return void;

I love that post title! It stands for “University of Texas at Dallas Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.” Quite the mouthful. Well, I received this email today. It’s time to buy some school supplies and a new car (I’m leaning towards a Toyota Prius or a Honda Civic).

Congratulations on your acceptance to the MS/CS Graduate Program in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science! Your “official” acceptance must come in a letter from the university, and may contain a few conditions such as completion of prerequisite courses. Each student’s file is carefully reviewed for admission and all deficiencies are noted for all four CS areas of study. After attending Graduate CS Orientation, students choose their concentration. Students are responsible for fulfilling only those prerequisites pertaining to their area of study. You may apply for a waiver and/or transfer of prerequisite courses, after your enrollment at UTD, based on your previous academic records and the track of study you choose.

Nevertheless, I would like to “informally” welcome you and celebrate your educational opportunities at The University of Texas at Dallas. We are very proud and excited about our program, and I would like to encourage you to join us. UTD has admissions requirements which are at least as selective as the other top universities in the nation, providing you with an education of high scholastic standards.

In the Erik Jonsson School, we have 3 research institutes, 5 research centers, and over 48 research labs, with the number continually growing! This means that both our faculty and our graduate students have ample opportunities to pursue their areas of research interest. Furthermore, because of our location in the 2nd largest high-tech region in the United States, our industry ties are very strong. Because of this, we are able to work closely with industry to both understand current needs and to continue to push our research activities ahead of the “state-of-the art.” Joint research with industry is also frequently undertaken. Your participation in our Graduate Program will certainly provide you with opportunities to participate in these activities.

The Erik Jonsson School also has the largest Industrial Practice Program in the state of Texas, and the sixth largest in the nation. This program is designed to allow our students to work with our local industry partners while still progressing towards a degree. The job placement rate for students who complete our voluntary co-op program is one of the best in the nation.

Lastly, I would like to remind you that the university has a large support network for new and continuing students. There is everything from tutoring to over one hundred and thirty student organizations to keep you as busy and involved as you would like to be!

I sincerely hope to see you on campus for the fall 2006 semester. If you have questions or would like additional information, please contact

Warm Regards,

Dr. Kang Zhang

Professor, Assistant Department Head

Summers have always been big for bands, even before the mega concerts like Lollapalooza; acts would pack their bags for the summer and hit the road. Every year I see more articles with the headline reading “Slow Sales for Big Summer Tours” and I have to ask myself what has brought us to this? In plain English the problem is straight economics.

Ticket prices have grown steadily over the years for big-named acts. First the reason were scalpers artificially driving up the prices, then ticket brokers, not to mention the facility fees, convenience charge, and of course tax. The new hot topic is the price it takes for these bands to fuel their busses to get from venue to venue, and how much it is affecting their profitability behind the tour. Of course these acts don’t want to take a hit in the profit margin to tour, so who gets to pick up the tab? That’s right the consumers.

Not only are ticket prices getting incredibly high to see a show, but often times there are problems getting good seats simply due to availability. Artists have tried to offer good seats to the people who join their fan club (lining their pockets with more $), and acts have even started putting prime tickets up auction style. When is enough enough, and when does “alienation” of their core fan base start to happen? Not all Radiohead fan’s can drop $500 + dollars for good seats to see them perform live this summer, but many of these people would really like to sit close enough to not need binoculars to see Thom Yorke and company.

Even those cheap seats are approaching ludicrous prices, like $50 for third tier seating in an arena. Pearl Jam had it right years ago when they attempted to take on Ticketmaster and their pricing machine. Unfortunately the corporation won, but something has got to change. They need to examine their supply and demand curves a bit, re-adjust their costs and reduce the ticket prices. Oh, and what is up with charging $30 for a tour t-shirt?

There is something special about being at a concert (I really enjoy them), but when is it just going to cost too much, and the $18 DVD of a stop on their tour going to be more enjoyable?

I have been playing with the Widget plugin and found that it finally resolves one of the two major problems I have with WordPress. I’ve been thinking about the other problem and I tried to hobble a solution together but found that the time investment exceeded my freetime. Instead, I decided to make a feature proposal I wasn’t sure of the correct means to do so, so bear with me as this may be rather long.

I will also be posting this to my blog at http://voidreturn.com. For a sample of the following, please refer to http://voidreturn.com/onclick.xml and http://voidreturn.com/oneclick.txt

Installing plugins and themes have always been a sore spot with me. There use to be a plugin database but it has become deprecated due to a serious underlying design flaw. Here’s my suggestion: all themes and plugins (any really anything) should be installed, removed, and updated with a single click. The flaw with the old plugin database was that the maintainer kept track of the installing of the plugins when in fact the plugin/theme developers should themselves do this.

