The Right Glue
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Passing of the year
By Dean
(2007-12-31 20:49:18)
The year will soon be over. Time to go over some of the things that I did this year.
I bought Diaeresis pretty early in the year. See My house for pictures of it. Diaeresis is one of my computers. Specifically, it is my primary desktop. It is my fourth computer, and by far and wide it is more powerful than my other computers put together. My first computer was Sock, purchased for university in 2002. Then I bought Chives as a server in 2003. Then I got Jupiter (my PDA) for Christmas in 2004. Diaeresis and Ron (my Xbox 360) came into my possession in 2007. Who knows what my next PC will be called? Whatever pops into my head when I first think of naming it, of course. Just like the rest.
I bought Diaeresis to play video games. Specifically, Command & Conquer 3, which, I'm sorry to say, doesn't live up to the C&C series; Bioshock, which was absolutely fantastic albeit extremely violent; and Portal, which is about an hour long and easily the best game released this year, if not this century.
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Site Design by KenT (2008-01-16 21:24:58)
Quiet, you by Dean (2008-01-17 07:38:05)
Configurability
By Dean
(2007-12-20 20:39:42)
"Long ago in a distant land, I, Dean, the shape-shifting master of darkness, installed an unspeakable amount of RAM into my desktop! But a foolish operating system, wielding a magic service, stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final bit was filled, I tore open a window to services.msc and disabled it in the future, where my evil is law. Now the fool seeks to revert to a restore point, and undo the future that is Dean!"
We thank Samurai Jack for the original quote, which I have assimilated like some kind of linguistic Borg.
Basically, a few months ago I bought an extra four gigabytes of RAM for my desktop, which runs Vista 64-bit Home Premium. I bought the RAM mostly for bragging rights and also because games like Bioshock and TF2 tend to take up at least 600 megabytes of RAM alone and I want to avoid swapping.
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ORLY? by DLikhten (2008-01-03 16:19:16)
My house
By Dean
(2007-12-11 19:51:25)
So I borrowed a digital camera today so that I could use it to take some pictures of my house, because my house is awesome and you want to see pictures of my house taken with a borrowed digital camera. Accompanying the photographs is helpful and possibly amusing commentary explaining just what the hell you're seeing. Enjoy.
IMG_0799.JPG - What you see when you enter my house: the kitchen and part of the living room. Behold my couch in its glory! It is a glorious coat rack. Behold the bicycle I have not used for six years!
IMG_0800.JPG - The inverse view of the previous image: a view of the front of my house. Behold my television and Sock (the laptop on top of the TV). Behold the magnificence of my Nintendo chair, and my Nintendo.
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Comment by Tex (2007-12-16 04:18:36)
Comment by Dean (2007-12-16 14:20:10)
Re: Re: Catbert by Baronen (2007-12-16 16:47:33)
Blogger's block
By Dean
(2007-11-23 21:13:52)
The problem with not having a blog with no post schedule is how tough it is to bring myself to post at all sometimes. This past month I've had absolutely no inspiration about anything in particular. I suppose this gives me a good appreciation for what it must be like for people with real blogs (read: those with readership).
It was my birthday this week. I am now 23 years old. Still there, still pink. In my most recent year of life a lot has happened and at the same time not much has happened. The whole time I've just been working at McCain Foods as a programmer. During the same time span I was a finalist in a large programming contest, I wrote and deployed a new blog and backend, I revisited my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, to haunt the students there old and new (a process I hope to repeat annually for as long as I know people there), I was promoted from "associate" to "programmer" at work, I bought a new PC and upgraded later, I joined a jazz band, and I was giving a freaking Xbox as a gift (thanks again, Jos). It's been more than a year now since I've moved away from Waterloo. Seems like it's been longer, somehow.
Since I'm in a good mood (when am I ever in another mood? I'll kill you!), I've decided to link to a bunch of things. The first is a show called "Look around you", whose first episode is about mathematics. Aren't mathematics great? I use them to fly to work all the time. There are seven more episodes from the series (all on the same page I linked), and each one is as hilarious and scientific as the first. If you like maths, then I definitely suggest liking the rest.
