My Head Hurts

A Concurrency Programming Kata in Erlang

2012-01-04T09:25:00.006-05:00

Write an Erlang program that spawns two processes. Each process should: Send a unique (pseudo-random) key/value pair to the CouchDB database. Remember the value in-process so it can be confirmed later (see Step 6.) Don't use process dictionaries for this. Send the Id of the created CouchDB record to the other process. Listen for Ids being sent to it by the other process. On receiving an Id,

perlbrew and 32-bit CPAN modules like Mac::Growl

2011-08-03T19:24:00.003-05:00

Today I discovered perlbrew, a utility for managing multiple versions of Perl under a non-root account, in the same spirit as rvm or virtualenv. I was forced into discovering perlbrew, because installing XCode 4 onto a Mac breaks the ability to compile many CPAN modules if you stick with the computer's default Perl. Even with perlbrew, you might still have trouble compiling CPAN modules on a

SEO changes forever (or so I've read)

2011-06-24T20:08:00.005-05:00

But you have not, as SEOs, we never really had to think as much or as broadly about, "What is the experience of this website? Is it creating a brand that people are going to love and share and reward and trust?" Now we kind of have to think about that. How Google's Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever This, in a nutshell, is the problem I've always had with SEO. People have seen SEO

Why Apple is charging you to store non-iTunes music in iCloud

2011-06-09T14:27:00.006-05:00

If you own some music that you bought from iTunes and you choose to "upload" it into iCloud, you're not really uploading anything. Apple already has it. You originally bought it from them. They just have to store the fact that you are allowed to access their copy of the song. Six million people can "store" Poker Face in iCloud, Apple has to keep only the one copy. Us nerds call this

Health insurance is more fun if you treat it like a game

2011-04-21T10:06:00.002-05:00

> look You are in a twisty maze of insurance forms, third-party authorities, and provider networks, all alike. > file claim You fill out a claim form for your wrist therapy and drop it in the mail. > wait Time passes... > wait More time passes... > wait Weeks pass. Your claim returns in the mail, rejected, with a brief explanation at the bottom. > read explanation The words are English, but

ImageMagick, Homebrew, the NEWS.txt error

2011-04-11T13:24:00.001-05:00

Seems like everyone has trouble installing ImageMagick, but everyone has a slightly different problem. In my case I was getting the error: Error: No such file or directory - /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/6.6.7-10/share/ImageMagick/NEWS.txt To fix this, do "brew edit imagemagick" (or "sudo brew edit imagemagick" if that's how you brew) and find these lines: # We already copy these into the keg

Visual Studio: My build actions are missing

2010-07-01T21:31:00.006-05:00

Since this seems to be a faq without an answer: In Visual Studio 2008 (and earlier?) if your project files are missing their Advanced properties - like Build Action - it probably means you were handed a "web application" that is actually a "web site" in Visual Studio parlance. You have to create a new "web application", copy over the source files, and a few other steps to complete the conversion.

Adobe is becoming the Jay Leno of developer tools

2010-05-14T08:19:00.011-05:00

Adobe needs to take a page from David Letterman: "You get fired, you get another gig! You go across the street and you punish them and you make them eat your words!"Adobe is trying to leverage public opinion - and even government intervention! - by portraying itself as the victim of a monopoly power. They start with the assumption that the iPhone is the only gateway to the mobile web, and of

Uh, thanks Steam, I guess?

2010-05-12T19:55:00.003-05:00

Steam said that my downloaded copy of Portal had a 303 million percent fragmentation rate? ... But then Steam defragged it for me, so it's 303 million percent better now.

