How To Automatically Clean Your macOS Downloads Folder
I download a lot of crap, and it ends up in my Downloads folder. I used to use Hazel to keep my Downloads and Trash clean, but it was overkill: Hazel is a mu...
Technology
How Twitter Ruined Their API And What They Can Do To Fix It
During the question and answer section of the panel I recently spoke on at DCWeek 2012, one questioner asked the panel to describe an API that had “disappoin...
The One API You Should Know
I had the opportunity to speak on a panel at DCWeek 2012 this past week: “Five Crucial APIs to Know About”. (I am not listed on the speakers page, as I was a...
The Steve Jobs Book Pissed Me Off
I have always had a thing for books. I started reading when I was a kid, and I never stopped. I oscillate regularly between fiction and nonfiction, binging ...
How To Bypass Wikipedia’s Stupid SOPA Blackout
So if you’ve been to Wikipedia at all today, you have no doubt noticed that instead of your desired web page, you’re instead being shown a big, black page d...
Windows 7 Chkdsk Prompt Hangs At 1 Second: How I Fixed It
A few weeks back, something bad happened to my computer. I’m not sure what, but my nightly backup reported a failure to run due to corrupted folders. So I ...
Living 64-bit: Why Windows Thumbnails Show Up Randomly
Windows Explorer has had support for showing thumbnails instead of icons for many years now. Support is built-in for many common formats, like images or ric...
The Web Paradigm Four Years Later: King Browser
In my first post in this series, we took a quick look at where we were at the start of 2006 in re-defining the Web, and then asked, “How are we doing? Have ...
The Web Paradigm Four Years Later: Where We Started
Everything old is new again. The advent of Chromium OS, and discussions at work with David, have prompted me to dust off these old posts and revisit my posi...
Living 64-bit: Search Filters for Windows
One of the greatest features in Windows Vista that carries forward to Windows 7 is the Windows Search-In-The-Start-Menu. Just hit the Windows key and start ...
Fun Little Bug In Windows 7: Control Panel Back Button
Here’s a fun little bug I stumbled across in Windows 7: It appears that the back button in the control panel does not properly update the quick navigation li...
Chronicles of Windows 7 Part 3: From Release Candidate to Final Version
I was running the Windows 7 Release Candidate for many months prior to the October 22 public release. I had pre-ordered the new version, and it conveniently...
How To Load Bundled Images In A Prism Webapp
One of the features in the Prism Webapp Bundle for Google Wave is a toaster pop-up notification of unread waves using the window.platform.showNotification() ...
A Prism Webapp Bundle For Google Wave
Though Prism and Google Wave go great together simply creating a web app from the Prism Firefox add-on, Prism supports some script extensions that allow for ...
Google Wave and Prism: A Match Made In Heaven
I received a Wave invite from Tim this morning. (Thanks, Tim!) I’m still not sure of Wave’s usefulness as a tool, although I had quite a positive experience...
How To Make Java Ignore IPv6
Sure, IPv6 is going to save us all from the apocalypse, defeat communism, cure the swine flu, and bake you the most delicious brownies you’ve ever tasted. S...
Hadoop World 2009
I had the privilege of attending Hadoop World 2009 on Friday. It was amazing to meet, listen to, and pick the brains of so many smart people. The quantity ...
Death of My Kurobox
After serving faithfully for over three years, and a year-and-a-half after getting a hard drive upgrade, my Kurobox Lulu died this past week. I suspect a po...
Interpreting the Imperial Network
A guest post by ferrix.
Chronicles of Windows 7 Part 2: Multi-Monitor Support
One of the awful, terrible, no-good parts of Vista was its multi-monitor support. My set up is a laptop mounted in a docking station with a second monitor. ...
Twitter and Compression of Meaning
An interesting and often-mocked technical limitation of Twitter is the 140-character limit. The semantics of the buzzword “microblog” aside, I notice in my ...
Chronicles of Windows 7 Part 1: Qualcomm Gobi 3G Modem and VMWare NAT
So I went ahead and installed Windows 7 RC 1. The process is remarkably smooth, and the OS is nicely polished. The new task bar is a long-overdue change, f...
