unhandledexception.net

Today Videotron, Quebec’s cable monopoly, made another shockingly dumb announcement, living up to its name as a cable company, in it for the green and totally out of touch with reality. I first saw it on TV, but surprisingly, their affiliated news service, Canoe (like a good cable company, they control some of the media as well) reports on it too in this article.

The premise is that new services allowing people to download music, movies and other big-volume files are clogging up the network and forcing them to spend money upgrading their equipment. So, content providers, like Apple’s iTunes, are pushing content through, and the telcos aren’t invited in the party.

Well, what’s wrong with this is that I’ve got a 20 GB limit every month, unless I want to pay 80$ a month for internet service. Exceeding this limit costs me 8$ a GB. Apparently this ripoff isn’t sufficient to quench their greed.

This is typical telecom behavior. Their monopoly, and the fact that they’ve befriended the CRTC to accept their periodic monthly fee increases leads them to this kind of distorted thinking. Why do they think people get high-speed? For the kicks of surfing the net faster on Lynx? Seriously, you must be hiding under a big heavy rock not to realize that people download music, and soon going to start pulling 20 GB a minute of live, HD video content. Welcome to the future, dumbasses!!!

Well, as for me, we’ll be switching out of them soon. Up to lately, the 20 GB limit hasn’t been very problematic; we just had to watch out over Bittorrent downloads. But now, with mom and dad getting more savvy (I am really impressed with them lately), the advent of live Greek TV, Google Earth, YouTube and other high-bandwidth applications, there’s no need for Bittorrent or my brother’s gaming to exceed the limit regularly by 1-3 GB, and at this rate, I only expect this to increase. I am looking at InterNet Canada, which offers 3 Mbps DSL, no limits for 30$ a month, even lower than what we’re spending now, after successive rate increases. On the downside, I’d have to part with my modem and live on 3 Mbps rather than 6 Mbps.

Firefox 2.0 was officially released today, unlike stupid diggers reporting that it was released yesterday and offering links to pre-release binaries on development (or other third party) ftp servers. If you can’t wait a fucking day until it would be released, get a fucking life!

Anyway, Firefox 2.0 was released today, and you can download the real thing from the official site. This follows the release of IE7 last week (which needs to phone home to validate Windows to install) unless you use a little hack.

Anyway, I installed Firefox on my desktop, and everything went smooth. When Firefox 2.0 first started, it asked me to disable the incompatible extensions and allowed me to update extensions to be compatible. However, on my laptop, I had a little hiccup with my bookmarks. Firefox first started, WITHOUT any mention of incompatible extensions, and didn’t display any bookmarks at all. I went to import them, but Firefox did nothing at all. I uninstalled & reinstalled it, and only then did it ask me to disable incompatible extensions, and gave me a default bookmarks file (maybe because I had moved my bookmarks file out as a precaution). So I try to import my bookmark file, but the douche creates a new “Bookmarks Toolbar Folder” that doesn’t appear on the toolbar. So, I close it and overwrite the created bookmarks.htm and bookmarks.bak with my old files and it finally works now.

So what you would notice is the new tab bar. They put some eye candy on it, and the “x” to close the tab is in the tab itself just like Opera. That seems to be about it for now. I am eager to see if they did something about its memory appetite issues.

Update on memory usage

Well, after about 2 weeks, I can tell at least something has been done towards improving the memory leak situation. Right now I have it open since like last week, and it’s up to 240 MB usage, which if you consider I have like 30 tabs, and did some YouTube on it.

It’s midterm time! And that means that I am so busy nowadays. This year, for some reason, three of the four courses that I am taking involve groupwork. So, it’s not only work, but team management politics and overhead, which is something I don’t really like.I just like to get the work done and get over it. Well, I gather this is the opportunity to learn teamwork, a skill employers seem to be demanding these days.

Today I went through my A.I. midterm. I think it went pretty well, and that I might have actually aced it. Well, to tell you the truth, artificial intelligence seems to be an interesting topic, but whether it’s the way it’s taught, or perhaps the topic itself, I don’t really like the course. And, to add insult to injury, the book we have, Artificial Intelligence, by Luger, completely sucks. First of all, it is full of mistakes. It is a book for christ’s sake, not a web page. And the mistakes are very obvious typographical and calculation errors, on one instance what was supposed to be a logical not symbol became a pi. But it’s not really limited to that. The examples shown, particularly these illustrating Dynamic Programming (elegantly named DP), which are string alignment and Levenshtein distance are incomprehensible textual rubbish, rather than easily understandable code. Both of these examples contain errors and inconsistencies, in the true fashion of the book. I find myself constanly having to scour Wikipedia and Google to get to understand what the heck is going on. As a result I never understood string alingment (or its purpose) until a friend of mine spent the friggin night scouring the web for it. Worse, I cannot find an errata page for it, which would be kind of helpful given the sithation.

