the shortcomings of the the autolinking feature for quite some time now; the main problems that autolinking had (that Allen had mentioned earlier and dodo recently brought back to my attention) is that autolinking would create autolinks of links.

A quick background: Autolinking allows you to associate words in your entries to websites; whenever that word appears in your journal, it links. For example, I have an autolink for the word AudioMatch. (You see what it did?)

The problem is when I wanted to do something like this directly in my entry:

I love <a href="http://www.audiomatch.net/?view&user=roy">my AudioMatch</a>

The autolinking feature would create the following HTML:

I love <a href="http://www.audiomatch.net/?view&user=roy">my <a href="http://www.audiomatch.net">AudioMatch</a></a>

Basically the solution required that autolinks ignore data already existing between <a> tags. But how to do this? Originally I was thinking I could use some really complex pattern matching using preg_replace(), but that would require me reading the Perl Regular Expressions document. No. No good.

Then it hit me. Why didn't I get a precursor function that would go through the data first, find all instances of links and remove them (leaving a flag for later). Then I would run the autolinks, then simply replace the data back after autolinking using the flags. I used the md5() function to quickly generate tags ... and it worked wonders.

I've actually really proud of this solution; it doesn't require me messing around too heavily with the perl regular expressions, and it works perfectly :D.

I've uploaded the function I use for autolinking; go give it a gander. You can see how crappy I script! Ha ha!

I think I'm going to start journaling more about web development on this site; or I may just get unlazy and actually do something with the 'learn' section on my website. Who knows.

Problem solved. Now to go learn about weird chemical things for my exam on Wednesday :(

Nasty Nate came over after dinner and comandeered SAR's computer.

He discovered the joys of hotornot and infatuasian. We all discovered how harsh Nasty Nate is when rating other girls.

While I would give an "average" score of 5 or 6, Nasty Nate insisted on 1 or 2. He is incredibly harsh with rating.

For example:

::Scene: Nasty Nate starts clicking through the website::
NN: "Umm.. okay...."
NN: "...get out of here!"
:clicks 1:

NN: "She seems like she'd be nice."
:clicks 3:

NN: "Whoa, she looks like she'd be a skank."
:clicks 5:

So what is the lesson learned here?

Nasty Nate enjoys rating skanks higher than girls with nice personalities.

Time to test my will.

I will get Boardwalk. ALL I NEED IS BOARDWALK!! I HAVE PARK PLACE ALREADY!!!!!

My 5-year plan involves winning McDonald's Monopoly promotion every year. Then I will be earning $250,000 a year ... so that I can fulfill my dream of sleeping in until 1pm EVERY DAY!!!!

I will be eating at McDonald's for lunch and dinner for the next three days. Let's see if I can do this.

TIME TO GET SOME FREE BEST BUY BUCKS!

. . .

MP3 download of the day: (Outkast) Big Boy f. Killer Mike and Jay-Z's Flip Flop Rock from Speakerboxx/The Love Below. (MP3 Download - 4.20 megs)

I bought this CD for my drive up to DC for Fall Break, and I gotta say I love this new album. Good pick, Nasty. Download the MP3 above! It's a hot track (besides the two other singles).

Help prove the long-standing theory that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce Shakespeare works!

This is much better than that SETI screensaver crap.

Go monkeys!

. . .

I had a great post in mind earlier today, but I got distracted by basketball and then I lost all motivation to write it. I guess it's somewhat depressing that I now lose motivation to write entries; it's almost as if I feel like I'm actually trying to write in this darn thing now.

Basically it was about how everything is turning into a commodity; your education, our skills, even us as workers in a corporate setting... we're all becoming a commodity that can easily be replaced with someone else.

The trick is to make the commodity seem like a scarce resource, much like De Beers does with diamonds.

But this goes against economics. Free-market economics, more than anything, essentially wants to break down all the discrepencies in pricing across the globe; it converts everything to a commodity. This is, of course, for the better good of the world. But we lose the 'richness' that is the result of sharp distinctions between us (the US) and Third World countries.

. . .

Ignore my stupid ramblings. I have two huge back-to-back exams and I'm just procrastinating. Back to work.

Today I had two exams.

Then I came back and worked on a new webproject (I am a whore for clean slates).

Then I slept.

Then I went to Southpoint mall and wasted $80 on clothes. Dinner was at CPK, which was good.

Crispdawg, Yush and I started talking about writing a screenplay. Rough ideas. Needs lots of polishing.

Then I played poker.

Today was a good day.

I do not like slow websites. In my frustration with Bjunkyard (which, for whatever reason, is the slowest website in the world), I decided to use a spidering program to download all images from their Hyori gallery, which were conveniently left in a nice directory setting.

After downloading about 1500 images of Hyori, I used the wonderful ZIP features for Tokki to upload all of them. So now I have a Tokki Gallery with all the wonderful Hyori pictures.

This whole mirroring process actually only took me about 15 minutes of real work. Now you can view all those nice pictures at a nice blazing speed, instead of the 1996-esque speed of the Bjunkyard server.

I just need to organize them now when I get done with webpage making stuff.

w00t.

Disclaimer: I really don't like Hyori that much. I'm just really anal-retentive about webpage speeds; I'd much rather just mirror a site for the sake of the Internet users than put up with a slow site. Plus, I used the huge gallery to benchmark Tokki speeds for rendering large albums (It does pretty well, although memory usage is a bit excessive in some places, which I'll probably address later) :D

It was a dork thing more than anything :/

Our claim to fame.

In Chapel Hill, police are already getting ready for the big Halloween party on Franklin Street. This year, Halloween is on a Friday and police expect more than 75,000 people will show up.

Being the loser that I am, I will probably spend tonight working. I have some big things I have left unresolved in terms of projects that I want to wrap up tonight.

If any of you are sober enough to chill out afterwards, you know where to find me ;o.

Edit: While walking back from dinner, someone called out Han. He has a bumblebee outfit (pictures later), and some big black dude called him OUT. He yelled out while Han was walking down the street:
"THAT'S GAY. MAN, DUDE'S AIN'T SUPPOSED TO DO THAT. THAT'S GAY."

HAahahahahahaahahaha.