0x539 Haxxorz

I am not a hacker and the title is probably thus misleading. One of the things that I may do with this blog is to document my discoveries in Powershell. If you do not know what Powershell is then you can look here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx

Basically it is the new scripting language from MS. I happen to think it is very good but I have no desire to engage in a scripting language religious war here.

In Powershell, it is a "promiscuously" typed language. That is not my term it comes from an excellent book "Windows PowerShell In Action by Bruce Payette". It is typed but it does an admirable job of handling the typing for you. I was reading the book and I came across this:

12:44:31 ( 44 ) C:\Temp PS>0xDeadBeef
-559038737

So Powershell automatically converts the Hex value of DeadBeef to an int of -559038737. For some reason this peeked my interest. I was curious about what the Hex value was of some decimal numbers. Unfortunately it is a little harder to get hex from dec. To find out that the hex for 15 is F, this is what you need to do:

12:40:55 ( 41 ) C:\Temp PS>"0x{0:x}" -f 15
0xf

Which lead me to:

12:43:49 ( 43 ) C:\Temp PS>"0x{0:x}" -f 1337
0x539

Kalel Cometh

I'm sure it is probably total coincidence, but in the past week or two, a potentially habitable planet was found orbiting a red giant star:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=450467&in_page_id=1965

and Kryptonite was discovered in Serbia:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/24/kryptonite_found/

Really Cool Site

This site is a really good application of Flash (a technology that I am generally not very fond of). It basically has a distance scale along the bottom and when you click on it you see items that are in the range of size. For instance clicking on 10E-5 m shows Mitochondria, a single electron transister, and colibacillus among others. Try it out at:
http://www.nikon.co.jp/main/eng/feelnikon/discovery/universcale/index_f.htm

iPods can change your life

So my wife got me an iPod for christmas. It has significantly changed the way I interact with my world. I used to listen to the radio whenever I was in the car. Usually I was listening to talk shows. Now I listen to my iPod in the car and I listen to several different podcasts. I enjoy the experience immensely, but now I don't know what is going on in the world nearly as thoroughly as I used to. For instance I didn't even know that President Ford died until I noticed that flags were flying at half staff and I went to google to find out why. Overall it is a great experience and I'm happy to have it I just need some more interaction with the rest of the world.

Welcome

I am going to give blogging a try. I'm not sure where it will go if anywhere, so we will just have to wait and see.