Came across an interesting link on reddit today that claimed that you could store 256GB on an A4 piece of paper. My first reaction was: holy crap, what a great idea! I was all set to write a version up. But then you look at the numbers, and it starts to look less feasible. Taking [...]

I happened across the Shortest Sudoku Solver page, which has programs in various languages that solve the puzzle. Most of the major scripting languages clock in at anywhere from 100 to 200 characters. It means nothing, of course — it’s just elaborate puzzle solving. The C program is just about as short as Python, for [...]

Quick, an Ocaml quiz: What is the best way to write a summation function? [code lang='ocaml'] let sum a = List.fold_left (fun x total -> x+total) 0 a [/code] or [code lang='ocaml'] let sum a = List.fold_right (fun x total -> x+total) a 0 [/code] – What is the best way to write this function? [...]

I decided to get a dedicated server for my project and passion of the moment (more on that later, maybe). As a result, I wanted to set up a CentOS installation so that I could work out all the bugs before uploading. Unfortunately, it turns out that getting CentOS working on a USB drive is [...]

I’m really excited to be able to talk about CSVTL, because I believe it’s the next big thing, and it’s been in the works for several years. History Basically, I had been in contact with one of my old high-school friends high up in the W3C working group. I had always wanted to join one [...]

Having been using Python for a while, I am fully enamored of the language. It is elegant, easy to read, and wonderfully descriptive. The only drawback is a serious case of the slows, but I am hoping that this will be fixed eventually. When I think of all the time I spent writing Java, it [...]

I do love Gentoo, often more than is seemly, but sometimes I don’t want to spend half a day or so compiling everything. So, I installed Dapper on my new box at work. Everything looked great, and the Gnome desktop is certainly nice if a bit of a memory hog compared to XFCE… … but [...]

I bought an external hard drive to back up a bunch of stuff that I have laying around on computers. I purchased the Seagate 200GB Firewire drive because a) Techbargains pointed out that there was a sale on them and b) I neglected to read the reviews on CNet. That said, the drive seems fast [...]

Sometimes, something works so well and so invisibly that is just makes you kind of chortle with glee whenever you use it. My Gentoo box has become my primary workstation — nowadays, I am using my Windows box only for games and iTunes. Each has a separate monitor, so I can see what is going [...]

Spent the good part of today trying to clear my laptop of a virus that wasn’t being caught by Norton or any other anti-virus program that I tried. In the hopes of saving someone some time, I put them here into the Google-mind. Symptoms: Extra processes THEWMPCD.EXE and ROUCCONF.EXE in the task list. The processes [...]

I am making this in the hopes that I can save someone else some time, and also in case I ever need to do this again. I’m loving the Gentoo setup, now that I’ve got it — it’s very fast and lean — but it was a pain to set up, and took me three [...]

I was just reminded of one of the horrible anti-patterns I’ve seen in working with a template library that will remain nameless. At a previous company we called it “text subclassing.” It’s what we called it when you had to copy huge pieces of text out of a superclass and paste it into your subclass. [...]

I’ve picked up a fair number of languages over the years, like anyone in the industry. The latest has been Python (and, for anybody that wants a quick introduction to Python, it is really hard to beat Dive Into Python), and, of course, I am always completely enamored with the latest new language that I [...]

Why can’t I find a bug that makes me feel smart? If you think you’ve hit a problem where Apache sessions are just suddenly not working, totally borked, be sure to check your cookie paths; or, go to your browser and make sure you don’t have multiple cookies for your site. How I know this, [...]

There is apparently a variant of IEPlugin making its way around that Lavasoft Adaware doesn’t remove properly, and since I couldn’t find anything on the mass that was Google, I had to track it down. The symptom were the following lines being inserted into multiple locations in the registry (and always being flagged by Adaware, [...]

Horrible, horrible hack to automatically parse the “Recently Played” section of an iTunes XML file, convert it to HTML, post it to a web site. Uses regex instead of a proper XML parser! Has everything inline instead of using Text::Template! Gross, gross, gross! I have it set up to run every hour; it checks the [...]