Cold

I've got a cold and I've got all the stereotypical symptoms, including being a big baby. I wonder if I had premonition that I was going to get sick, and that's why I spent money at the toy store last Sunday.

I got an email from my Aunt Lucy (sister to Aunt Pat) with an attachment that is supposed to be a picture, but got encoded as text so now it's a hundred K of goble-de-gook. It is using base64 encoding, and I am thinking that maybe this has got something to do with the new 64 bit processors. This has happened before and I never found any useful information.

This time I asked the right question ("decode jpg image from RFC-822 data") and Google came back with some answers. It isn't fancy it's just the latest incarnation of the old Unix uuencode scheme used for sending binary files over text links. 64 refers to the fact that 6 bits can have 64 different values. Just so we understand each other:

• 2^6 = 64
• 2 to the sixth power equals 64
• 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 64

Found several moronically derived web apps that purport to be able to decode the base64 stuff, but they must be from kindergarten. They have a little text box on their web page where you are supposed to paste your data and then they will send it back to as a binary file.

And once again Wikipedia comes to the rescue with info that I want, a whole bunch that I don't, and this fine quote from Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan:

Man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but by this singular passion from other animals, which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.