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I'm being eaten by bees! (2009-09-14 15:59:50)
Have your lie and eat it too
By Dean
(2007-11-12 09:17:05)
This is harder than I thought it would be. Y'know, the whole blogging thing. The problem is I have two groups of people who actually read it, and each of them has a different idea about what I should be writing.
One group (my coworkers) want me to be more entertaining like I was with Oh Two. The other group (my friends from university) never liked Oh Two and prefer it when I write about more computer-sciency stuff.
And then there's me personally. I'd rather write about about computer-sciency stuff but in an entertaining way. The problem is I never really thought of myself as entertaining. So instead I'll start having two kinds of posts: old-style posts like this one and new-style posts like the ones that aren't this one. That way I can have my cake and eat it, too.
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Legendary pink unicorn
By Dean
(2007-10-30 16:56:43)
Apparently I'm not zany enough, according to my coworkers. Well, I'll show them. Today I will be talking about a topic very dear to my heart: killing perfect strangers across the Internet in video games.
We'll start with the basics, as is my custom. When gamers want to play video games in a more-than-just-casual way, the first step is what's called a LAN party. A LAN party is basically a group of people (often people who have never met before) who like to play games who physically bring their computers to a predetermined location (be it a friend's basement or a hotel convention room) and network them together in order to play multiplayer games together with less lag then one typically sees on the Internet.
Due to the proximity of the computers and the competitive nature of gamers, some gamers will alter their computer cases by adding lights or glowy parts. This is called case modding. Case modding is the nerd equivalent of getting chrome wheels and lowered suspension. Usually case mods are done to make a computer fit into a certain theme. Sometimes it's to make a computer look like it belongs in a video game (in this case Half-Life 2); sometimes it's a steampunk theme.
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Comment by Cait (2008-08-27 10:32:14)
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The language trap
By Dean
(2007-10-21 11:00:10)
To me, the scariest thing a programmer can say is, "I don't like X, I'd rather use Y," where X and Y are the names of programming languages. It means that whoever said this has fallen into the language trap.
We, as computer scientists, have many different programming languages at our disposal. From object-oriented languages like Java and C# to functional languages like LISP and Haskell to interpreted languages like BASIC and Perl to entirely bizarre languages like those found on Esolang, the esoteric programming languages wiki. Those of you not familiar with this might tend to think, "Why do you have so many different languages? Isn't programming just telling the computer to do things?"
The reason why we have so many different languages is because each language is created with a particular set of problems in mind. Though each language is inevitably compiled or interpreted into the same machine code, different languages are more suited to specific tasks than others. In general, if a language was designed for a specific task in mind, then if you are writing software that needs to accomplish that specific task, then you should be using that language.
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Language integration is a pain... by George Caswell (2007-12-10 16:33:40)
Indeed by Dean (2007-12-12 09:58:07)
My first production issue
By Dean
(2007-10-05 18:53:59)
I am proud to say that this week I experienced my first real home production issue. It was Tuesday night; I had just gotten home at around 1900 hours after dealing with some issues at work and having an after-hours teleconference with some Australian representatives.
After I hastily made some food in the kitchen, I sat down for what I hoped would be a quiet evening of watching the X Files. Unfortunately my hopes were soon destroyed by a unusually frantically blinking Ethernet hub on my desk. At first I wasn't sure what was causing the spike in network activity, so I thought, "Maybe if I wait, it will subside." I was wrong.
Given I am running a number of servers, I decided to take a look at some of my various daemons to see if any of them are the culprit. My first stop was httpd2, which is a web server. Taking a look at its status, I could see that it was dealing with 50-80 requests concurrently when it would usually only handle at most five at a time with my usual traffic.
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Comment by tex (2007-10-07 19:11:26)
Comment by Dean (2007-10-07 21:36:21)
The Dean Proxy by KenT (2007-10-09 10:22:04)
Moving forward
By Dean
(2007-10-01 18:21:20)
And so officially begins my new blog, The Right Glue. As is my tradition whenever I found a new blog on these wonderful Internets, I will introduce myself.
