Nvidia’s chip fabrication problem
The Inquirer recently published an excellent article about Nvidia’s chip fabrication problem that I highly recommend reading. It doesn’t spare any of the technical details in explaining why Nivida’s...
View ArticleDrawing enlightening parallels between computer science and bacon
My housemate has become rather obsessed with bacon in recent days. He’s been reading the Bacon Subreddit religiously and filling me in on all of the breaking news and happenings in the burgeoning...
View ArticleA first-hand lesson in software optimization
One of my major computer science projects in college was creating an educational videogame for elementary school children called A Day in the Bay. We had eight people on the team, though only three of...
View ArticleWeb nostalgia
If this does not bring back nostalgic memories, then you, sir, have not been on the interweb nearly long enough.
View ArticleI think Verizon hates me
I think Verizon hates me. Here’s proof hate isn’t too strong of a word: Ever since we got Verizon FIOS, I’ve been using it to the maximum because, why not?, we’re paying for it. BitTorrent is...
View ArticleTeen runaway McKenzie Church gets a bit more than she bargained for
You know the typical teen runaway story: parents try to discipline their kid over a poorly thought-out relationship, who then thinks they’re the worst people in the world and decides to run away with...
View ArticleWhat C# does better than Java
I spend 90% of the development time at my job using either Java or C# .NET, with a roughly equal split between the two. So I know a fair amount about both languages — enough to feel qualified to...
View ArticleTab overload
It’s not uncommon for me to find out that Firefox is using a gigabyte of RAM at any one time. Sure, that may seem like a lot, but I have a full 4 GB of RAM to work with, and Firefox is the most...
View ArticleReview of Antec skeleton case neglects to mention RFI issues
I will admit to being fascinated by Antec’s latest case. It’s more of a skeleton than an enclosure, providing mounting points for all of a computer’s components to screw into, fans, and nothing else. I...
View ArticleWeb comics authors: Please stop using HTML image attributes
I like XKCD. Everyone that I know who’s heard of XKCD likes it as well. But there’s one little annoying thing its author, Randall Munroe, does that I wish he would stop: putting additional commentary...
View ArticleHow to prevent Firefox from lagging badly when dragging selected text
This past week I upgraded my system from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 8.10. The upgrade was pretty smooth, with nothing much to report except that my system now boots without requiring the all_generic_ide...
View ArticleFixing ordering bias of U.S. presidential election candidates on Wikipedia
Today, upon getting home from work, one of the first things I did was check the Main Page of the English Wikipedia. It always has interesting content on there, and today was no exception. For the first...
View ArticleHow browser security exploits hinder exploration of the web
It’s important to be able to feel safe while browsing the web, both in terms of what your software protects you against and what your own “web street smarts” protect you against. Users who don’t feel...
View ArticleFirefox continues gaining market share, software flaws
Excellent news! My favorite web browser, Mozilla Firefox, has gained market share yet again and now commands 21.53% of the market. That’s a far cry from several years ago when Firefox was just coming...
View ArticleI caught the Twitter bug
Sigh. A lot of other people at work were using Twitter, so now I am too. If I join anything else, I’ll need to think of a good way to organize all of my web presences. I guess this blog can be the...
View ArticleThe joys of 2 meter simplex
I’m up in Parsippany, New Jersey at the moment on business travel. That in itself wouldn’t be anything special, except that the eastern seaboard was just rocked by a huge snowstorm. I had to leave a...
View ArticleHere’s a pretty bad Unicode WTF
I’m doing some research on Unicode and compression algorithms right now for a side-project I’m working on, and I came across a highly ranked Google search result for a UTF-8 munging code snippet that...
View ArticleA Python script to auto-follow all Twitter followers
In my recent fiddling around with Twitter I came across the Twitter API, which is surprisingly feature-complete. Since programming is one of my hobbies (as well as my occupation), I inevitably started...
View ArticleAustralia blocks my page from their Internet
A couple years ago, when I was more active on Wikipedia than I am now, I was trying to prove a point by compiling a list of all of the risque images on Wikipedia (link obviously NSFW). I don’t quite...
View ArticleWhy I use Identi.ca and you should too
Those of you following me on Twitter may have noticed that all of my tweets come from Identica. I started off with Twitter but I quickly switched over to Identica as soon as I learned about it....
View ArticleMy once-tiny GNU/Linux desktop morphs beyond all recognition
Almost a year ago, I bought a cute little desktop from Dell with the intent of using it as a GNU/Linux desktop alongside my existing Windows desktop. Its name is Vertumnus. But things don’t always turn...
View ArticleReminiscing about the naïve, spam-free days of the web
Remember a long time ago when the web was free of spam? I’m not talking about email, which has had spam problems for awhile, I’m talking about the web. Nowadays, the web is festering with link-crawling...
View ArticleFixing an error with being unable to add user fields in Drupal 7
Drupal 7 has a nice built-in Fields functionality which can be used to add fields to any entity. As applied to users, this replaces the previous Profile module which was used in Drupal 6 to add fields...
View ArticleUsing LINQ in C# to easily get a list of most often used words
A pretty common programming interview question is to parse an input sentence and return the list of unique words used in that sentence. A further elaboration on that problem, the one that this post...
View ArticleAnd the spammers have won (comments are now disabled)
The problem with spammers on the web that I talked about before has continued getting worse and worse, to the point where hundreds of spam comments (and no identifiably non-spam comments) have made it...
View ArticlePython’s negative list indexing is confusing and shouldn’t be taught to...
I’ve been programming for a long time, in a wide variety of languages, but never did I see negative list indexing until I learned Python nine years ago to play around with making automated edits on...
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