During one of my nightly sessions of rampant web surfing, I accidentally typed in the wrong address! To my horror, I was not given the standard 404 page, but rather something from Bell!

For my non-techy readers, let me explain what is happening. Every website on the internet has an “ip address” that tells your computer where that site lives, that looks like a bunch of numbers, (ie. 128.0.0.1). You don’t have to memorize those numbers, because everytime you type in an address, like http://www.google.com, the computer does a “dns lookup”. Its pretty much like a dictionary, that has a list of every single site, and the ip address that it has.

So what happens if that site isn’t on the list? The dns lookup fails, and sends back a “404″ error to your browser, which then displays the 404 page that you all know and love:

Bell doesn’t do this. What they do, is hijacks the 404, and sends a redirection instead, to their crappy search page. Why? I’m guessing its because they get revenue for doing so. So who are they partnered with? To find out, just dig a little bit into their html, and you see:

Infospace! So what is infospace? They’re just a search engine that combines results from google, yahoo, bing, twitter, ask, etc… into one convenient location. So am I happy about that? Not exactly. I don’t like being told what search engine to use. I like using google. I WANT to use google. I like their results.

If you click on “about this page” there’s actually a convenient page that lets you opt out!

What does that actually do? Absolutely nothing. Bell still hijacks your 404s! Sure, you get the “address not found” page you are used to, but not really, because they’ve redirected you to their page anyways! It really hurt me then and there, being lied to like that. They’re still even loading infospace’s stuff into my browser!

Argh! So how do we fix this? I tried complaining to bell, but that didn’t go too well:

Me: Hi, I’m calling to complain about your 404 redirects.

Tech Support: What’s that?

Me: You know, when you type in an address that doesn’t exist, the dns server sends back a 404 message to your browser. You guys are hijacking this and sending us to your “search” portal page.

Tech Support: DNS? Err…Let me talk to my manager about that.

Me: Okay…

(Five minutes later) Tech Support: We are not really sure what you’re are talking about…

Me: …

I guess DNS server wasn’t on their scripts. So how to resolve this error? One way, would be to actually define your own DNS server. A nice guide exists at OpenDNS if you want to check it out. What it does, is sets up your router to not ask Bell’s DNS server for the ip address, but rather openDNS’s DNS server. So when you get those pesky 404’s, you get a real one, not the one generated by Bell, in a poor attempt to squeeze a few extra dollars out of their customers.

Unfortunately, Rogers is guilty of that too, so changing ISPs won’t work… that is..unless… you switch to teksavvy

A group of ten evil henchmen enter a bank. The evil leader rises up his gun, shoots a round of shots and yells, “Everyone on the ground! This is a robbery!” Frightened, the bank tellers and clients fall to the ground, quivering in fear, not knowing if they will make it out alive.

One by one, the evil henchmen enter the vault and extract their bounty. Hope appears to be lost, when suddenly, out of the blue, the hero flamboyantly falls through the glass ceiling, proclaiming to the world, “Never fear! Your hero is here!”

The evil leader, not wanting to lose his hard-earned treasure, orders the henchmen, “Get him boys!” The henchmen swarm around the hero, ready to beat him to a pulp. They attack him one by one, buts its no use. The evil leader squirms in anguish as the hero tosses the evil henchmen off to the side.

They’re now unconcious. The evil leader, in an act of desperation shoots the leader with his evil ray of doom. “Silly evil leader”, exclaims the hero, as the evil rays of doom bounch harmlessly off his rock-hard chest of goodness and saves the day.

So, what went wrong for the evil leader? The evil henchmen of course! Seriously. They’re being taught the WRONG things at the evil henchment academy!

Seriously,  it happens all the time, in kung-fu movies, super hero movies, power ranger movies, etc…  What is this problem? The henchmen are using a PRIORITY ATTACK QUEUE!

What is a priority attack queue? Basically, the henchmen all want to attack the hero. They wanna attack him badly, but they can’t decide who will go first. So, they assign themselves a priority. Sometimes its the strongest first, sometimes its the weakest first. Whatever. It doesn’t matter, because they always end up fighting the hero one-on-on.

Let us assume that we have a set of ten henchmen, each one will have an x amount of attack they can administer to the hero. The problem is, the hero will usually have a power level greater then or equal to the strongest henchmen. So with that assumption, the hero will be able to easily dispense any of them.

So what algorithm should the evil henchnen be taught at the Evil Henchmen Academy? Please. Its so obvious. They should be implementing an EVIL DIVIDE AND CONQUER algorithm!

The idea behind an evil divide and conquer algorithm, or any sort of algorithm like this, is to divide the problem into little parts, and solve those parts seperatly. After those little parts are solved, they are combined together into the final solution.