My name is Dean Whelton. As of today I am 22 years old and currently living in Florenceville, New Brunswick, Canada. I hold a bachelor of mathematics in computer science from the University of Waterloo. I have a wide variety of interests ranging from entertainment media to politics to proofreading to computer science and mathematics.
One of my primary interests — indeed, something I have been doing most of my life — is keeping an online log of my interests in a website of my own creation from the ground up. Roughly every two to four years I scrap my old web software in favour of something more robust. It started in grade 8 when I learned how to create web pages. Since then I have always kept a site going in one form or another. Originally these sites were about specific things, such as computer games I enjoy playing. Later they became about university life and politics (Unconventional Conformity; which is no longer online), eventually degrading to nothing more than a fancy link portal (Oh Two).
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Comment by Joseph (2009-04-01 11:27:02)
The Right Glue
By Dean
(2007-09-29 12:31:48)
Let me tell you a little story about glue.
Last week I visited Waterloo, Ontario on vacation from work in order to visit my friends who still live there. In the middle of the week, I went to the Imprint production night, in which the University of Waterloo student newspaper, Imprint, is created.
During this night I met with Michael Davenport (hereafter referred to as "D-pr0n" or "Davenpr0n"), an ex-Imprinter I had known from my years as a student. Davenpr0n and I were in Tim Hortons at the time, discussing the things that we do and the things that had happened since I graduated and moved to New Brunswick.
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Now with actual text by The Baron (2007-10-07 19:48:36)
Part of The Knack... by Tali (2009-04-14 17:09:03)
Need a name
By Dean
(2007-09-27 10:15:36)
This blag needs a name. It needs a name so bad. What am I going to name my blag? Well, a related and more important question would be about what is the blog?
Well, I was thinking about just that. I don't want to do the whole "one post every six days" thing anymore. With this blog I want to post more irregularly. Why post once every six days when sometimes neat stuff happens all the time and other times neat stuff never happens? I would rather have a larger number of small posts that dwell on one and only one topic than have a smaller number of large posts that jump between topics like a kid with ADHD with an unlimited supply of pixie sticks. The reality of the situation, though, is I'll end up having a smaller number of smaller posts. We all know how lazy I am with stuff like blogs.
Also, I want to be more in-your-face again like I used to be with UC. Back when I was with UC I used to talk about politics and other stuff like that. When I moved to Oh Two I toned myself down a lot. I stopped giving my opinions on things that really matter and started only blogging about cool forms of entertainment and occationally new technologies. Basically with Oh Two I just talk about cool things instead of everything.
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General commenting kind of.. yeah.. you get it. by The Baron (2007-10-07 20:13:30)
What? by Dean (2007-10-07 21:34:46)
Response by The Baron (2007-10-08 19:09:21)
2008 (Next)
This is some kind of footnote. This webpage is awesome and can be viewed in any browser. Even ones that suck ass like Safari and Firefox. Isn't that awesome? This site is best viewed with browsers that aren't maximized on large-resolution displays (> 1024 pixels in width). But then again, if you are running a large resolution and browsing maximized, then you're a terrible person so you don't really deserve to see this site at its finest. Jerk. I mean, seriously. I spend all this time making a nice site and your silly browsing habits ruin its look. That's really cold, man. If you're using IE6, then in order to see the cool avatar effects you need to enable JavaScript. No rights reserved by Dean Whelton (who is awesome) of any of the content, images, design, backend or electrons used in this site. Steal at your convenience. None of it is worth stealing anyway, so there. I have even made an RSS feed for more efficient theft of my intellectual property: CLICK IT NOW!!! Now, don't say I'm not generous. I guess if you want to know more about me, you can visit the about page. It's not really an about page, though. It's just one of the first posts. I don't feel like making a real about page. You can contact me, too. If you feel like it. Are you really wasting time reading this? Go outside or something.