Multi-Threading with VFS
One of the new features in the BagIt Library will be multi-threading CPU-intensive bag processing operations, such as bag creation and verification. Modern ...
Human Beings Are Big-Endian
I always have trouble remembering the difference between big-endian and little-endian. The names don’t make any sense, so it ends up being a mere definition...
Funny Smelling Code – Endlessly Propagating Parameters
We’re currently working on a new version of the BagIt Library: adding some new functionality, making some bug fixes, and refactoring the interfaces pretty he...
Useful PDF ImageMagick Recipes
It turns out that ImageMagick is really quite good at reading, writing, re-arranging, and otherwise mucking with PDFs. Unfortunately, you need to know the p...
Yet Another Vista Anecdote
I upgraded to Vista SP1 this weekend. There really is no reason not to try, especially since the version I have has a disk-imaging backup tool. So I could lo...
No Backup On Battery in Vista
With the release of Vista SP1, I decided it would be a good time to back up my computer - in case something went horribly wrong. Better safe than sorry, or s...
Kurbox Upgrade; or: Musings on Network Appliances and Embedded Operating Systems
I spent most of Saturday trying to put a new hard drive in my Kurobox. The Kuro, named Lulu, has really become quite central to our life here at home since I...
Chumby First Impressions - Pretty Neat
I was so busy, I only had time to unbox the Chumby after it arrived yesterday. Late last night, when my brain finally fried and I had no energy left for work...
Chumby Arrived Today
The Chumby that I ordered arrived today. I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had time to even plug it in. I did, however, find time to snap a short series of Chumb...
We’re Getting a Chumby
David mentioned the Chumby in channel the other day, and thought it seemed somewhat interesting, I wondered who would buy it. Then I happened to show it to H...
Why, Specifically, the New iPod Nano Sucks
Everybody is talking about the new iPod Nano. I mean everybody. I can’t refresh my RSS reader without stumbling across yet another review of the thing, like ...
Simple Solution for AirSet Desktop Synchronization Problems on Vista
I use AirSet for my calendar needs. Quite simply, it’s the most powerful calendar system out there, easily besting 30 Boxes and Google Calendar in just about...
Wii Downloading
The throbbing blue slit when I woke up tipped me off that the Opera beta for the Wii was released this morning. I downloaded it this morning, and it’s an int...
Transactional Memory: The Future?
There’s a really nice introductory article on transactional memory in the ACM Queue. It gives a great overview of the advantages and challenges posed by this...
What Did the Virgina State Trooper Say to the Maryland State Trooper?
No, that is not the lead-in to a joke. There is no punchline here.
More Than Slight Paranoia
There’s this guy in Bloomington, Indiana. He’s a graduate student and security researcher. He has been poking holes in the security theater our government pr...
Google Asks Us Not To Google
Have you ever googled something? Of course you have. Everybody has. I don’t even need to define what it means: It’s that obvious. The term has now become so ...
Meizu Miniplayer Rocks
Five years ago this month, Apple released the first iPod, touching off what would become am international sensation. While some people are celebrating by pur...
AllPeers Finally Figures It Out
Almost a year ago now, I wrote up an entry about the techie-hit Firefox extension AllPeers in which I chided AllPeers’ creators for making it a Firefox exten...
The Semantics of the Hacker Mindset and the Criminal Mind
Bruce Schneier posted a very good essay on fundamental qualities of the hacker mindset a couple of days ago. As seems to be the common scenario around here, ...
Security Tip: Actually Handle Passwords Your System Claims to Handle
I’ve been using a password safe called KeePass for several years now. It’s fantastic for keeping track of the myriad of passwords for the different systems t...
Cursed Code
I know we’ve all felt this way before.
Net Neutrality and Wiretapping
For a long while now, I’ve thought that the whole debate on net neutrality was mostly an attempted at legislating a late-land-grab for the big telecoms. Basi...
If You Think We’re Just a Consumer Culture, Think Again
Tim O’Reilly posts about a New York Times article bemoaning the end of amateur draring, with the implication that our culture’s transition from producer to c...
