Luci Sandor’s blog

As the train was making its way out of the Newark Airport station, I saw a man on leftmost rail track, just past the place where the airport-bound highway passes above the tracks. His gait look as if he was inebriated, he wasn’t wearing the bright colored work clothes of the rail workers, it was close to the peak hour. The chance of seeing him smashed by a train were so obvious, that I went straight to the first NJ Transit employee and told him. This was the guy who checked the tickets in the fourth and fifth cars in the Trenton train which reaches Newark around 7 PM. He looked at me as if he believed me, but kept checking passengers’ tickets. I repeated what I said, and he thanked me again. So all I am left to do is to blog it, live: West-bound trains out of Newark Penn Station will most likely suffer “30-60 minutes delay due to police activity”. Enjoy.

According to the FT, in a new show of disorientation, Yahoo outsourced one of its core products, the highly successful Yahoo IM, to the no-name three-coders-and-a-PR-rep company Jajah. The pretext: they will focus from now on on core products. Like what? Hotjobs? Yahoo Movies?

I learned today I wasted one full week by trying to work around some stupid bug of a ill-written, ill-documented software package that I use at work. I know that for a fact most visitors come to this blog to search workarounds for similar bugs in Microsoft Windows, Ahead Nero, Sun NetBeans, or Microsoft Visual Studio. I keep getting emails from crooks like SAS (emails without unsubscribe instructions, if we come to it) inviting me to join user groups and do the work that they are supposed to do - that is, explain the stupid programs that they wrote with its lack of documentation and its unjustifiable quirks to their frustrated, over-charged, and over-worked customers.
I know that people who make this software, both coders and (especially) managers, make far more money than, say, rice growers, although, arguably, they work less. They make so much because they can do so much; and surely they are productive when I, in my naivety, have worked for them, providing the world with the documentation they didn’t write.
What if I stop doing their work? I am thinking of calling it a day.

The Guardian, quoting unnamed sources, says that the Olympia was today host not only to the officials lighting the Olympic flame, but also to thousands of security personnel. According to The Guardian, the place was "crawling with Chinese undercover security". An undercover Chinese agent in Greece (or worse, a whole pack of them) reminds me of the old joke about the well-trained CIA agent caught in Moscow. After facing undeniable evidence, the agent admits he is not a Russian, and asks what gave him away. The answer: we figured something is fishy when we saw you are black.

Recently The Guardian published an article about Nick Denton, an apparently famous and controversial blogger Read the rest of this entry »

According to the BBC, some countries are quite alike.

VMWare, the maker of virtualization software, is fighting a hard battle against Microsoft. Microsoft has all the money in the world in order to ruin the efforts of its fly-weight rival, and only MS’s lack of consideration for Linux prolonged VMWare’s very existence to this day. Thus VMWare decided to spend some of its small budget into some weird type of advertising. Read the rest of this entry »

Next thing, Behemoth will tell you how many gmails you read from your zero folders. I don’t think anybody would care about such features or enjoy such privacy intrusions, even if the system would work.

Apparently, the Sharp/Danger/T-Mobile Sidekick is a Microsoft phone. Now I understand why the poor phone runs out of memory so often. Microsoft buying Danger is one of those moves that MS employs in order to replace lack of innovation. In the old days, the software created by the 3-4 Danger employees should be written by the Windows CE team in two days. Should Apple make that software, it will take a week for the code and three months for filming the ads. The purchase will achieve even less than the buyouts of aQuantive or GIANT - can anybody point what exactly those companies were producing? As usual in recent years, Microsoft (under the appearance of desperation) divests again money from the shareholders into so-called investments.

Recently, the Yen stood strongly against the decline of the majority of the Western currencies. This is why you might want to move your savings into an Yen account. Citibank Japan does just that: anybody can use this web form to open an account. When I say anybody, I really mean anybody - including citizens of the long-gone countries such as the Byelorussian SSR and the Socialist Republic of Romania.