Nerdcore! Aww yeah!

Last Tuesday, I got to hang out with “the world’s 579th greatest rapper,” MC Frontalot, before and after he performed at a Stanford concert! He is best-known for coining the term nerdcore and basically defining the whole nerdcore hip-hop musical genre. As you can tell by picture above, I dressed appropriately for the occasion.

When a visiting Stanford graduate student contacted me with his plans to host an MC Frontalot concert at Stanford, I was ecstatic! I pledged $300 on behalf of the Stanford ACM to help pay for the concert costs (MC Frontalot’s price was very reasonable). Nerdcore culture is computer science related, right?

A bunch of other Stanford clubs also made contributions, including the IEEE, GSPB, CCRMA, Audio Engineering Society, and Hip Hop Congress.

“MC Frontalot is the nerdcorest of the core.” Just a sampling:

We deliver the hits that give the kids with the spectacles spectacular fits!
I seen one nerd foam at the mouth in his glee.
(It was me, in the mirror, rhyming, brushing my teeth.)
And now the heezy we’s off don’t babble 300 baud.
I get no error while compiling my rhyme.

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This is how my iPhone looked after I shattered the screen. Such a sad sight...

And then I fixed my iPhone.

The new iPhone screen! Looks good as new!

And now I’ll share some pictures of the process with you. (Click to embiggen)

I broke my iPhone 3G when I accidentally dropped a metal keyboard on it from a high distance. I was just sitting there looking at the phone when I suddenly yelled out “iPhone — you don’t have a physical keyboard, do you? Well, then take THIS! This is what a hardware keyboard feels like!!”

Ok, that last part was made up — but I actually did break the iPhone screen by dropping a keyboard on it by accident. I actually love the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard, but I digress.

All in all, it took me about 2 hours to disassemble the phone, remove the shattered glass and glue from the display assembly (using a hair dryer and a metal spudger), attach the new glass front panel (which I bought here), and reassemble the phone (the iPhone has tiny screws!). I was surprised at how easy the process was, despite the rumors I’d heard about non-responsive touchscreens, broken proximity sensors, and the like.

There are handy step-by-step instructions that were useful for me — although the instructions suddenly end at the point where the iPhone is completely disassembled, with the hilarious note “Now just do the same thing, but in reverse,” which might not be so nice for newbies.

If you’re curious to see more about the iPhone 3G screen repair, there’s a video of someone doing what I did on YouTube.

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I just read an interesting opinion column about technology illiteracy over at TidBITS. The author, Adam Engst, argues that as technology becomes easier to use and hence more transparent, society has lost the ability to converse about technology.

With that, comes a generation of people who can find information on the Internet proficiently, text message at ridiculously high speeds, and do any number of standard computing tasks (word processing, email, IM, etc.) fluidly – until something goes wrong, at which point they become completely helpless and haven’t the slightest clue how to fix the problem on their own.

At this stage, these people will probably throw away their “broken” iPod and buy a new one, or bring their computer into the shop for costly repairs. Even if they realize that the problem is fixable, they lack the vocabulary to express the problem clearly and so they find themselves unable to coax Google into giving them useful search results that help them to fix their problem.

Here are some highlights from the article, but I recommend reading it for yourself:

Dissatisfaction is the mother of exploration – only if Safari or Internet Explorer isn’t meeting your needs do you have much impetus to learn about and switch to Firefox. So the better technology works, the less we’ll learn about how it works.

I’d argue there was a more insidious effect from the loss of manuals – it caused an entire class of users to become technologically functional while remaining technologically illiterate. When I asked my mother-in-law, Linda Byard, what browser she used, she became somewhat flustered and guessed at Outlook. This is a woman who uses the Web fluidly and for all sorts of tasks far more sophisticated than simply browsing static Web pages. And yet, the fact that she used Internet Explorer to do so escaped her.

. . . Being fluid with technology doesn’t mean you understand how it works or can fix it when it breaks. Being able to dash off text messages on a mobile phone demonstrates fluidity; being able to troubleshoot a dead Internet connection down to a corrupted preference file or flaky cable demonstrates understanding.