Anyway, back to the midterm. There were 4 questions, as promised. The first relates to dsiproving a common logical inference error that if P implies Q, and Q is true, P is also true. Translating P -> Q to its logical equivalent, ~P v Q, filling in a true table, and showing that there is a case where P is false, but Q and P -> Q is true. The second had to do with determining if a particular algorithm is A*, question 3 was a simple production rule, and the last question was alpha beta pruning, something I studied pretty well.

Well now, I need to study geology (one of these science electives), a couse I wasn’t really crazy about but it is growing on me. There’s not complicated math or anything of that sort, no labs, no projects. Just a midterm and a final.

I’ve got also a ton of other work that it would be better that I get started on rather than enumerate here.

Printer giving you a hard time? Simple. Just take the monitor to the Xerox.

That so reminds me of “Bad Day“!

Well, I am pretty sure you noticed a change around here!

Back to my old self… black background.. yellow & white text.. etc. It really looks like a site that I made awhile ago that used some primitive Ajax techniques, though not Ajax at all!

So, enjoy the new site, hope you like it, and that there are not too many broken things around! If there are, please let me know.

Friends

Yes, I might have forgotten you in my blogroll, so please tell me if I did. Also, if your blog has an XML feed please tell me about it so you can be included in the feeds on the right.

The old site, if anybody needs it, is here.

Got my first paycheck from my summer job today. I noticed that somebody helped himself to $2.34, along with idiotic “unemployment insuramce” that I will never be eligible for because my contract doesn’t last long enough. Well, if there’s one thing even the dumbest canadian is good at is paying taxes. We’re all Ph.Ds in that.

This year saw the birth of a new tax in Quebec. The government wants to encourage reproduction amongst the human species, as if 6 billion people on earth is not enough.

For those who don’t know, DVD regions are parts of the world that the entertainment industry cartel has hardcoded into discs so that DVDs sold in one region of the world won’t play in other parts of the world. For example, if you buy a DVD in Europe, which is region 2, it will not play on your DVD player that you bought here in North America. The reason behind it, so they say, is there are many release dates for the same title for each region, and because the prices vary from one region to the other. If, for example, a title is first released in Japan, and Amricans buy it from Japan (over the Internet), then the entertainment cartel won’t make as much profit on the Ameircan release date.

Fortunately nowadays this has been so easy to circumvent. Making specific DVD players for each region is too expensive for manufacturers. They’d rather come up with one design and mass-produce it for the world, so they come up with a region-lock that is easy to remove. As for PC-DVD drives, which have a limited number of times this can be changed, are cheap enough so you can buy plenty. The only problem is for laptops. PC enthousiasts have also developped software that thwarts the lock, and play any DVDs. Fortunately, many governments have also reacted, citing unfair anti-competitive practices, like Australia.

So, I just busted the region lock on my set-top DVD player, and I use Media Player Classic from the K-Lite Codec Pack, on which the DVDs play fine.

Already we are starting to think about what would we like to do next year for our final project course at Concordia. We are jotting down our ideas, and invite everybody in our class to pitch in. Basically we would like teams to be formed based on what people would like to work on rather than just picking out friends.

Join the discussion!

Hourray, we are now on daylight savings time. Lost an hour to my weekend, which appears to be much more but anyways. Next year the new American rules will come into effect, which means that the time willl be set back one week later in the fall and forward on the second Sunday of March. Most provinces in Canada have adopted the change, as it is said that not following the time change would cause great confusion in the area of air travel where people would miss connections, and arrival times would be incorrect. But, as a consequence of this change, many systems that automatically adjust for DST would be obsolete. All recent operating systems will need to be updated, or have the function disabled, and the time change be done manually. Will Microsoft bother releasing updates for old, unsupported systems like windows 95, 98 and NT? Anyway, I am not a real fan of changing the time, as I think that time should be a standard based on astronomical reality, i.e. at noon, the sun should be in the middle of the sky somewhere on the time zone, but on the other hand, I sleep in alot, so I enjoy seeng the sun as it sets later. My brother suggested that the entire world run on UTC,

This weekend has so far been a lazy one, althought I have no shortage of things to do. The gorgeous weather we have had for this time of year here in Montreal has contributed to that. It puts me in vacation mood (read, lazy mode), and as a result I tend to take things easy, hang around with friends, and sleep a lot.

Though I have been making steady progress on the task manager. Tomorrow I plan to have most of the required features completed, so that the rest of the week would be easy. I just finished writing algorithms to treat category hierarchies and the like, so the rest of the work is pretty much slight modifications to introduce new features. I really like my special design, though it actually suffers from my total lack of experience programming in Java. I am debating whether to implement an identity map for categories, because there really are a lot of them being loaded into memory, but I will let time make that decision. Without it, the app still fares very well in terms of time.

So yeah, last friday was the birthday of one of my classmates, so we went to Baton Rouge to celebrate after class. I am really not too crazy about that place (not a big fan of ribs), but being with these people makes it worth it. You guys all rock!

Oh yeah, what was the subject of the message… DST… Yes. Today is the switch to daylight savings, and