Snow Leopard, external displays, and fonts

2010-04-23T09:27:00.012-05:00

UPDATE 05/03/2010: The correct answer seems to be this one: 10.6: Re-enable LCD font smoothing for some monitors. "The problem with the Automatic option is that OS X incorrectly detects many third party LCD monitors as CRTs, and consequently, disables LCD font smoothing." A couple months ago I purchased a new 13" Macbook Pro. This was before the April updates, so it's the mid-2009 model. As an

Interactive Debugger for PHP

2010-04-17T17:16:00.006-05:00

If you're looking for a free (zero-dollar) debugger for PHP, I've stumbled onto the combination of Xdebug installed onto the server and MacGDBp on my workstation. My favorite part is that I don't need to have a copy of the source tree on my workstation to do source-level debugging. It's transferred to me on demand by the magic of DBGP.UPDATE: If you don't mind dropping a little money, I've been

The Nerd in the High Castle

2010-01-20T19:24:00.009-05:00

I like to read history books, and that includes the history of the computer industry. Steven Levy's stuff is pretty good, even if sometimes he gets a little breathless in the telling. Dealers of Lightning, West of Eden, Soul of a New Machine, stuff like that.From reading enough of these, and from the tech press as well, I know there's this notion floating around that during the early 80s Apple

Can I make a UIView transition to itself?

2009-10-14T19:56:00.012-05:00

Sure, why not? Let's say you have a UIViewController and you want the base view to do a CATransition from itself to itself: - (void)doTransToSelf { CATransition *anime = [CATransition animation]; anime.type = kCATransitionPush; anime.subtype = kCATransitionFromRight; anime.duration = 0.5; UIView *mySuper = self.view.superview; [self.view removeFromSuperview]; [

Why won't my backBarButtonItem use its action?

2009-06-28T16:23:00.010-05:00

Or, How to make a backBarButtonItem send its action to its target. Answer: you don't. Because a backBarButtonItem is a UIBarButtonItem, it has "target" and "action" properties, leading you to believe that if you assign values to those properties, shit will happen. Alas, shit will not happen. Or rather, the usual shit will happen, but not the extra shit you hoped would happen. The

Sun. Oracle. Ponytails.

2009-05-22T08:34:00.005-05:00

So... Sun. Oracle. And of course Schwartz. Schwartz, Schwartz. Blogging his way through the graveyard, chanting his open source mantra. As if clinging to all the right buzzwords would make up for not having an actual strategy. "I'm a CEO with a blog! How can my company fail??"There are lots of companies that get by without a strategy, at least for a while. Hell, I used to work for one. But if

A Thread Across the Ocean

2009-05-01T22:52:00.007-05:00

A Thread Across the Ocean was (to my surprise) the only book I could find that tells the story of laying the first transatlantic communications cable. Luckily, it's a good book. It's a classic story of 19th-century ambition to conquer nature (and get rich doing it) and this book tells it well. Recommendation: acquire.See also: Cryptonomicon.

Putting a background behind a UIView transition

2009-04-15T21:23:00.010-05:00

When doing a setAnimationTransition: with a UIView, you can do a "flip left/right" or a "curl up/down". If you do a flip left/right, you'll usually see a blank black screen "behind" the view as it flips. (The built-in Stocks app does this.) Recently someone asked me if you could have something else back there, and I thought "huh, that's interesting, I never tried that" and we investigated. It

Rails: Database-less ActiveRecord models

2009-01-27T22:16:00.008-05:00

It's not unusual in Rails projects to have one or two model classes that don't inherit from ActiveRecord and don't require an associated table in the database. But what if we want half of that? What if we want a model that does descend from ActiveRecord but doesn't exist in the database? I finally found some code for doing exactly that. Here's an example:class Feedback < ActiveRecord::Base

EventMachine: a TCP server module for Ruby

2009-01-23T15:06:00.019-05:00

I just discovered EventMachine. EM is, at its least, an event-driven library around which you can build a custom TCP server. The nitty-gritty of listening, sending and receiving, and multiplexing connections is all done for you. That's selling it short, though, because EventMachine can do a lot more. In its own words, EventMachine "provides event-driven I/O using the Reactor pattern." It can be

I didn't know Ozzy Osbourne was a member of Elevation Partners

2009-01-19T20:53:00.007-05:00

(Click To Read)

