Cow. Chicken. Bell.

Wikipedia rules. We all know it. It may not always be accurate but it will give you a pretty good understanding of most topics. It is actually quite impressive how fast vandalism gets corrected.

The problem with Wikipedia is that it never ends: you just have to follow the interesting links. You look one thing up and end up having 15 tabs open and hours of reading to do. I decided to keep track of my recent Wikipedia navigation and threw it into a flowchart. I find it quite interesting how one can start at Mayan calendars and end up at pregnancy, Russian tanks, radio guided bombs of Nazi Germany and binocular vision.

=> Read more!

As a tribute to one of the inspirations behind this site, I present...

The Infamous "Password" Logs:

Day One…

[14:44] “Password”: Hey PF
[14:44] PF Chang: hey “password”
[14:45] “Password”: I am reading your e-mail regarding Company X
[14:45] “Password”: Where did you come up with your stats
[14:46] PF Chang: it's based on one server processing 100 hours per day, which is the average we see with our current engine
[14:46] “Password”: Yes but where did the 1100 hrs of audio come from?
[14:47] PF Chang: it's 13000 files at an average of 5 minutes each, multiply
[14:48] “Password”: I don't follow
[14:49] “Password”: Each file is 5 min or 300 secs long
[14:50] PF Chang: 5 minutes times 13000 files = 65000 minutes = 1083.33 hours which is about 1100 hours
[14:50] “Password”: Ahh your rounding off
[14:52] “Password”: How did you go from mins to hrs
[14:53] “Password”: Did you divide the 65000 by 45 mins
[14:53] PF Chang: divide by 60
[14:53] “Password”: We need a caculator or tool
[14:54] “Password”: Are we working on that
[14:54] “Password”: Ihave one I should sent you
[14:54] PF Chang: i'm just using the calculator that comes with windows
[14:55] “Password”: I have one that breaks the volume of files by segments
[14:55] “Password”: It's pretty good
[14:56] “Password”: I will sent it to you for you to evaluate
[14:58] PF Chang: alrighty

Day Two…

[11:53] “Password”: if they Company Y has 21M files a year and each file is 240 seconds how many hours a day are generated?
[12:01] PF Chang: that's 3835 hours of files a day assumming 365 days a year
[12:02] “Password”: Ok take 50% of those 21M files
[12:03] “Password”: I get 1,050000 files
[12:03] “Password”: divide that by 12
[12:03] “Password”: I get 87500 files per month
[12:04] PF Chang: you're missing a 0
[12:04] “Password”: Ok
[12:05] “Password”: So I am not following how your getting the recorded files sorry for being brain dead here
[12:05] “Password”: Still on meds
[12:06] “Password”: What is the formula to get recorded files per day from 21M files per year
[12:06] “Password”: or at 50% of those files annually
[12:06] PF Chang: 50% of 21M is 10.5M per year
[12:06] PF Chang: divide that by 365 days
[12:07] PF Chang: that's 28,767 files a day
[12:07] “Password”: Ok I follow so far
[12:07] PF Chang: take that times 240 for the number of seconds a day
[12:08] PF Chang: that's 6904080 seconds a day
[12:08] PF Chang: divide by 3600 for hours
[12:08] PF Chang: you get 1917.8 hours of files a day
[12:08] PF Chang: which is 50% of that 21M a year
[12:09] “Password”: Why divide by 3600 hrs
[12:09] “Password”: Assuming 8 hrs a day?
[12:09] “Password”: 40 hrs a week?
[12:09] PF Chang: no...it's 3600 seconds in an hour
[12:10] PF Chang: you're going from seconds to hours

Cow Chicken Bell (or short CCB) is a site run by a bunch of geeks in the IT world. It is a collection of funny (and true) IT stories, hacks and code, rants, random humor and plenty more.

The title is derived from the inability of a former colleague to perform the simplest tasks -- type his password correctly, divide a number by the number of minutes in an hour (for some reason he insisted on an hour having 45 minutes), or use the Windows calculator. We joked that it would be best to get him one of these kids laptops, where the keys are replaced by animals. Cow, Chicken, Bell was part of his password -- unfortunately he had troubles remembering whether it was Cow Chicken Bell Monkey Bell or Cow Chicken Bell Bell.

Main players (in alphabetical order):

• FelixTheKraut likes to pretend that he knows how to fix a server, runs Ubumfu and occasionally climbs some rocks.
• MK1 aka MooseKnuckle is an ex karaoke DJ who churns out usable code once in a blue moon.
• PF Chang has his own office and now thinks he is hot shit. He also adds way too much MSG to everything he cooks.