Alde’s Stuff

The Meiji Fran Patisserie chocolate covered cookie stick:

This Fran consists of Almonds, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, cacao, wheat flour, and vanilla (at least what it says on the front of the box. The back adds things like shortening, condensed milk, and salt.). The cookie stick is chocolate in flavour, and is your standard Fran stick (i.e. larger than the Glico Pocky cookies). The hazelnut and macadamia nuts are imbedded into the chocolate, but are smaller in size than the typical Pocky Crush bits. A sweet first taste, it finishes a little bitter, and unless you nibble the chocolate off the stick, you really don’t taste the nuts, except in a light aftertaste.

Last in the Winter Chocolate list is Morinaga’s White Birch No Koeda.

As it says on the label, it comes with 12 packs with 4 sticks per pack. Each pack has a different food, including Cashew, Tea, and Sugar Beet. Mind you, not all these ingredients are included in the chocolate. I’m guessing that the ingredients are meant to remind the eater of the wintertime in Japan, and the shapes of the sticks to look like the twigs of the White Birch.
The overall flavour is a bit different in that there is no large crunchy cookie stick. There’s still a crunch, although minor, and a light vanilla chocolate taste.

Next in the winter-themed Pocky is the Glico Fuyu No Kuchidoke Pocky, or the Winter Chocolate Pocky.

This is your normal pocky, with an added dusting of Cacao, making the initial taste dry but bitter, until you get through to the inner milk chocolate.

Not your typical Pocky, and unless you’re a fan of bittersweet chocolate, you may want to stick with your normal Pocky.

Stopped off at the Crown Palace to pick up takeaway last night, so I went next door to the Asian Food Grocery store that exists next door and picked up some new pocky. I’m guessing since it takes a while for boat-shipped candy to make it across the Pacific, that’s the reason for the Winter-Themed Pocky.

First up is From Kabaya, the Vanilla hard stick.

This is an attempt at a vanilla flavoured pocky from Kabaya, but the difference here is that the cookie stick is HARD! Vive la différence! The stick is indeed a harder crunch, a louder sound, but still tastes the same. The chocolate is a vanilla flavoured, so it’s more of a milk-based chocolate. Each pack is about 18 sticks, and it come with two packs.

Kaiboer HD Video PLayer

These look interesting, but, as usual, the forthcoming information from their site has very little in actual “in use” documentation.

What’s the UI look like? If it’s linux, does it support SAMBA or NFS? Yes, having a removable hard drive keeps me from having to buy a USB enclosure, but if I can use the on-board NIC to stream video, that’s even less of a concern.

[Update - 3/30/2009]
Ok, digging further into their support site, it seems, Yes, it supports SMB, NFS, and NFS-TCP.

Glad to see the folks over at D.Net finally got someone to compile up an Nvidia CUDA RC5 Client (Currently in Pre-release).

Compared to the PS3, lets just say, it’s almost twice as fast as a PS3, which was 10 times as fast as my Core2Duo.

Running currently on my 8800GT, I’m getting 286mkeys/sec, which means it plows thru an RC5-72 block in approx 15 seconds. At just over 1 trillion blocks to search in the total key space (for a 100% keyspace span), you’re still looking at 523,000 GPU years. If all the folk who were active yesterday ran a single 8800GT computer, it would still take 133 years.

However, retail sales of the 8800GT were 3080 in October 2008, and the client doesn’t just run on 8800GTs, it’ll run on all the newer Nvidia cards.

One would hope that ATI’s Stream computing would be the next step here as well.

When we first started the RC5-56 challenge in April 1997, we were looking at 22 years until completion. We finished in 212 days.

Moore’s law may be starting to lag when considered against the CPU, but in terms of transistors and ability to compute, but the law keeps being met.

A friend related to me a story about an issue he had with a script he wrote.