The Palm Pre SDK, or, In Defense of Javascript

2009-01-13T16:46:00.010-05:00

So the Palm Pre is generating a lot of (mostly) positive buzz.[1] There are still a lot of unknowns around it, details of the SDK are still vague, and it may yet all turn out to be sound and fury, especially since no one is allowed to touch it yet.Most of the negativity so far has targeted the choice of Javascript as the programming language. Personally I've never had a problem with Javascript

iPhone: Development provisioning profiles and the Entitlements file

2009-01-09T14:41:00.010-05:00

I found what appears to be a disconnect between Apple's provisioning documentation and what actually goes on in Xcode. If you want to build your project for development (testing) on your own device, the documentation says to select the top-level build target of your application, open the Info window, click the Build tab, and set "Code Signing Identity" -> "Any iPhone OS" to be "iPhone Developer:

Two Desktop icons in Open File sidebar

2009-01-05T11:22:00.016-05:00

I recently had a problem similar to this one:Fix multiple ghost aliases in the Finder's sidebarI had two Desktop icons in the sidebar of my Open File dialog boxes, in all of my applications. I had only one Desktop icon in the sidebar of my Finder, though. The advice on that page is good advice, but you don't have to trash the sidebarlists.plist file. Instead you can edit it with the Property List

Dear MBW: I just want things to be like they used to

2008-12-24T09:37:00.010-05:00

I used to love MacBreak Weekly. But I finally gave up and unsubscribed. Why? Here's an example. And keep in mind, this is not an isolated incident. This is a representative sample:Episode #117. They've got Wil Shipley. Great guest. Should be a great show. Wil is (trying to) talk about scanning barcodes with a cellphone camera. Andy Ihnatko interrupts with a digression about how he takes pictures

In case you missed it in the 80s, here comes the sequel

2008-09-24T09:16:00.008-05:00

App Store: I'm out (Fraser Speirs)Apple Extends NDA to Rejection Letters (Arnold Kim)Beneath Apple (Brent Simmons)"[Microsoft] is annoying, but (in the end) not half so annoying as watching Apple inscrutably and relentlessly destroy itself." - Neal Stephenson in 1999

Slicehost: The Awesome Continues

2008-09-18T16:54:00.005-05:00

Is it possible to restore a single file or directory from a backup?I was recently in the same situation, it actually happened a little bit before Sep 4 and so I didn't have the benefit of looking at this thread. But I tried it anyway, just to see how Slicehost would handle it. I allocated a new slice sourced from the previous night's backup of my production slice. I scp'd my lost files back over

I Guess I Should Fear For My Soul

2008-09-13T20:26:00.004-05:00

Google Chrome

2008-09-01T15:35:00.007-05:00

Google ChromeJohn Gruber is on target when he says it sounds more like an application runtime than a browser. But the key point is that it is an application runtime optimized for the kinds of web applications that already exist. They're not trying to make a "next generation" browser like Ubiquity or push some new kind of embedded applet ("Rublets - now you can make RIAs with Ruby!") Based on this

We all suspected it, and now it's confirmed

2008-08-14T11:28:00.007-05:00

I'll give you a little hint here: some of us, back when I was inside the fruity compound, occasionally held contests to see who could get the weirdest, most funky and outrageous, rumors posted to one of the major rumor sites. - Chuqui 3.0

Safari bookmarks and Sync Services

2008-05-25T15:53:00.010-05:00

For my own purposes, I need to make a Cocoa program that knows about my bookmarks in Safari. Lucky for me, Safari submits its bookmarks to Sync Services, according to Syncrospector:To complete my evil plan, I also need to know the last time I clicked on a bookmark. Lucky for me, the sync schema includes a "last visited date", according to /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/SafariSyncClient.app/

OS X, Bonjour, Apache

2008-05-22T10:03:00.009-05:00

As part of some experimenting the other day, I went into System Prefs on my laptop running 10.5 and activated Web Sharing. To my surprise, my personal web site did not appear in Safari's Bonjour list, nor did any HTTP service appear in Bonjour Browser. I could reach the web page if I typed in the URL, it just wasn't being advertised by Bonjour. I had a very clear memory that it used to work with

If it looks like pee, don't drink it

2008-05-17T20:04:00.007-05:00

I'm done spending big bucks on any whiskey which is yellow. Good single malt whiskey should be brown. Think about it - Irish, Scotch, or American, all of the really flavorful whiskeys have a rich brown color. Now I do like Dewars White Label occasionally, but that's a blend, and a whole different financial category than a single malt like Auchentoshan or Knappogue. Those pale yellow-colored

XPath: baby steps

2008-05-09T12:45:00.005-05:00

As I'm learning about XPath, I want to do something like "find all Traveller nodes for which the DepartFrom node is "Bton". The XPath would be something like:.//Traveller//DepartFrom[. = "Bton"]But this does not return the Traveller nodes, this returns the DepartFrom nodes. Now, if I knew for certain that Traveller is the direct ancestor of DepartFrom, I could do this:.//Traveller/DepartFrom[. =

How many angels can dance on the tip of a mouse pointer? I don't care.

