...et voilà!

Being somewhat technically savvy, I've been called on quite a bit during the DTV transition to fix various TV and converter box problems around the neighborhood. More than once I've simply picked up the remote, turned on the power and flipped through the channels to demonstrate that everything indeed works. I really couldn't tell you what the problem was supposed to have been, but apparently my presence fixes it. In one case, it actually turned out to be a bad coax cable, but that seems to have been the exception.

The endianness of language

While perusing a beginner's book on Arabic, I commented to my CE major house-mate that while the Arabic script was written right-to-left, their numerals were recorded left-to-right.

His response?

"Cool, it's a mixed-endian system!"

rm with care

What happens when you rm your rm command?