Before Apple, before the IBM PC, we had mainframes and minicomputers that we interacted with via dumb terminals. You couldn’t do all that much, and you were sharing resources with many other people, but you also didn’t have to worry about things going wrong as much, because when they did, the computer operators would fix them.They were the gatekeepers, the wizards who controlled access and could say who was allowed to do what. Personal computers were supposed to democratize computing so anyone and everyone could do their own work. While that’s come to pass in some ways, it seems to me that we’ve returned to the days when you need a wizard to solve problems or do anything beyond the norm. It’s a somewhat uncomfortable situation, since those of us who grew up with personal computers are finding that we’re the new wizards.

via TidBITS Opinion: Have We Entered a Post-Literate Technological Age?

Update 10/07/2009:

I just stumbled upon a cool video from Google that attempts to explain what a web browser is to non-techies. Props to Google for mentioning Chrome competitors Firefox, Safari, and even Internet Explorer in the video! I love Google!

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Remember to add ENTER at the very end!

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, please get edumacated, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The Konami Code, known in Japan as the Konami Command (コナミコマンド, Konami Komando), is a cheat code that appears in many Konami video games, although the code also appears in some non-Konami games. The code was first used in the 1986 release of Gradius for the Nintendo Entertainment System but was made famous in North America in the NES version of Contra, for which it was also dubbed the “30 Lives Code”.

Update: The code also works on the iPhone, using gestures. Just replace the final B, A, and Enter keys with taps and it’ll work! AWESOME!

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http://feross.feross.org/feross/feross.feross?feross=feross#feross

You found the secret page.

If you remove a single “feross” from the URL, then you fail and don’t get to see the secret stuff hidden at this location!

Every feross serves a different function in the URL.

Can you name all the feross’s?

In order, they are:

• subdomain
• domain name
• TLD – top level domain (technically this one isn’t a feross …yet!)
• folder
• file name
• file extension
• “get” parameter
• “get” value
• URL anchor (or hash)

Ok, back to studying for finals!

EDIT: updated TLD description because it’s .org not .feross. Thanks Daniel!

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I witnessed this awesomeness first hand, today.

Today I witnessed history — Unix history, that is. At 3:31:30PM today, the Unix epoch timestamp passed the 1234567890 mark.

So, what exactly does this mean?

Essentially, computer time starts on January 1st, 1970 at midnight. We call this time zero (represented by 64 zeroes in binary) and count up from there. Ever since the beginning of 1970, this little 32-bit integer has been counting upwards (in seconds) to keep track of time in computer systems everywhere. Servers, phones, traffic systems, planes, and many other electronic devices all use Unix time. Unix time can be found everywhere, certainly not just in the Unix operating system.

That’s why it’s so awesome that all these electronic devices shared the same numerically beautiful timestamp – 1234567890 – for a brief second during today. Parties to celebrate the event were held by computer science enthusiasts (also known as geeks) all around the world today.

Indeed, many Stanford CS students celebrated this event, though some not by choice. Eric Roberts, the professor for CS106A (the class that I section lead), made his entire intro CS class watch the final minutes of the countdown and explained its significance to students who had never heard of Unix time before.

I followed the time from http://coolepochcountdown.com/ which provided a nice countdown timer and firework effects once the time reached 1234567890.

XKCD is awesome

Although today’s event was fun, it brings to light the question of what will happen when Unix clock runs out of seconds to count? What happens when the time reaches the 32-bit limit: 2147483647 (represented by 64 ones in binary) and rolls over to -2147483648, buffer overflow style? Computers will suddenly think the date is December 13, 1901 at 8:45:52 PM! This event is scheduled to happen on 3:14:07 AM on Tuesday, 19 January 2038, so this is a real and immediate concern.

Will society fall into chaos and computer systems cease to function (as the Y2K bug was predicted to do)? Or will the effects be much less profound, just causing annoyance (incorrect date on your desktop) but no devastation?

Either way, these are the wrong questions to be asking, since they are all speculative. We should be asking when we all will be using 64-bit processors. After all, 64-bit systems track time with a 64-bit integer allowing us to count back 20 times the age of the universe, and around 293 billion years into the future, according to TimesOnline.

64-bit would solve this problem once and for all. At least until we run out of numbers in 64-bit — which happens in about 290 billion years.

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