To solve this, an EBuild style file will be downloaded. Similar to Gentoo EBuilds, the file will dictate the location of the plugin’s download and will provide a function for installing and removing itself. This means that WordPress developers will not have to maintain information about the plugin/theme installs but rather the actual developer of said plugin/theme. For example:

VERSION=1.1
SRC=http://some.url.com/plugin-1.1.zip
function install(){
//php install code here
}

function remove(){
//php remove code here, removes this plugin entirely

}

The install/remove functions will be called depending on what the user chooses from the admin page. The admin page (check the sample) will have a listing similar to the plugin admin page. In fact, much can be borrowed from that. These EBuild style files can be downloaded and executed on the fly. They can use PHP to keep them platform independent.

The next major thing is how these EBuild style files are to be propagated. RSS seems like the best route here (refer to the XML sample). Note that the samples are just debug tests; I’m sure a more creative use of RSS can be devised. The sample plugin PHP code is also debug and is very inelegant. The RSS can be used to define all of the plugin details and links to the EBuild style file. This will also allow people to be notified when their plugin is updated or new plugins are added.

If anyone has any questions about this idea, please ask. I think this could be extremely powerful and useful, but I could be wrong (maybe there’s something I’m not seeing wrong). I am hoping someone else has the time to implement this and fill in all of the holes.

Some of you may not have noticed, some of you may have but zero-blog changed slightly tonight. I switched over completely to using WordPress Widgets plugin. This allows for drag and drop sidebar widgets to be added without theme reworking.

This has been one of 2 of my gripes from day one. Finally, I can switch to a different theme without having to do serious rewrites to have my sidebar the way I want it. Granted, some themes still do not have a concept of the “max-width” CSS property for images (highly recommended), but this is a major step in the right direction. Unfortunately, modifying a theme has become increasingly difficult.

Well, lets hope things improve. I am looking for a new theme so I’m taking suggestions now.

I watched the Family Guy movie recently and loved the section where Peter gets a job on the local news complaining. Imainge that, being able to complain about stupid people and stupid things for a living. So I decided to make this a regular here on zero-blog. Every Friday night, I plan on posting about something that really irritates me. So here’s my first attempt.

You know what really grinds my gears? Sony. They’ve become too arrogent for their own good. I bought a Playstation and a Playstation 2 and thoroughly enjoyed the hardware and the games. Based on this 10 year success, I ended up purchasing a PSP. I’ve made other mistakes before and I’ll discuss them later. Sony decided they know what gamers really want to do: watch movies.

First they put an inferior UMD disc player on the handheld which weighs/slows it down. Then the UMD is utterly killed in stores by being yanked from Wal-mart and Target. Then Sony thinks they have their finger on the pulse of all gamers by releasing a $60/100 Memory Stick that can transfer only one of four DVD movies to be viewed on the PSP.

Screw you Sony. What gamers want is to play games. Period. Why is it so hard for them to get it into their thick skulls that gamers don’t need convergent game systems and hate having to use hacks to watch DVDs they already own. Here’s an idea: sell ITMS-style movies that can be downloaded and watched on the PC with no proprietary software and allow us to transfer them to the Memory Stick. Quit dickin’ around with the fireware upgrade war with the mod community. Quit trying to lock down your movies so damn much the consumer has to pay double.

Bundle this with the PSP White advert debacle and the PS3 pricing nightmare and I am amazed that Sony remains a top brand name. What are the requirements to do market research at Sony? “Let’s see, well he’s not dead so I’m guessing he has a good idea what gamers really want.”

Lastly, for those of you who are hedging your bet on Blu-ray, you have a short memory. Let me refresh it: Betamax, ATRAC, MiniDisc, HighFD, Super Audio CD, and now UMD. It seems Sony made a wise decision with MMCD, but thinks they are above making agreements nowadays.

I was surfing around and I stumbled across a site that sells some of the coolest thing’s I’ve seen sold anywhere. The site is called Uncrate and the gear they sell is rather uniq. For example, you can buy everything from a personal hovercraft to a Lego chess set. They also have this really cool global ID (possibly GPS translocator) for your luggage. This would be irresistible if I could put that in anything. Imagine hiding on of those things in your car. That’s a $15 Lo-Jack!!

Anyone find any other (highly expensive) desirable on this site?

I am working through upgrading and cleaning up my WordPress install in preparation for the new 2.1 release. It seems someone was finally fed up with the WordPress theming system as much as I was so I will be playing with some new toys. For a few days, there may be some weird things going on with the theme, but the content should not break. If you loathe the default themes that much, I recommend using a feed reader until things stabilize.