how to detect if standard out is redirected

so i spent a dumb amount of time trying to figure this out, starting by trying to tweak the Dr. Gui method for detecting a redirected stdin, and finally settled on a pretty gritty solution -- Console.Clear() throws an exception if stdout is redirected.

bool consoleIsRedirected = false;
try
{
Console.Clear();
}
catch
{
consoleIsRedirected = true;
}


this has some obvious drawbacks that i don't even want to try to defend, but it works as a solution until the right one shows up.

solution for "could not access network location \Startup" error 1606 when installing Adobe Acrobat 7.0

the content of this post worked perfectly for me:

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6122_102-0.html?forumID=44&threadID=106141&messageID=2555461#2555461

i just searched through the HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Office key for subkeys named "InstallRoot", and if they didn't have a path, i entered the path to the current office installation (in my case: c:\program files\microsoft office\office11\")

worked like a charm.

--j

Barack O Yeah

William Arkin is crazo. One among many of course, but definitely in the pool. Here's what I say:

Hillary and Barack are both thoughtful and driven. I think that Hillary's approach to politics includes years of forced moderation and 'going with the political flow'. Barack's willingness to be simple and direct, accepting the consequences of that approach, is what I like about him - your "diplomatic version" of what he said could just as easily be tagged as "more spinnable", and the bottom line is that Hillary tends to put things in a way that lets her reinterpret her own past, while Barack's approach leaves him committed. I hope he sticks to that approach, and I hope it wins him the presidency - that will say something about the American peoples' ability to overcome their exhaustion with spinning corrupt hypocritical politicians (and their pet journalists).

Superstring

not sure how i got here, but here's a quote from superstringtheory.com:

"
Type IIA superstring theory has a stable one-brane solution called the fundamental string. If we take M theory with the tenth space dimension compactified into a circle of radius R, and wrap one of the dimensions of the M2 brane around that circle, then the result is the fundamental string of the type IIA theory. When the M2 brane is not around that circle, then the result is the two-dimensional D-brane, the D2 brane, of the type IIA theory.
"

listen to yourselves, people. i guess there's no reason to expect a simple result when you're looking for the structure of the universe, but damn. i know there is a real mathematical analog behind this theory, behind these statements, it just seems to me that there's a freedom in complexity that's been exploited (perhaps unintentionally) by this whole line of inquiry.

MultiDimensional Confusion

I just watched / read some content over at the Tenth Dimension (and his little blog, too). interesting stuff; i'm a pretty open minded sort of guy when it comes to philosophy, physics. I run into all sorts of nitpicks though, mostly with the larger physics community in general (and i acknowledge that the solutions to these nits may be found in actually educating myself better on these topics).

the one i had with this guy, and with physics in general -- a "dimension" is a variation in some property, that you're choosing to take note of and possibly (if you're labeling it with an ordinal bigger than '1') plot against some other dimension. where do They get off talking about "The fifth dimension", "The sixth dimension"? for the first three dimensions, there's a level of historical consensus that makes it plausible to talk about them as if they're proper nouns, but when you get into the foggy depths of string theory and tenth dimensional positions, it really isn't (to me) so clear what property gets to occupy those positions. and this guy seems to be describing certain dimensions as aggregates of the previous dimensions, by definition, which i don't get.

Not Shocked

There's an interesting article over at physorg that talks about the "crowd behavior" of excitons in gallium arsenide thin film semiconductors. It seems to be a measurement that confirms theoretical predictions about the higher-order self-interactions of these little not-particles (i love it that you can take {a thing}+{the absence of a thing} and describe the pair like its a new particle).

this leads me to two of my many mantras --

* Nature has no problem adding shit up. we are constantly "discovering" higher order interactions and levels of detail that have huge effects when the harmonics of the situation are tuned just right, but i don't recall anyone drawing particular attention to the tremendous amount of information that's *thrown away* by making the kind of first-principle approximations that science routinely makes in order to get close to the mark with a doable amount of effort. every time that happens, there's a whole branch of inquiry opened up for figuring out what information you threw away in the approximation, and discovering it as new content. it's difficult for us to determine the 17th order interactions of electrons and their absent counterparts, but in practice i guarantee that the world has no issue including the 128th order of self interaction in every moment's equation.

* (I believe) The behavior patterns associated with conscious, intelligent people are bound to be found at the quantum or very small classical level -
i'm on a limb, no logical justification for this yet, but i'm never shocked to hear that some subatomic system is behaving in a way similar to the way humans behave, or that some socialogy term has found its way into a physics journal.

I can't git no...

I think one of the satisfying things about blogging must be the idea of catching thoughts, like taking constant little snapshots of yourself. It might be, or lead to, narcissism, especially since it's theoretically just the stuff you think is worth writing down (like taking a snapshot of your best facial feature - i'm particularly fond of the new racing stripes I've groomed on the side of my face where the sideburns used to live).

About Us

No, I'm not suffering from multiple personality disorder, i just deal with 'About Us' pages all the frickin time as a web developer... *twitch*, *twitch*

I think that one of the things i would use to describe myself is "unsuccessfully fastidious", like a cat that keeps getting burrs stuck in its tail, to its constant irritation.

The Question

douglas adams has it right. the question is bulk of the work. answers are everywhere when the question is well defined. i may be crazy, but i really *expect* to figure it out, or live to see someone else figure it out. i think it's doable, solveable, etc.

when i'm talking about the 'meaning of life' i'm thinking:

what motivates us to continue 'making progress'?
what makes us move?

there's this process called spinodal decomposition that allows crystallization (sp?) to take place in a scene where molecules wouldn't normally collect together, but it still happens because there's a surface tension 'performance gain' sortof thing that makes the overall physical process a net gain from an energy standpoint.

i know there are levels of detail that have to be added to these sorts of questions before they can be tackled, and i'm sure i'll make more sense when i'm not watching Dane Cook over the top of my laptop.

wikipedia has kickass discussions of this meaning of life topic, but everyone's so non-committal. i want the ANSWER. the QUESTION. the only absolute truth is that people don't really agonize over questions of this level of abstractness, because we've convinced ourselves that there really isn't a deterministic answer (or that the answer is God, in whatever form).

more variations of questions to come (i know you're on the edge of your seat ;) )

this post is a case-in-point though - many distractions, makes it hard to stay on point for a relatively simple thought.

Slowly now

a little background : i firmly believe that "the secret of life" is one of those things that's only difficult to identify because of the amount of competing sources of information flooding our senses. it's there, there's a real answer / question (however you want to tag it), we discover it constantly without seeing it as being significant.

Old and New

Since it's such a pain in the ass to deal with forgotten credentials when you switch email accounts, i'll just link back to the old blog.

Heather Graham on Scrubs

yeah.