2008-04-25T06:14:00.009-05:00

I used to care about piddly shit like this. The day I quit caring was the day I started wanting a Mac. (That day, incidentally, was about two years before I actually got a Mac, so don't give me any crap about rationalizing in Apple's defense.) After five years of having a Mac, I still don't care and I feel great! It's like switching from Catholic to Buddhist. That's what not having autofocus is

Creating a menu-based SIMBL plugin

2008-03-15T14:19:00.048-05:00

There are a hundred tutorials on creating nib-based Cocoa applications. And there's at least one good write-up on how to make a Cocoa bundle that can be loaded by SIMBL. SIMBL has taken on increased importance with the release of Leopard, because InputManagers can no longer be installed in user folders. They must be installed at the system level in /Library/InputManagers. However, if you or your

Dear Mac developers: the mobile app market existed before you came along

2008-03-08T21:25:00.005-05:00

One of my friends sent me this excellent article examining the state of the mobile app industry. People who want to bitch about the iPhone app model should read some history first. Then at least they can do some informed bitching.Mobile Applications, RIP

Current podcast list

2008-03-08T18:06:00.006-05:00

As a Baby Gnome He Had So Much Potential

2008-02-17T20:27:00.018-05:00

(Originally written April 9, 2004)Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.- Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-MonthDate: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 13:47:53 -0500 (EST)From: Adrian HoseyTo: Thomas R. HallSubject: Re: good articleOn Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Thomas R. Hall wrote:: On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Adrian Hosey wrote::

In My Defense, The Broiler Pan Was Dirty

2008-02-16T18:49:00.009-05:00

1 oven on broil + 1 top rack + 1 quarter-sheet pan + 2 raw steaks = 2 delicious steaks + 1 ruined quarter-sheet pan.

The Digital Devil Made Me Do It

2008-02-16T10:35:00.009-05:00

(Originally written December 4, 2003)The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.- H. L. MenckenMost of what you can find on the Net about how to make a bomb is available somewhere in a library

Conspiracies unmasked

2008-02-15T09:40:00.008-05:00

The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. Being outraged online is a form of entertainment, and refreshing a thread to receive a hit of consensus packs the thrill of genuine activism without requiring any sweat.- Tycho Brahecdent: i think the internets have made it challenging for people with hungry brains to focus: there's so much to graze upon that we all

Wishlist: more efficient scrolling for the iPhone

2008-02-13T19:08:00.006-05:00

I've had an iPod Touch for about a month now, and I love it to death. But as humans tend to do, I'm going to be general in my praise and detailed in my gripes. But wait! because I have a proposed solution to my gripe.My praise: it's awesome. It's still not my perfect iTablet, but I'm using it for the same reasons - I can access the net, in comfort, without using a keyboard.My gripe: there is no

A Nutshell: The Matrix Reloaded

2008-02-08T18:03:00.003-05:00

(Originally written June 10, 2003)As the lights came up on The Matrix Reloaded, I already knew what I thought of it. I was curious what my wife would think. I didn't have to wait long. "That sucked" she said."Really?" I said. "I thought it was pretty damned all right.""Really?" she asked."You didn't like the ending." I asserted."No, I didn't.""He was saying things I think a programmer would

Project Dresden

2008-02-05T18:30:00.001-05:00

I know we're not supposed to laugh at our own jokes, but once in a while I find something I forgot I had written, and if it makes me laugh to see it again, I feel like I must have done something right.Project Dresden

Heroes

2008-02-04T17:58:00.002-05:00

(Originally written July 27, 2000)My son, almost 4 years old, has developed an interest in Batman and Spiderman. He's starting to have heroes. I think that's neat. I started thinking about my childhood heroes - Batman and Spiderman being two of them - and then I started to wonder about people who for some reason maybe didn't have heroes as children. My first thought from there was those teenagers

Tonight's homework: choose the future of computing

2008-02-01T18:17:00.001-05:00

Compare and contrast:The Web's The Place by Tim BrayiPhone's AJAX SDK: No, thank you by Wil Shipley

Be Seeing You!