Flickr Is Down, and Yet Still Awesome
So Flickr is down due to a storage failure. As somebody who works on digital libraries trying to keep terabytes of storage online and available, I can empath...
Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) Is a Luser
This transcript of Ted Stevens is so funny and sad. This man with power actually thinks he has an intelligent opinion on net neutrality, yet his statements b...
Amusing Netcat Gentoo USE Flag
Somebody obviously has a sense of humor. This USE flag surprises me and makes me chuckle every time I see it.
Is Web 2.0 Ownable?
It seems that lawyers and marketing drones can make even the greatest of companies pull a boneheaded move. In this case, after coining the term Web 2.0, some...
Continuations Are Worth Being Hot
Steve has noticed, via Don Box, that continuations are getting popular. I can tell you from personal experience that there is a ton of value to continuations...
Real Life Creative Commons Success Story
If you didn’t know, I have a Flickr Photostream to which I post most of the interesting photos I take. I have also posted a lot of my old photos to the photo...
Windows Genuine Advantage Nagging Is Too Late
Microsoft has kicked off a new era in its history recently, actively nagging users who are using counterfeit or pirated versions of their operating system so...
Spinning Platters of Death
Last week, my hard drive died on my laptop. Unfortunately, due to my own negligence, the last backup was made in December. I lost some fairly important data,...
TortoiseSVN OPENSSL_Uplink Error
I upgraded to version 1.3.3.6219 of TortoiseSVN this afternoon. Shortly thereafter, any repository operations ended with a nasty little message box.
Kitten Captcha Needs to be Mashed With Flickr
I hate comment spam. I hate captchas only slightly less. Since optical character recognition is continually improving, captchas become ever more inscrutable ...
Published vs. Public
I’m really like the idea of separating published interfaces from public interfaces. Apparently, a JSR has been started to add an idea like this to Java. In t...
Windows 3.1 Review
Chris and I were rummaging around his condo, and we discovered a huge box full of old 3.5” floppy disks. This included a big-ass Microsoft Windows 3.1 box, d...
Why Vista Is Late: The Geeks Have Always Known
The mainstream media has been all abuzz over the recently announced delayed release of Microsoft’s next operating system, code-named Vista. I’m not sure anyb...
Obscuring Links Sucks - Maybe The Ping Attribute Isn’t So Bad?
Obscuring links is generally a Bad Thing. Most people hardly notice it, but a lot of major web sites redirect links through their own sites in order to track...
Busboys & Poets WiFi Port Blocking Is Really Asinine
I really like Busboys & Poets. It’s a nice place, with great ambience, good food, good music, and … well, their coffee is pretty crappy, but you can’t ha...
When You Hit Your Thumb With a Hammer, Your Learn to Fear the Hammer
Chris Sells posts a story about how his son learned to fear a computer’s ability to throw away work.
It’s Not Paranoia If…
So this guy dual boots into Linux to buy a book on Amazon. Now, I’m all about being paranoid. I mean, I’m a guy who uses VMware as a sandbox to run applicati...
Status of My Request: Google URL Console Shenanigans
It started with an email I received on the afternoon of March 3rd, 2006, originally sent from Google URL Console url-remove@google.com to the webmaster email...
Google to Wall Street: “Up Yours”
Google has been taking a lot of flak over the last few days from the Wall Street Power Broker types. They are upset that Google hasn’t been issuing earnings ...
Fun With C# 2.0 Iterators
In the little free time that I have, I have been messing around with writing a .NET program to help me with the large amount of photo metadata editing I want...
Boot and Nuke
Since the Samus switchover, the old machine has been sitting quietly next to my desk, awaiting final dispensation. I would like to strip it down and sell the...
Fun Watching DNS Propagation
I’m not sure why, but I am fascinated with watching DNS entries propagate through the Internet. For the most part, the process of cutting over to the new Sa...
Tim Sweeney’s Slides on the Next Programming Language
As might be guessed from my rambling on some of UnrealScript’s domain-specific features, I’m a huge fan of Tim Sweeney. His thoughts on practical language de...
What Does “Web Paradigm” Mean, Anyway? (Part 4)
First of all, sorry for the delay in posting this last part. I’ve had a great majority of it written for some time, but - as Faulkner once wrote - life inter...
