Monthly Archives: February 2007

Some time ago someone at work asked me if I know anything about data mining. I replied that I sure do. Hell, I almost wrote a thesis on automated blind database integration. It was actually quite fascinating – we used … Continue reading →

It’s surprising even though I run into this problem quite often, I have yet to find a perfect solution. I’m talking about file transfer. Say we have two users – let’s call them Bob and Alice. These two are inexplicably … Continue reading →

You know that you are working at a small company if your employers official website has lower google page rank than your personal blog. The various online tools tell me that my page rank is 4. My employers rank is … Continue reading →

I’m continuing to mess around with Ruby on Rails on WinXP. I just ran into another problem that took me over an hour to figure out. I set up a database in MySQL, configured my database.yml file, created a model … Continue reading →

I was messing around with ruby on my Windows box and for some reason WEBrick kept crashing on me with the following output: ruby script/server => Booting WEBrick… => Rails application started on http://0.0.0.0:3000 => Ctrl-C to shutdown server; call … Continue reading →

This made me chuckle: #732536 +(361)- [X] <El_Pompo> what would be the best language to build a crawler in? <Emetri> jawa. It’s a quote from bash.org of course. It might take you few seconds, but you will get it. Or … Continue reading →

I think I want a Koala! No, not the bear you silly people. What the hell would I do with Koala bear. Although, I have to admit it would be kinda awesome conversation piece. Chicks dig little cute fuzzy critters … Continue reading →

The site was down between 3 am and 7am EST today. I apologize for the inconvenience, but this was beyond my control. My host was doing maintenance in their data center, and had to shut the power down in their … Continue reading →

Alex Papadimoulis from The Daily WTF just decided to rename his website to Worse than Failure. If you are not familiar with his site, you should definitely check it out. He posts a daily WTF stories from the IT industry … Continue reading →

Lately everyone complains about the call centers in India. Sadly the truth is that when you call a large company, the first line of support operators will be equally dumb no matter where the call center is located. Because of … Continue reading →

Lost fans assemble! Seriously, Work kicked my ass, and I don’t have anything useful to post, so I’m just gonna go and play HL2 for a while to unwind. In the meantime you people go read this interesting post on … Continue reading →

This is totally dumb, but I just can’t figure out how to do this “in place”. I want to find all the files of a given type in a certain directory, and it’s subdirectories that were created in a given … Continue reading →

It’s a pain in the ass to send shit to Canada. It really doesn’t seem like it would be. After all, they are just skip and a hop north from here. We have people flying in there on business all … Continue reading →

I just heard that there was a big power outage at MSU just now. I started pinging various hosts on campus and it seems that most of the infrastructure managed by the CORE group just went down. And I suspect … Continue reading →

Remember my post about the unused Starbucks cards I got for Christmas? I forgot to mention that I also got an unused $25 gift certificate for Comp USA that I didn’t have a chance to use until this past weekend. … Continue reading →

I ran nmap on my home network today to see which machines are up without getting up from my desk. I noticed something strange. I own a Dell Axim X5 Pocket PC. It is an old model which did not … Continue reading →

Holly Shit! When did this happen? Dell has been selling desktops without the Windows for quite some time now, but I didn’t realize they will also extend this offer to laptops. It seems that they are now offering Latitude systems … Continue reading →

I was under impression that almost everyone in the world knew the international radiation symbol: After all its been only featured in hundreds of movies, books, children’s cartoons, video games and taught to millions of children in schools during the … Continue reading →

I was browsing Flickr today and I noticed pictures of this odd looking car popping up in photo streams of various users: Apparently there is a website devoted to this car. It’s creator the H-Wing and designed it circa 00. … Continue reading →

I got 2 Starbucks cards as Christmas gifts from co workers. They are worth $5 each, and I still haven’t had a chance to use them. It’s not that I don’t like Starbucks – I do, as much as anyone … Continue reading →

Jeff Artwood made an interesting observation about version numbers on his blog. He claims that version names which contain a date (eg. Windows 98, Office 2003) are much more intuitive to users than the traditional decimal point notation. Logically, this … Continue reading →

As you may have noticed I removed the amazon ads from the main page and individual blog posts. The reason was two fold – first, they created visual clutter, and second, they were completely useless. At least adsense tries to … Continue reading →

Lately I noticed that my ClamAv installation is having some issues. Observe: # freshclam ClamAV update process started at Fri Feb 16 16:14:54 2007 WARNING: Your ClamAV installation is OUTDATED! WARNING: Local version: 0.88.2 Recommended version: 0.90 DON’T PANIC! Read … Continue reading →

In the morning today I noticed that I got around 10 new friend requests on MySpace. All of them were spam accounts and all but 2 have been deleted since then. Since I’m running Linux I decided to check out … Continue reading →

I discovered a very nifty tool today – a mini SFTP server for windows made by Core FTP. The whole tool weighs in under 780 KB, requires no installation and gives you a bare minimum SFTP functionality. Simply run the … Continue reading →