2008-01-29T11:38:00.001-05:00

When I was in 2nd grade we got our first computer at home, an Apple ][+. One of the first softwares my dad bought to go with it was a game called "The Prisoner", loosely based on the Patrick McGoohan TV show of the same name. This was a very early game, a strange mish-mash of hi-res, lo-res, and text graphics.One of the more distinctive traits of the game was that whenever someone "talked" to you

Macbook Thin == iTablet beta

2008-01-28T11:02:00.002-05:00

Well, we didn't get an iTablet, we got Macbook Mini. Except it's more like a "Macbook Thin." Which is interesting because making it Thin instead of Mini addresses Bill Manning's complaints about UMPCs, which I thought were spot-on.I wasn't predicting a tablet, just hoping for one. The Macbook Thin is a great product for the "not me" demographic. There's a lot of neat tech packed into the thing

Outsourcing, or, This Time It Will Work For Sure!

2007-12-18T18:40:00.005-05:00

Oh man, those first four hundred bites of dirt were not so good. Maybe the next one will be better. - StinkomanI just got back from meeting with a buddy who was telling me how his organization is getting ready to outsource tens of thousands of internal email accounts to Google ... or maybe MSN, they haven't decided yet. We spent a fair amount of time and beer discussing why this is a bad idea,

Aspect Oriented Programming for .NET

2007-12-13T13:26:00.001-05:00

PostSharpSee also

Here's hoping against the "Macbook Mini"

2007-12-04T12:20:00.002-05:00

"As Macworld approaches, reports of an ultraportable MacBook are following patterns of previously expected products that eventually materialized," analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to clients. "We believe these reports are legitimate and continue to expect Apple to introduce a MacBook with a significantly smaller form factor." - Piper Jaffray analyst Gene MunsterOne might assume that Piper

iPhone keyboard isn't faster - but who cares?

2007-11-14T11:25:00.001-05:00

I keep Slashdot in my RSS because it's still a great clearing house for links. But the asinine commentary that comes with the links drives me crazy. Case in point:"One of the selling points of the iPhone was its revolutionary touch-screen full keyboard. But a study has shown that text messages sent from iPhones contain significantly more typso than messages from phones with other kinds of

Long long ago, he was actually a pretty good writer

2007-11-12T13:25:00.001-05:00

George Lucas: "I basically worked out a general theory for the Force, and then I played with it. The more detail I went into, the more it detracted from the concept I was trying to put forward. It worked better as I got less specific... So the real essence was to try to deal with the Force but not to be too specific about it."(From Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays)And don't we all wish he'd

YASIBLR: Yet Another Self-Important Blogger Leopard Review

2007-11-07T18:24:00.003-05:00

The 3D Dock sucks. Much hash has been made about why it sucks, but sometimes the gestalt view of the layman is the most telling. On first boot, on my Macbook with the glossy screen, there were so many glares and reflections - some real, some virtual - that I couldn't distinguish... well, anything. It's a visual trainwreck. Using the defaults command to make it 2D is better, but still

MacBook Pro screen, psychedelic colors

2007-10-11T13:23:00.001-05:00

This week, I experienced exactly this problem:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1065874&tstart=0At first I was sure it was a hardware problem, because it affected the screen both in OS X and when I booted to XP with Boot Camp. I knew the video card was okay, because my external monitor looked fine, but I thought it could be a problem with the laptop LCD, or with the ribbon

Please, no more Mail.app

2007-08-16T10:20:00.001-05:00

Peeve of the moment: Whenever some people refer to the Mac's standard Mail program as "Mail.app" or "Mail-dot-app". I also sometimes hear "Terminal-dot-app", and I expect I'm going to hear "Numbers-dot-app". Yes, "Mail" is a very vanilla name for a program. Yes it needs to be disambiguated from other mail programs, and even from the common noun "mail." But you never hear people say "Word-dot-exe"

Multitouch desktop? No. Multitouch laptop? Yes.