So if a henchmen were to encounter a hero, they would divide the hero into the following pieces:

1. Right leg
2. Left leg
3. Right arm
4. Left arm
5. Throat
6. Head
7. Chest
8. Testicles (Its an evil algorithm! Don’t attack surprised!)
9. Buttocks
10. Mouth

So if each henchmen were to focus on solely one of these parts, the hero’s attention would be too divided to even begin to fend off the attack. The henchmen would then beat each of these parts into a bloody pulp, then when the parts are combined into one final solution, you get a hero who is now a huge bloody pulp.

I swear. I should turn to a life of evil. Unfortunately, my evil laugh still needs a bit more work to strike fear into the hearts of my opponents. Until next time, same Anton-ian blog, same Anton-ian domain!

For my male readers who read this blog, this should be a familiar sight to you. You’re out in public, and you gotta go really badly. You have no time for the toilet stalls, so you make a beeline for the urinals. You’re a man. You’ve been equipped with a penis, which makes urinals a fairly easy thing to use.

Normally, the rest is easy. Not for me. According to my dear friend wikipedia, the average male height in Canada, is a grand 5′8! Me? I’m a mere 5′5 man. I’m ABOVE average in Vietnam (5′3), which explains why I tower over my family. But the minute I leave the safe confines of the world, I’m a midget.

So what does this have to do with urinals? Well, since the average male height in Canada is 5′8, I believe they place wall-mounted urinals to adhere to those of this height. If you check out this thread on reddit, they are debating what urinal people prefer: Knee-high or Waist-high.

My answer? Neither. Knee-high comes up to my stomach, waist-high means I have to be on my tippy-toes to even begin to urinate decently.  So that’s one reason why I hate urinals.

But you know what? I’m okay with knee-high ones. With waist-high urinals, a problem occurs. Let me show you a picture to illustrate the point:

As you see, I do not pass the minimal clearance. But notice that protrusion that sticks out? Usually “average” men’s heights allow them to rise above that protrusion, and thus move their bodies closer into the urinal; effectively hiding their junk.  I cannot. Do you see my perdicament?!

I am VERY VULNERABLE to peeping eyes! Now, you must be thinking right now. “But Anton, don’t you remember the number one rule? Keep your eyes on the road!” Yes, I know, but let us use some math to show you something.

The average degree of sight, for the eye, is 60 degrees towards the nose, and 100 degrees towards the ear:

So from the edge of the eye, someone may see something. As you can see, from the corner of your eye, something can be seen. Assuming the average man stands 15 cm from the urinal, and I stand 30 cm from the urinal, then what distance do I have to be, for my “junk” to be seen from the corner of someone’s eye? Let me show you with a graph!

To calculate this, we use similar triangles, with angles of 10, 90, and 80. So to calculate the visibility distance (distance away from the urinal), we use the distance from the next urinal (beside you) as the dependent variable. Thus I get the formula:

Opposite = Adjacent x Tan (10)
Visibility Distance = DistanceFromNextUrinal x Tan(10)

Which means if the distance between urinals were only at least 47 cm apart, then someone standing within 30 cm of the urinal would be exposed!

Gladly, most urinals clear this distance, or it would be a tight squeeze. New urinaters, on the other hand, that’s a whole other story! Maybe I’ll just stick to stalls.

A lot of people have dreams they wish to achieve. I, like most humans, too have a dream. I have decided to document the path to achieving my dream, so that others may follow in my path and increase the happiness-even if it is only momentarily-in their lives. So what is my dream? I discovered it last week, and excitedly tweeted it:

I used to be content with life. That is, until I discovered I could have this hanging on my wall: http://is.gd/sH2

Yes!  The VELOCIRAPTOR HUNTING TROPHY!

Can you even IMAGINE how amazing it would be? To have guests over, give them a tour of your home, while nonchalantly pointing out the velociraptor head hanging on the wall along with your bookcase of Django books? You watch their eyes literally jump out of their sockets, as you try your darndest to hide that smirk that’s just begging to burst free. They ask you, “how did you manage to kill a velociprator?!” You reply, “by following Anton Nguyen’s Guide to Achieving Your Dreams of course!”

Let me outline the 7-step process for you.

1. Decide what your dream will be
2. You need to deeply desire your dream
   
3. Visualize yourself achieving the goal
4. Make a plan for the path you need to follow to achieve the goal
5. Commit to achieving the goal by writing down the goal
6. Establish times for checking your progress in your calendar
7. Review your overall progress regularly

See? Its that easy! I will show you how I plan to achieve my dream, so that you can see an example.

1) Decide What Your Dream Will Be

This is important. It may be obvious, but you’ll be surprised how many people don’t know what they want. So take some time and think about it. As you know, I’ve already decided. Velociraptor head, the most badass of dinosaurs, hanging on my wall!

2) Deeply Desire Your Dream

This is what will motivate you through all this. When you’re succeeding, it will be easy to work. When you’re not, it will be difficult. So you need to want it badly, to drive you to achieve it. Besides, weak desires produces weak results.

