Feedback Works!
It's hard to say if this is coincidence, but it's worth mentioning. A few weeks ago, I sent eBay feedback on their new site design. My gripe was that they were nesting scrollable areas within...
View ArticleFixing the Xbox 360 's Grinding Noise / Tray Ejection Problem
I spent an evening performing unexpected surgery on my Xbox 360. When I put a game in, the drive made the most horrible grinding noise. On top of that, the drive would not stay closed. The tray would...
View ArticleGetting Started with Stack Overflow
I joined Stack Overflow shortly after it launched, but I didn't do anything with it. I found it in search results here and there, but I never asked any questions. I would have done more, but new users...
View ArticleT-Mobile Visual Voicemail Problems
T-Mobile recently released their Visual Voicemail application in the Android market. It had some launch problems, but those are mostly smoothed out at this point. The app works pretty well, and I'm...
View ArticleI wish Blogger would let me rename tags
Occasionally, if you read this via RSS, you will notice that I repost old articles. This isn't intentional - any time I edit or retag a post in Blogger, it puts it back on the feed. I don't see any way...
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Painting Space Marines
For some reason, I got an itch to paint some Warhammer 40k figures. I've been slowly assembling them over... I don't know, maybe 2 years. Hey, I have a lot of things that I do in my free time. Anyway,...
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More Painting Space Marines
I have an update to my Space Marine painting. I've continued to shade the marines. After the previous coat of 1:1 Regal Blue to Ultramarine Blue, I added the following:1:2 Regal Blue to Ultramarine...
View ArticleFixing hard disk clicking / aggressive head parking on Mac OS X
I recently bought a Western Digital Scorpio notebook hard drive to put into my 2007-vintage Macbook Pro. Everything seemed fine at first. However, as I used my laptop, I noticed that it would...
View ArticleWhy Google Experience phones are pretty awesome
As Android has grown, devices fall into one of two major classifications. Some devices are so-called "Google Experience" devices (featuring the phrase "with Google" somewhere on the device). Other...
View ArticleStandard algorithms and boost::ptr_vector
I did something bad the other day.OK, I can't tell if it was bad. In another environment, it would have been bad, but since this was C++, perhaps it was OK. I was in the situation where I had a...
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Even More Space Marine Painting
I've been slowly working on my Space Marines. It's taken a while, but they almost look like a unit. I think I've spent between 10 and 20 hours on them, but much of that was spent learning. Most of the...
View ArticleDeriving the Y Combinator in Erlang - Part 1: Intuition
This is the first of a series on the Y combinator. Part 2When I heard about the fixed point combinators before, I didn't know what to make of them, so I filed the topic away in my brain. However, when...
View ArticleDeriving the Y Combinator in Erlang - Part 2: Abstraction
This is the second post in a series on the Y combinator. Part 1In the last post on the Y combinator, we established that some functional languages (such as Erlang) make it hard to have recursive,...
View ArticleThings I Learned While Debugging an SSL Issue
SSL is sometimes actually TLS. SSL is apparently on the way out, though TLS is only supported in a subset of common browsers. Fortunately, both use the same kind of certificate, so it's mostly...
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Even More Space Marines
I've spent some more time on my Space Marine squad (it's going on something like 6 months at this point - I just don't get a ton of time to paint). Anyway, the tactical squad is basically done. Notice...
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Unpacking a Safari Extension
So, now that Safari extensions are official (and not just a developer curiosity), I decided to see what people had managed to make over at the extension gallery. It looks like there are some cool ideas...
View ArticleDES Encryption As Used in VNC Authentication
A few notes about how DES is used in the VNC Authentication security type (type 2)DES is used in ECB mode. The ECB Key is based upon an ASCII password. The key must be 8 bytes long. The password is...
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Mysterious, Blank User in 10.7 Sharing Dialog
I wanted to copy some files from my PC to my Mac. When I went to turn on SMB sharing, I came across this:I was wondering about the identity of this phantom user. It turns out that it is the macports...
View ArticleUsing Apache on Mac OS X to serve files outside ~/Sites
I'm working on a web project that basically contains just static HTML and Javascript. (well OK, there's also one, small PHP script, but it might be going away in the near future). I tend to keep all my...
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Updating a System Shock 2 Wallpaper for HD Resolutions (in Javascript!)
Back when I was in college, I was a big System Shock 2 fan. My favorite co-op experience of all time was when my dorm roommate and I played SS2 together. I had all kinds of ideas for case mods (even...
View ArticleThe joys of parsing a toy programming language
In my personal time, I've been playing at building a toy programming language. Progress has been slow, but things are finally starting to come together. Last night, I ended up finding an interesting...
View ArticleA quick overview of what WebAssembly is and what it is not (yet)
There's been a lot of buzz today about WebAssembly, and that's completely understandable. A bytecode form of Javascript has been on the minds of many web developers for a long time. But the online...
View ArticleHow JetBrains Lost Years of Customer Loyalty in Just a Few Hours
Yesterday's big news, at least for many developers, is that JetBrains - maker of popular tools like IntelliJ and ReSharper - is moving to a software-as-a-service subscription model for their...
View ArticleWhy you should (sometimes) NOT use tail recursion in Scala
There was a recent post on /r/scala (direct article link) about how great tail recursion is. I agree with everything said in that article; this isn't an attempt to refute his points. But tail recursion...
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