2007-08-09T20:40:00.001-05:00

From the Q&A section of this week's Apple press conference:"Introduced multitouch on iPhone, what about for the Mac?"Steve: "Makes sense for the iPhone, not sure it makes sense in the Mac. Classify that as a research project."(taken from Engadget)Some people really latch on to this idea. Other people dismiss it, citing the well-known gorilla shoulders effect. I think they're both right, because

Historic new Apple keyboard

2007-08-08T07:57:00.004-05:00

Why is it a historic new keyboard? Check out this photo from Engadget. For the first time in a long time, we have a Mac keyboard where the Command key is not also the "Apple" key.I've had a strange fascination with the history of the "Command/Apple" key ever since I learned that the original Macintosh used the ⌘ symbol exclusively in the interface, and did not have the Apple symbol on its

10th Anniversary of Macworld Boston 1997

2007-08-01T16:14:00.003-05:00

This August marks the tenth anniversary of Macworld Boston 1997, AKA "The Return of Steve Jobs." You can see the video of his speech here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEHNrqPkefI At the 23 minute mark, he says something very interesting. He says that when he returned to Apple and examined the state of the company, he uncovered two core assets: the Apple brand name, and the MacOS software.

Open source people shouldn't pirate closed source - you're not helping yourselves

2007-06-23T12:58:00.003-05:00

A few years ago, at the height of my free software beliefs [1], I was having lunch with a co-worker who was also a free software proponent. He had a cache of license keys for some Microsoft software, and he was sharing them freely with anyone who asked."Man, don't do that," I said."Why?" he asked. "Screw Microsoft. We want them to lose, right?""Yeah, but you're not really helping free software.

Safari on Windows, continued

2007-06-12T07:35:00.001-05:00

John Gruber was the first person - that I saw - who points out that Apple makes money on Google searches done with Safari's built-in search-box. (i.e. not just browsing to google.com.) That's the angle I was trying to fill in. Apple didn't port Safari just to grow browser share. They didn't do it just to help develop for the iPhone. They did it to make cold hard cash, even if it's not obvious

Safari on Windows - where is this going?

2007-06-11T14:16:00.001-05:00

At the D5 conference, Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs about iTunes on Windows. Steve Jobs said there have been hundreds of millions of downloads of iTunes for Windows, to which Mossberg said "that makes Apple one of the larger vendors of Windows software." Given today's announcement about Safari on Windows, you almost wonder if Mossberg's question at D5 was a plant.While Safari on Windows is a

Eight-core Macs and performance

2007-04-17T11:04:00.002-05:00

On the one hand:New eight-core Mac Pro performance a mixed bagOn the other hand:"12:23pm - Easy to spread multiple threads across as many processor cores as you want -- demo [of Compressor] shows octo-core encoding jump to 100% across all eight cores. Shows live bookmarks in video, publishing to iTunes. All done!" - Apple Keynote Live from NAB 2007Even though SMP has been around for years, it

What kind of breakdown would your computer have?

2007-04-09T22:55:00.001-05:00

When a Mac, or a Linux computer, or a Sun, is broken, there is still a logic to the brokeness. I have tools available to me for inspecting the computer, and I can pursue the symptoms of the problem, and the symptoms lead on a rational path to the cause. In the cases where I can't fix the problem, I at least feel confident that I have exhausted all my options and the machine is truly well

Online resources for understanding Aspect Oriented Programming

2007-03-30T11:07:00.002-05:00

I was going to buy a book on Aspect Oriented Programming, but all of the books I can find use AspectJ, and I don't currently use Java for anything. So I went looking for online resources about the principles of AOP and found some good stuff:Gregor Kiczales describes AOP to GoogleThis is excellent. It starts a little dry - like every good thinker, he's pedantic in laying down his groundwork. But