3) Visualize yourself achieving the goal

The mind is a powerful thing.  Studies with patients, drugs, and placebos have shown people’s health improving drastically, if they thought they were given the real drug. To put it into perspective, a wish man once said, “if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything!” So imagine yourself doing it, and it will happen. Here’s me imagining:

4) Make a plan for the path you need to follow to achieve the dream

You gotta really think ahead and make a plan. You can’t just go around randomly just “hoping” it will happen to you. I guess this has parallels to software engineering, where you must plan everything out. Here’s my plan.

1. Find out if an island of dinosaurs exists
2. If it exists, visit the island. Then go to step 15
3. If it doesn’t exist, find an amber mine
4. Find a piece of amber with a mosquito in it
5. Extract blood from mosquito, use blood to find raptor DNA
6. Once found, repair deteriorated DNA by filling the gaps with frog DNA
7. Reconstruct raptor, and have it hatch from an egg
8. MAKE SURE YOU’RE THE FIRST ONE THE RAPTOR SEES!
9. If you’re the first one the raptor sees, the congratulations! The raptor thinks you’re its mother!
10. Raise raptor until it is of an appropriate size for your wall, then chop its head off.
11. If you are NOT the first one the raptor sees, you’re in trouble. Build a pen.
12. Put the raptor in the pen
13. Build security infrastructure to raise/feed raptor
14. Make sure ALL doors have rounded door knobs with NO handles! (So that if the raptors escape, their claws won’t be able to turn the doors. They’re really smart you know!)
15. When raptor is of age, “accidently” turn off the power, so that the raptor can escape
16. Smear your blood in a trail leading to you
17. The raptor will smell your blood, follow it, then it will get to a handle-less door with a round door knob! As it tries to learn how to open it, it will be distracted, which gives you a chance to chop its head off!
18. If by chance, you’re in a place with doors with handles, be scared. Very scared. Fortunately, you have the backup plan. Clone a T-Rex.
19. Have the T-Rex kill the raptor
20. Chop its head off

See? Wasn’t it that easy?

5) Commit To Achieving The Goal By Writing Down The Goal

This is almost like the “first step” step you take. It makes it a reality. It sets it in stone. It makes you see what the goal is, so that you can’t change it later on. I’ve already done it, so lets move on to the next step.

6) Establish Time Frames

This is important. You gotta know when each step will happen, so that you can plan accordingly. It helps you keep track of your progress, lets you see if you’re running late or not, etc… My plan has a lot of uncertainties, so I can’t provide dates, only “estimates” of how long it will take.

1. 5 minutes. Just google it. Apparently, a place does exist called “Isla Nubar”.
2. 8 hour flight. Done!
3. Easy. Google it, book a flight. I’m there! 8 hour flight.
4. Easy. Get the miners to do it. Next!
5. You might have to go through a few mosquitoes. Should take a most a day.
6. Easy! Get a network of computers to collaboratively do this and you’ll be done in 24 hours (DES was broken in that time frame)
7. Incubation times for birds are like a month. So I will assume it takes the same amount of time here.
8. 10-15 minutes. You gotta wait around until it hatches that’s all.
9. 1 minute.  After it sees you, you gotta play with it a bit, to let your image register.
10. This could take a while. So you choose how big of a raptor head you want and raise it until its that big. Should be 1 month to 2 years.
11. Construction? 1 month.
12. 3 Hours. You gotta build a crane to lower the raptor down.
13. 1 month. Construction + Security stuff to build.
14. This should take just a day. Hire constructor to change all the door handles.
15. Finding the power supply should take an hour, maybe quicker if you can find the blueprints. Turn it off, then run for cover.
16. You have to do this quickly, or else the raptor will tear you to bits and pieces. I’d say 1 minute. You HAVE to finish it in 1 minute. Once they sense you, they can accelerate at a rate of 4m/s^2, reaching a top speed of 25 m/s. You do not want to die! This would be the opposite of achieving your dreams!
17. 10 minutes. It might take a while to chop its head off.
18. The T-Rex cloning should take as long as the raptor cloning. So I’d say a month.
19. 5 minutes of awesomeness!
20. 10 minutes. Dream Achieved!

7) Review your overall progress regularly

You gotta always re-examine your progress, to make sure you’re on track! Or you will fall behind! So for example, if I havn’t reconstructed and hatched a raptor yet after 1 month, then I know that obviously, one of my scientists have screwed up, meaning I would have to fire them, and hire someone who really knows what they’re doing.

There you go! How to achieve your dreams! I’ll be starting up soon, make sure you come by in a few months, to check out my “bookcase”.

So I wrote a post a week ago about My Favourite Things. My brother loved it, so he convinced me to record it and film it. He played the keyboards and I wrote the lyrics. Hope you enjoy!