Fake-Me-Out Test Object Nomenclature
Martin Fowler has a nice little post with a list of definitions for the various ways to strap an object into a test harness. So a mock object is quite distin...
What Does “Web Paradigm” Mean, Anyway? (Part 3)
In Part 1 and Part 2 of “What Does ‘Web Paradigm’ Mean, Anyway?” I put forward the view that web integration with the desktop has already been done to the ex...
What Does “Web Paradigm” Mean, Anyway? (Part 2)
In the first post on “What Does ‘Web Paradigm’ Mean, Anyway?”, we discussed the ideas of bringing the web into the desktop, and bringing the desktop to the w...
What Does “Web Paradigm” Mean, Anyway? (Part 1)
A trackback to my previous post lamenting the trend of making everything a Firefox extension was linked by one of the creators of the AllPeers software menti...
New Camera
After losing our old camera several month’s back, Hedda and I were finally able to purchase a new digital camera to replace it after some generous donations ...
Stop Making Everything A Firefox Extension!
I’m all about Firefox. It is beats the pants off of Internet Explorer in pretty much every regard. No other single program gets as much of my overall attenti...
Things I’ve Learned from Google Trends
So hopefully by now we all know that Google keeps a search history, and it’s possible for to access your own personal search history if you have a Google acc...
Suppressing Deprecation Warnings in Import Statements
I’ve got an import statement that references a deprecated class. However, it’s old and tested, and I don’t want to change it. For a long time, I annoyed the ...
Parallel Processing and the User Experience
Have you ever pegged your CPU? It could happen any number of ways. You could be encoding some video, or performing a big compilation. It could be a rouge pro...
Pandora’s Music Box
Have you tried Pandora yet? If not, go there and check it out. It’s pretty self-explanatory, and really freakin’ cool.
Google is Deep Thought
It’s offical. Google is Deep Thought.
And You Thought Software Was Complicated?
Software, and in particular the Internet, is often tauted as being the most complicated machine humanity has ever built. We computer geeks need to be careful...
E4X Looks Awesome
I was browsing through the new features for the impending release of Firefox 1.5. (In fact, Ars is expecting it any minute now.)
Troubles with Flash and Adblock
After installing a recent Flash upgrade, I started having some troubles viewing certain content. I also started having issues with certain JavaScript code ru...
Subversion Dump File Splitter
I recently had to do some mangling of a dump of my personal Subversion repository. Basically, I had to modify some paths and revision copy numbers before re-...
Geek Humor - or, Why My Wife Doesn’t Think I’m Funny
There’s a post over on Slashdot about capacitors going bad on some Dell workstations. It’s not really that interesting of an article, but this punny comment ...
Updated Mantis Basic Authentication Code
I’ve updated my post on Making Mantis with Basic Authentication Not Suck to fix an oversight I discovered in the original version.
Making Mantis with Basic Authentication Not Suck
At work, I’ve been doing a lot of system setup and administration. While it’s definitely beyond my job description as a Software Architect, there’s nobody el...
Schneier on SHA
My ever-favorite security guru Bruce Schneier has been live-blogging a conference he’s been attending on hash functions. There’s some good stuff in all of th...
Everybody Has My Laptop
As a contractor, I spend a fair amount of time working in various non-traditional office locations. I am partly enabled to choose my work location by the mob...
The Threat of Open Source on Monopoly Behavior
Check out this article. Or not. In fact, don’t. I don’t want to drive any traffic to that charlatan’s article. Instead, I’ll summarize. Microsoft has been po...
I Can See My House From Here!
Holy hell. Google Maps was awesome before, but now they’ve added satellite imaging to the mix, with all the same features as before! Check out my new neighbo...
Yet Another Java vs. NET Blog Entry
I was chatting with Steve last night about his upcoming Big Announcement, and the topic of Java vs. .NET came up, as it often does. Coincidentally, tonight I...
Encrypted Video Game Files
I received Half-Life 2 from Mom & Dad McGowan for Christmas. The game is supposed to be great, and I’m looking forward to it. But so far, I am not impres...
Stacked Browsing (and other Extensions)
While I’m browsing the web, I use Firefox tabs as a sort of “browsing stack”. I tend to start out on something, and then branch off into other things by open...
More Semantic WinFS
I want to followup to my post on semantic web technologies and WinFS. Steve updated his previous post on the subject to respond lightly to my post. To quote:
The Semantic WinFS
Steve is mulling over the potential reasons for the WinFS delay. His general thought is that writing a new metadata filesystem is hard because we need canoni...
Using Bloglines
I started using Bloglines a few weeks ago. With the doom of my hard drive and the ensuing several week hiatus from my news aggregator, I decided to check it ...
T-Mobile SMTP Interception
Hedda and I have been in South Bend for the last couple of weeks spending time with the family. Fortunately, most of my work can occur remotely, so I am easi...
WS-Goldylocks & The Seven Layers
I’d like to comment on Steve’s post on the WS-* standards process, specifically on how the standards have been produced. A “real” standards process may or ma...
Why I Like Open Office
Slashdot is running this article about the fourth birthday of OpenOffice. Not unexpectedly, there are only two comments under the story: Either “I hate this ...
My CPU Fan Really Sucked
I was digging around inside of Samus the other day. Mostly I was trying to hook up an IDE disk so I could reset the root password on the drive, but I happene...
New Phone for Me
I bought a new phone today. The volume control on my trusty T68i broke while I was at GenCon, which really isn’t all that big of a problem by itself. However...
Got SP2 Installed
I installed SP2 for Windows XP today. As I’ve said before, the security enhancements are not all that exciting to me, especially because I already run a pret...
New C# Operator
How many times have you written a piece of code like this?
Failed Sandbox Peer Launches (or Something)
When it comes to my computers, I’m a pretty paranoid guy. I’ve suffered through enough system instability and crashes due to misbehaving software that I don’...
Re-De-Compiliation
I was able to successfully de-compile and re-compile my MoleMan executable using FileDisassembler. It has a few problems generating incorrect code, although ...
Bluetooth in XP SP2
I finally have a reason to be excited about the upcoming release of Windows XP Service Pack 2, other than my usual cynical hopes that they finally remove the...
Need a Decompiler
When I was still at Avanade, I wrote myself a little program called MoleMan to manage my SSH tunnels. It was really useful because I would often disconnect f...
Machine Check Exception
So I was upgrading Samus to a new version of gcc/glibc, as provided by portage, and Chris stopped by before we went to lunch. We were chatting about some thi...
Convergence is for the Birds
There’s an article over on Slashdot asking [if the Personal (Digital Data) Assistant (PDA) is dead](http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0...
UT2004 Jackbot Query Script
You might have noticed the link over on the side of the page for The Burrow. That’s the Unreal Tournament 2004 game server I have running on samus.ardvaark.n...
Build A Better Blog
I’ve been not-too-enamoured with Geeklog for quite a while now, and I’ve been experimenting with a lot of different blog engines. Recently, I was pointed at ...
Patching DotNetMock
I have been working on a project at home for which I am using DotNetMock to create mock objects for my unit testing. Unfortunately, DotNetMock has a couple o...
UnrealScript and Domain-Specific Languages
UnrealScript is really cool. I’ve been working on my Explosive Ammo Mutator for UT 2004, so I’ve gotten a pretty good crash course in Epic’s scripting langu...
Free Phone Downgrade!
So today I got my free downgrade from my wireless provider. I’d been getting letters in the mail for the last two weeks telling me how lucky I was to be an A...
Evening Technolust
This phone looks completely awesome. It’s got everything: pen-based input, a keyboard, Bluetooth, GPRS, 802.11b, and it’s a PDA. Unfortunately, it runs Pocke...
Nasty Error Upgrading to Mono 0.30.1
Blorg!! I’m trying to upgrade to Mono 0.30.1 (from 0.28) on samus, and it fails during the emerge with a nasty little error (found in the full text). It seem...
Funny Leaked Comments (or Why Favoritism Stinks)
There’s a rather funny look at some comments from the leaked Windows source code over at K5. It’s good to see that our friends in Redmond are just average co...
RDF: You Went Too Far
The updated RDF and new OWL specifications have been released by the W3C. The purpose of these languages are to help define machine-understandable semantic r...
Exposed Password for my Public Key
I sign all of my email messages using public key cryptography, specifically GNU Privacy Guard using Enigmail for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. This m...
Decompiler Obfuscated
Oh the irony! I am definitely sad to see that Lutz Roeder has decided to obfuscate Reflector. Reflector is a great tool for exploring an assembly, discoverin...
Debugging Spirit
There’s a cool article over on Wired News talking about some of the problems with debugging a software system that’s 35 million miles away. It’s pretty light...
XSD As A Type System Redux
Steve has written a lot over the last few days on his belief the XSD is not a type system. This was one his favorite topics to toss around with me when we we...
No Service is an Island
I think everybody is starting to go a little crazy trying to define the term Service Oriented Architecture. Udi states that he sees “two distinct and complim...
The Problems with .NET Exceptions
My current contract involves a lot of Java work. I’ve always been a big fan of Java, although my personal opinion is that C# and .NET are superior to Java in...
Check Your Premise
One of the primary goals of XP is to make software development rewarding for every person involved in the process, and like the rest of the process, taking t...
Shell Love
Oh UNIX shell, how do I love thee? You let me do things like
Services Really Are All About Interfaces
Steve, I agree that service-oriented programming is absolutely better and more interesting than old-skool interfaces. However, I disagree with you with your ...
Possible Google Killer
Google may have a battle on their hands in the form of Vivisimo. I am very impressed with the categorization of the search results. Their results feel a litt...
But They’re Better Interfaces
Steve writes:
Another Enum Gotcha
Steve is talking about the enum versioning problem. You know the one. It’s that annoying problem where you have an enum, say
Service-Oriented vs. Object-Oriented
Avery is going through the thrashing of trying to morph an object-oriented mind into a service-oriented world. He’s getting the right answer, but I don’t thi...
PublishedAttribute
Martin Fowler has a new bliki entry on the difference between public interface and a published interface. I think Martin is dead-on in his statements, so muc...
.NET Web Service Clients Give You No Choice
(How’s that for a provocative post title? I can’t wait for the flames!)
Biculturalism Extended: Palm vs. Pocket PC
A blog entry flitted across my browser, which I occaisoned to read. It’s one of those “Dammit, I wish I’d written that myself!” things. The basic gist is tha...
Background Radiation
Over on The Register is a very interesting article about the Internet’s background radiation. Go read it if you haven’t. You’ll like it. What follows is my r...
Mono Web Services
Bwa ha ha ha ha….I will rule the world!!
New Laptop
So after having torturously removing a portable computer from my life, I realized that I really cannot live without one. With my new job, I have a lot of fre...
WiFi S&M
Courtesy of Steve Maine, here is a link to one of the most bizzare things you’ve ever seen in your life! As my friend Reaperman once said, “Oh the lengths to...
Gentoo is Cool
I’ve been working hard over the past several days to get Gentoo Linux up and running on a VMWare machine. After about two solid days of compiling, I finally ...
C# 2.0 Specs Released
Sweet! Microsoft just released the C# 2.0 Specifications. It’s available in Microsoft Word format only.
Baby Steps
In my many conversations with some of my anit-Microsoft friends, I have, of late, frequently espoused that Microsoft has changed in the last few years. While...
Things Not To Do With Process Explorer
I am a big fan of the Mozilla family of products. This morning, I downloaded the newest version of Thunderbird (0.3) and started it up. It created a process,...
RDP From Linux and Technology Integration
My good friend Chris Schultz (whose wife invaded my earlier post) is a big Linux fan. In truth, he was responsible for introducing me to the open source oper...
Self-Amputation
Tomorrow is my last day at Avanade. With all due respect to the friends and peers I am leaving behind, the hardest part of leaving is losing my laptop. Sadly...
Mono and dasBlog
I’ve been trying on and off to get Mono running on samus.ardvaark.net, with minimal success. The problem is that samus is based on an old RedHat 7.1 installa...