New defensive scheme for the Colts

2007-03-15T15:43:00.001-05:00

Now that they have a Super Bowl victory, the Colts are free to try some "experimental" game plans.Like releasing the whole defense and having the offense play both ways.Reggie Wayne is training at cornerback and Peyton Manning is training at linebacker.Manning was quoted as saying "I get two paychecks this way."Harrison plays corner, but since he has better hands than 99% of receivers, he just

Favorite Simpsons episodes

2007-03-01T08:05:00.001-05:00

One of the local TV stations just finished running a Top 50 countdown of the best Simpsons episodes ever. They had Homer's Religion at #2 and the Dental Plan at #1. Those are great episodes, but I wouldn't have put them at 1 and 2. They made some other very questionable choices, like putting the Spring Break episode way back in the 40s.My top episodes would look like this:8. The Swimming Pool ("

Will the iPhone become the Phone?

2007-01-11T14:17:00.002-05:00

By now everyone who knows about the iPhone also knows that Cisco owns the trademark on "iPhone" in the United States. Cisco and Apple were in negotiations over the US trademark, but then Cisco got mad and decided to take it to court. Everyone assumes it's a matter of money. But now Cisco has said something very interesting:What were the issues at the table that kept us from an agreement? Was it

OS X, perl security update

2006-11-28T18:34:00.002-05:00

I noticed in the Security Update 2006-007 for OS X, they are including an update to the system Perl. I remembered that Redhat also recently released a security update for Perl on RHEL4, so I did a little digging. Turns out that today's update from Apple has nothing to do with CVE-2006-3813 which is Redhat fixing their own slip-up. No, Apple is fixing CVE-2005-3962, for which Redhat released an

We're gonna need a longer spoon

2006-11-21T13:12:00.001-05:00

Open Letter to the Community from NovellSee Also:Novell Withdrawing Participation from the Hula Project

A penny saved

2006-11-10T09:03:00.002-05:00

I just learned that if you want to go to the Zune store and buy one 99 cent song, you can't just spend 99 cents. You have to buy $5.00 of "points" and then spend 99 cents worth of points.Just like Expose versus Flip 3D, Microsoft can't just copy something even when the template for success is right in front of them. They have to copy it, and then tweak it, usually tweak it for the worse, so they

babble + log

2006-10-28T15:55:00.001-05:00

This is exactly the problem I have with the "blogging uber alles" crowd. They talk about conversations -- and spend all of their time lecturing. you think Scoble actually spent any time figuring out what was going on? No, he took a sound byte he could play with and started babbling. That's conversation? - Chuqui 3.0Sing it brotha! Sing it to the mounTAINS!

Snake Plissken. I heard you were dead.

2006-10-05T20:38:00.002-05:00

Hey! There are still practicing Gnostic churches in the world!Apostolic Johannite ChurchEcclesia GnosticaI had no idea until now. I thought the Popes had managed to kill them all.

VBScript == teh SuxOrz

2006-09-30T15:01:00.012-05:00

VBScript sucks in so many - oh, so many! - ways. The interaction between VBScript and ADO is particularly non-intuitive and bug-ridden. Let me make a note of this one in particular, before I push it down into the part of my brain where it will become just another mote swirling around with all of the other instances of VBScript sucktitude in my memory. Sometimes you want to know if a field

Things I Learned From Cartoons, #28

2006-09-25T22:14:00.003-05:00

Any even vaguely boomerang-shaped object can fly thru the air, injure a cat, and then return safely to its owner's hand.

boundlessly accessless

2006-08-21T21:51:00.001-05:00

So I made this Blogger/Blogspot/Google Blog account a couple weeks ago, and for the first several days I had been making sure to login to my Gmail account and then go to blogger.com, because I was sure that the Gmail login page is secure, while it's less obvious that the blogger.com login page is secure. The URL is http://blogger.com, not https, and there's nothing in the login form that says "

They should do a show where a family has to live like it's 1895

2006-08-17T21:18:00.004-05:00

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in

I Can See Through Time

2006-08-15T11:35:00.003-05:00

Time Machine: incremental backups and rsyncing are nothing new. But if you've ever been responsible for backups you know something about scheduling full dumps versus incremental dumps and layering restores and on and on... it used to be we'd try to come up with clever levelling strategies to optimize our storage space, but now storage has gotten cheap enough that I think everybody just does level