I’ve been using Mint to track my money for a few months now.  Most of you reading this are cool people who have been using Mint since before I heard about it, though, so I won’t bother explaining how the service works.  I guess I’m supposed to set up budgets or something, and if you don’t it kinda guesses based on your past expenses.  Then it alerts you when you go over-budget in a category.  Which is nice sometimes, but other times you get things like this:

Okay, so ummm... what am I supposed to do about it?  If I could have payed only twenty-three dollars I would have.  Maybe they need an “e-mail a complaint about this to your congressman” button or something? :)

Every so often, the popular answer on an Everybody Votes1 poll surprises me.  Here is one example from a few weeks ago:

Is this really what the majority of people think about how a series with prequels should be viewed?  I imagine there is some portion of the population that didn’t understand the question and thought “well I don’t know anything about Star Wars but why would you watch them out of order”, and chose the “I, II, III, IV, V, VI” answer—inadvertently choosing the “watch them out of order” answer!  But as popular as Star Wars is, I doubt this could account for that many people.  The question also doesn’t specify whether the numbers correspond to episodes, which could have confused some people.

If this is really what most people think, though, then I guess that would explain why the The Chronicles Of Narnia compilations inevitably feature the books out of order, with The Magician’s Nephew first (even though it ruins the book to read it first!).  But I can’t imagine, for example, a compilation of the Metal Gear Solid games featuring Metal Gear Solid 3 as the first game, even though the MGS3 story takes place thirty years before the others, and the MGS4 story picks up right where MGS2 left off.  Of course I said the same thing about the Star Wars movies last year, when I was talking about the Narnia books....

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.  It happens sometimes.  Anyone care to weigh in with a good reason why someone approaching a series of movies/books/video games/whatever would want to start with the prequels first?  Or maybe you want to weigh in to tell me you agree with me.  That’d be cool too.

PS: I think another problem with the question is that neither answer was the correct answer.  The correct answer is “IV, V, VI, II, III.”  Episode One is unwatchable garbage.  Two and Three are just garbage, but they aren’t unwatchable.  Episode Five is still the best.

I think I just participated in a Turing test.  I had a problem ordering a new cell phone from Sprint, so I did an online chat with a customer service representative.  They said they would e-mail me a transcript, but they haven’t yet.  Since the chat was in a Flash object, I couldn’t select the text to copy and paste it, so I just combined two screenshots, and added some annotations.1

I’m now tweeting.  You can follow kipthegreat on Twitter if you want to see what I’m up to.  So far I haven’t done much tweeting.  It just seems weird to use Twitter when I don’t have a Blackberry or iPhone.  Or maybe I just don’t get it yet.  I mainly signed up because my screen name was still available. :)

I added some code to the site to improve the way source code is displayed, both in snippets in my blog and when viewing an entire file directly.  I’m adding line numbers on the server-side, but they are in a separate div so you won’t end up copying the line numbers if you copy and paste the code.  The syntax highlighting is all done in Javascript by prettify, an open-source library provided by Google.  After getting around two annoying jQuery bugs (one which is only present on IE6, and another which was fixed by upgrading to the latest jQuery level) I got it up and running, and it looks like this:

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  /**
   * Returns 1/this.
   * 
   * @throws ArithemeticException if this == 0.
   */
  public BigFraction reciprocal()
  {
    if(numerator.equals(BigInteger.ZERO))
      throw new ArithmeticException("Divide by zero: reciprocal of zero.");
    
    return new BigFraction(denominator, numerator, true);
  }

Anyway, I figured I’d show off the full-file view with some source code you’re free to use if you want to.  You can find the BigFraction class I wrote in Java when working on some Project Euler problems.  The class represents a fraction as a ratio of two BigIntegers, so it will never overflow, and there will never be roundoff error.  It was fun to write, because it involved lots of math and manipulation of base-2 numbers (especially for the constructors which took one or two double variables), and I’m one of those weirdos who really likes those things.  This works in all the Project Euler problems I’ve used it in, and I’ve done some pretty exhaustive ad-hoc testing, but there’s still a good chance I’ve missed a bug or two.  Especially since I didn’t bother writing any unit tests or anything (hey, this is spare-time coding!).  If you use this and happen to find any bugs, let me know.  And of course, I need to close with:

Disclaimer: the BigFraction class is provided as-is with no warranty expressed or implied.  If you use it to calculate missile trajectories and end up nuking the wrong city, you shouldn’t come whining to me.

This is awesome.

That is all.

I experimented with using Feedburner to manage the feeds for this site, but I haven’t been pleased with the statistics they provide.  They seem to be inaccurate, and I think the problem is that Feedburner is geared towards sites much larger than mine.  So I’ve decided to revert to hosting my own feeds.

So.  If you subscribed to a feed from this site in the last three months, you may need to resubscribe sometime next week in order to keep getting updates.  If you’re not sure which feed you’re subscribed to, you should start getting notifications sometime next week that the feed is dead (if you’re subscribed to the Feedburner feed).  If you don’t get any notifications, and you keep getting my blog posts, then you don’t need to do anything.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about then none of this applies to you.

I found it very ironic the way the title of my last post was displayed after being imported into Facebook:

Here is a message I got after logging into a website recently:

** NOTE ** Using a colon (“:”) in your password can create problems when logging in to Banner Self Service. If your password includes a colon, please change it using the PWManager link below.

Protip: If you are designing any kind of login/authentication system and you find that you need to give users a warning similar to this, you are doing something wrong.

On a much more nitpicky side note, why not just make “PWManager” or “using the PWManager” link to PWManager?  To their credit, at least they didn’t say “by clicking the PWManager link below.”

I’ve come up with a very simple solution to the problem of browser-cached CSS files.  What I mean by this is: when you update the CSS which manages your website’s presentation, it will take a while before some visitors actually see those changes.  The reason, of course, is that browsers (this is at least true of IE and Firefox) will cache CSS files pretty aggressively, without checking very often to see if they have been updated.  Usually refreshing the page will solve this, but most visitors aren’t going to care enough to do this.  Meanwhile, your site will look pretty broken to them (especially if you’ve done something like styled a list so that it looks like a horizontal toolbar instead of a bulleted list, for example).

So here’s the very simple solution.  Add the following rule to your root .htaccess file:

      RewriteRule ^(.*)\.[\d]\.css$ $1.css [L]

I’m assuming that you have a common include file or template or something which prints things like the page header.  If so, whenever you update your CSS file (say, style.css), you update the link tag in your header to use style.0.css.  This will look to the browser like it is a different file from style.css, so it will download it again.  But Apache is really just loading the same CSS file through the magic of URL rewriting—you’re just ensuring that the user picks up your recent changes.  You can repeat the process the next time you tweak your CSS, just change the header to style.1.css and so on.