A Conflagration of Randomness

One of my friends’ AIM statuses today was “PC Load Letter… What the f*** does that mean?!” She’s a CS Major and I didn’t know what this meant so I assumed she was having an issue with her computer. So I googled it and found out that this message is actually what old HP Laserjets used to say when it needed more paper.

This message is confusing (I had no clue what it meant) and confused a lot of people:

The non-intuitive message confuses people for several reasons. The abbreviation “PC” is misleading because it is widely understood — especially in the context of electronic office equipment — to mean “personal computer“, suggesting to many that the problem lies in the computer, not the printer. The word “LOAD” is also ambiguous, as it can also refer to the transfer of electronic data between disk and memory. Furthermore, the word “LETTER” is only associated with paper size in the US and Canada as A4 is the standard size used in the rest of the world. Thus, users encountering this message may believe that they are being instructed to transfer the data or content of their letter to the printer, even though they have already sent the job to the printer.

The particular quote my friend had was from the movie Office Space when a printer in the film displayed this and the main character exclaimed the above quote.

Linked the the PC Load Letter on Wikipedia was an article with the title “lp0 on fire.”  Relating to a printer article this really caught my eye since I knew that lp0 was short for laserjet printer on port 0.  I read this article and this is what it said:

The origin of the “on fire” message was in the 1970s when line printers were large mechanical affairs with a high speed drum rotating at 1200 to 2400 RPM and impact printing heads. Misaligned operating components could cause the paper to come into direct contact with the high speed rotating parts, generating quite a bit of paper dust and increasing the likelihood of a paper jam. If a jam was not detected soon enough, the accumulated paper dust, ink dust and paper could generate enough friction along the rotating drum to start a fire. Furthermore, the cleaning solutions used in the printers were usually alcohol based, the fumes of which also presented a fire hazard. However, there have never been any actual reports of printers which had friction-related fires.

I think it would be really scary if my printer caught on fire, but thankfully these were the old printers.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

Everyone knows the creepiness that Facebook brought to the online word in terms of cyber stalking.  All you need is a name and assuming your account has limited privacy, anyone can view most if not all of your information.  However, this form of stalking may soon end as a new form begins.  Enter Yatedo, a search engine to find anyone on the web.  On their main page they say the following about themselves:

Yatedo is the new generation free People Search Engine which lets you find and contact anyone on the entire web with any kind of information you have about the person you are looking for.

Now you will not have to have Facebook open when you are doing a school research project on Albert Einstein.  Instead just open Yatedo and search for both Einstein and your best friends.  I have requested an invite to this service, so I will see more of what it is like once I get one, but for now here is a screenshot of an info page.

The Bing search engine had a major outage on December 3, 2009.  As many search engines users know, if a search engine fails, that is many dollars of revenue for the company lost. A search engine as big as Bing get sometimes close to a million searches per minute, which means for the 30 minutes that Bing was down, that is approximately 30 million searches that could not be completed. Of course the half hour I chose to use Bing for the first time, it had a server error

With all the hard hours and late nights, this is what happens…

The fastest way to lose weight, guaranteed.

When I didn’t know PHP I spent a lot of time trying to find the coveted script that would allow me to include content in a page by including a page so that I could change the layout and it would remain the same for all pages, only the content would change. I of course didn’t want to use an iframe because these scroll and look hideous. The solution I found, but did not understand for several months later. When a bit later I lost this code I realized it was time for me to learn PHP. The code I wished to know was the code that allows you to include pages with content like http://example.com/index.php?page=home.php. The layout would be in the file index.php but the content for the homepage would be at home.php. The code to do this would be:

<?php if($_GET['page'] == null) { include “default.php”; } else { include $_GET['page']; } ?>

The explaination of this is:

$_GET['page']
is the PHP way to get a parameter from a url.  In PHP all the page parameters are stored after the ? in the url.  For example in this page index.php?page=anything.php the only variable is page and in this case page is equal to “anything.php”.  The $_GET['page'] gets the value of page.  If you wish to add more variables to the url you simply add an & in between the variables.  For example “index.php?page=anything.php&loggedin=false” Thus $_GET['loggedin'] would result in false.   Next time you do a go0ogle search check the url and you can see these variables.

include “default.php”
The first include will be shown if the page variable is null.  In this case it will show the default page you assign it.

include $_GET['page']
This will show the page of whatever follows the page variable in the url.

For an example of this visit my homepage http://rkania.com/index.php?view=home.  My site has customized code and mod rewrite so it won’t work exactly the same.