mathie's bits

San Jose and Sunnyvale are among the safest cities in the United States and Richmond and Oakland are among the most dangerous.

The University of Waterloo received a huge “Google dividend” yesterday when David Cheriton, one of the search engine giant’s early investors, donated $25-million to the school’s well-respected computer science department. Mr. Cheriton estimates the return on his US$200,000 investment in Google at about 5,000%. CS School renamed to David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. It’s really exicting to see and imagine all potential opportunities UW can do with this donation. As an UW/CS alumni, I thank you, Mr. Cheriton!

Firefox does not pass referrer string while IE does.

This is another solution written by Brent Ashley for asynchronous information fetching, way before the term AJAX were coined
<br /> var RSLite;<br /> function RSLiteObject(){<br /> this.interval = 1000;<br /> this.attempts = 3;<br /> this.i = new Image();<br /> this.call = function (page){<br /> var d = new Date();<br /> document.cookie = ‘RSLite=x; expires=Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:59:59 GMT; path=/;’;<br /> this.i.src = page+’&time=’+d.getTime();<br /> setTimeout(“RSLite.receive(1);”, this.interval );<br /> }<br /> this.receive = function ( attempt ){<br /> var response = null;<br /> var aCookie = document.cookie.split(“; “);<br /> for (var i=0; i < aCookie.length; i++){ var aCrumb = aCookie[i].split("="); if (aCrumb[0] == 'RSLite') response = aCrumb[1]; } if ( response != null ){ this.callback( unescape(response.replace(/\+/g,' ')) ); } else { if (attempt < this.attempts){ setTimeout( "RSLite.receive( " + (attempt+1) +" );",this.interval); } else { this.failure(); } } } this.callback = function( response ){ alert(response); } this.failure = function(){ //alert("Timed Out ["+this.i.src+"]"); // disable for the time moment } } function myCallback(response) { // write the result back var tmpObj = document.getElementById('ResponseArea'); if (tmpObj != null) { tmpObj.innerHTML = response; } // if } RSLite = new RSLiteObject(); RSLite.callback = myCallback;

If you search for “map” or “maps” on Google, the first result is not maps.google.com but MapQuest. This surprised me!

FOX Broadcasting Company: PRISON BREAK

With too many pathetic reality TV shows these years. One of the best TV show I’ve ever seen. It’s an excellent show. Very original and high level of suspense.

I Love Sky Video on Metacafe

Root account in Linux is considered all powerful. You can make or break the system if you have root access to a Linux box. Here is a cool tip to make your files immutable even by root.

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Computer science majors tend to struggle for reasons that have very little to do with computers. More often than not, such struggles are rooted in weaknesses related to math. If you plan on getting a CS degree, you need to come to grips with one important fact first: computer science has more to do with math than computers.

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