It’s a web-based password reset program for resetting users’ passwords, using the standard debian-provided dictionary file from the “dictionaries-common“. In essence, it takes two random words from the dictionary file, puts them together using a punctuation mark and a number, and randomly capitalizes any easy to see letters (that is, it will capitlize a Z or G but not an I or L or O).

So, someone from his MIS department was using this tool to reset a woman’s password today, and it came up with “dUmb%4bitCh”.

Needless to say, he’s been tasked to create a package based off the debian package that removes certain words.

Checking my server’s own /usr/share/dict/words file, I came up with some other printable splices that could cause HR nightmares:

• large!3member
• auto^8cunnilingus
• vomiting*9vagina
• sexless@1nerd
• infected.1gonorrhea

etc…etc…etc…

Which is why you never automate a tool like this to end users, and always have a admin/tech do these things for the end user.

Just a reminder for you folks out there:

Since this year is getting a leap second added to the end, the LI bits on the NTP packets you receive should be a 01. Most properly crafted NTP clients understand this. Some wonder vendors panic when the LI bits are not 00.

As a reminder (From Meinberg.de):

From the RFC, the Leap Indicator bits:

   Leap Indicator (LI): This is a two-bit code warning of an impending
   leap second to be inserted/deleted in the last minute of the current
   day, with bit 0 and bit 1, respectively, coded as follows:

      LI       Value     Meaning
      -------------------------------------------------------
      00       0         no warning
      01       1         last minute has 61 seconds
      10       2         last minute has 59 seconds)
      11       3         alarm condition (clock not synchronized)

So, your low end consumer grade gear, say a router, or a VOIP TA, or an access point, may be freaking out right now, because the NTP servers they get their time from is sending an LI bits of 01, since 2008 ends with an extra second, it will all be happiness at UTC midnight, when the bits go away.

Compete Epic Newgg Failure all around.

So, I’m going to Germany And Austria for a Christmas Market tour. 12 days through the Alps and all, Munich, Salzburg, Kremsmunster, Vienna. Really cool.

I decided to get a 32 Gig USB flash drive to store all my pictures I take on (see the NikonD90 page). 43 Gigs plus the 24 gigs in Compact Flash should be enough to store about 3500+ 10MB RAW files.

I ordered from Newegg, since they’re in the same state as I, and I figured the best bet to get next day overnight.

I ordered at 1:34am on Monday morning. Paid $69.99 for the stick, plus $5.95 in tax, and $15.05 in shipping…

Well at 3:45 pm that day, I get the Newegg Black Friday newsletter mailing… Guess what? The stick now is priced at $47.99. Lucky for me, I got promptly on the LiveChat feature and:

3:37:04 PM Yubia
Thank you for waiting. Please note that we do not provide any price protection for the items. However, we are willing to make a one time exception and honor the price difference.

Score one for Newegg… Since I purchased this on my Amex, Amex would have gotten the $22 from Newegg anyway.

So, where’s the Big Fail? Well, today I got my tracking number. Turns out, express overnight shipping really isn’t. Reminder: Newegg’s Warehouse is in NJ, and I live in NJ.

Date/Time                         Activity                                 Location
Nov 25, 2008     11:07 AM   Arrived at FedEx location          MEMPHIS, TN
                       10:03 AM   Departed FedEx location           NEWARK, NJ
Nov 24, 2008     10:26 PM   Left FedEx origin facility            EDISON, NJ
                        5:55 PM    Picked up                              EDISON, NJ
                        8:54 AM    Package data transmitted to FedEx

Ship date  		        Nov 24, 2008
Estimated delivery 	Nov 28, 2008 by 4:30 PM

Complete utter failure. I could have walked from my home to their facility in the 9 hours it took for them to get FedEx to pick up the package. I’m going to be on a plane and on my way to Munchen before the device even gets here.

Congrats Newegg & Fedex, seems like Amazon & UPS have a new customer.

In Japan, 11/11 is also known as Pocky Day (Due to the 11/11’s looking like pocky sticks).

For your entertainment: