(No parenting posts yet. I’m still getting my head around the idea that some poor kid has me as a father. So, I bring you another rant…)
One phenomenon (of many) about modern culture that really confuses me is the success of budget airlines. Of all the things on which one might want to skimp, I’d [...]
I recently started playing with GCC’s prefetch builtin, which allows the programmer to explicitly tell the processor to load given memory locations in cache. You can optionally inform the compiler of the locality of the data (i.e. how much priority the CPU should give to keep that piece of data around for later use) as [...]
One of the more useful things to be aware of as an American is the surprising ruthlessness of Madison Avenue’s manipulation. Nowhere is that more evident than in a classic Atlantic story from 1982 exposing how the public was fooled into thinking diamond rings are an integral part of marriage custom. I’d read it a [...]
Every once in a while I have to put something actually useful up here. I just spent a while trying to get Rhapsody to work in Firefox 3 under Ubuntu 8.10. Having an entire music store at my disposal is one of the things I miss most from my Windows machine when I need to [...]
There is a bug in the new version of Ubuntu (8.10, or Intrepid Ibex), where static IP network settings are lost after every reboot. Kind of makes it hard to connect to your box remotely with ssh.
Pretty big bug, huh? You’d think it would be rather embarrassing when your latest operating system release breaks the internet [...]
I noticed a crack in the back of my iPhone, between the mute button and the metal bezel. It just appeared, not caused by a drop or anything. Looking online, this is happening to a lot of people. The reason why this is happening, I think, is that Apple bonded a plastic back to a [...]
The following is written tongue-in-cheek, but is nonetheless true.
I’ve written before on the failure of Linux on the desktop, and my feeling being that it is a hopeless to shoehorn an ancient server OS into something your average person might want to use to check e-mail (at least not without the resources of somebody like [...]
