Monthly Archives: September 2008

Hacking in Hollywood

I said this before, and I’ll say it again – I can’t stand Hollywood movies about hackers or hacking. I just can’t deal with that shit. The classic Hackers is possibly the single notable exception to this rule. And that’s … Continue reading

16 Comments

JQuery Tablesorter: List of Builtin Parsers/Sorters

On of my users tried to explain a bug to me today. Apparently the results on the search page would not sorting properly. Or they were sorting but not by date but by half or a quarter of the date. … Continue reading

21 Comments

Name That Game #1

New game in the spirit of Name That Movie or TV Show cycle I’ve been doing here. This one is a bit different and possibly more difficult. Or it could be easier. I don’t know. This version of the game … Continue reading

10 Comments

Create Arbitrary Sized Sparse Files under Windows and Linux

Apparently there is something to be said about short blog posts. Allegedly I tend to get long winded sometimes and my posts can run a tad verbose sometimes. I usually tell people to STFU and go read Steve Yegge if … Continue reading

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Death of PC Gaming May Mean Death of Windows

In the past I argued that PC Gaming is far from being dead but the more I think about it the more I start believing that I was wrong. I don’t want PC gaming to be dead – I have … Continue reading

34 Comments

Commentary on the Palin Email Thing

I know that I promised not to talk about politics on this blog. You get some of that in the form of politically charged funnies at /dev/random and short bursts of venom on twitter. I don’t really want to become … Continue reading

5 Comments

Easy Way to Create Simple Linux Packages

I just figured out how to create an installation package in any of the popular formats (deb, rpm, etc..) in under 30 seconds. This method is probably not something you’d want to use for a serious project, but it is … Continue reading

2 Comments

OpenDNS and NetBios Adresses

Recently I plopped an old laptop running a stripped down version of Ubuntu onto my home network. I joined it to the local workgroup and gave it a NetBIOS name so I could ssh into it from the windows machines … Continue reading

5 Comments

Faster – Short Story by Janusz Cyran

I usually don’t review short stories here but perhaps I should start. I recently read a very short piece by Janusz Cyran, a Polish SF writer that struck a cord with me. The story itself was not all that spectacular, … Continue reading

6 Comments

Don’t Close Comment Threads on Old Blog Posts

A blog without comments section is not a blog – it is a vanity page. To me blogging implies a conversation between the reader and the writer. Often comments may be better than the blog entries themselves. Especially when blogger … Continue reading

4 Comments

VBA Purgatory: The God Damned Scroll Wheel

This is hopefully the last post from my VBA Purgatory cycle. This time around it is a rant about one of the more infuriating little bugs in MS office namely the lack of scroll wheel support in the built in … Continue reading

2 Comments

DRM and Offline Gaming PC

I had this neat idea once of setting up a PC that I would use exclusively for gaming. I would make sure it had good hardware, and it would run WinXP without an anti-virus suite, firewall or any sort of … Continue reading

8 Comments

Free Wifi

Being a geek, and a developer/sysadmin by trade I sometimes forget how regular people’s brains work. I mean I sort of get that they view technology as magic that can only be understood by unattractive an unpopular people. That element … Continue reading

13 Comments

Live Free or Die Stupid (aka Die Hard 4)

I saw Live Free or Die Hard few days ago and I must say that I’m really glad that I did not actually waste money to see this piece of crap on the big screen. My gut instinct is to … Continue reading

28 Comments

VBA Hacks and Trickery Grab Bag

Hi, I’m here to torture you with more VBA! Run away! Run away! This is part two of the tales from the Programmer’s Purgatory. And once again, no it is not hell. When you are in Programmer’s Hell you spend … Continue reading

5 Comments

Making a Better Use of Script Tags

Admittedly, I’m a certified Stage 3 Javascript fanboi. There is a lot of things I love about the language, but one thing I do not particularly care for is the script tag syntax. Let me show you what I mean. … Continue reading

4 Comments

Twimi

You might remember that like a 100 years ago I posted a small snippet of code showing you how to post Twitter updates using nothing but curl. Well, I took that snippet of code, polished it up a bit and … Continue reading

13 Comments

Gibsonian Concept of Cyberspace is Silly and Outdated

In the early 80’s William Gibson imagined that the young and still developing Internet will one day bloom into Cyberspace. He envisioned it as an abstract plane where your disembodied mind can wander, surfing on the streams of data, and … Continue reading

16 Comments

Name that Movie or TV Show 3

Welcome to the third installment of the Name that Movie or TV Show game. If you are a regular reader, you probably seen or participated in the the first and the second one. If not, you can go and revisit … Continue reading

29 Comments

Excel: Adding Checkboxes the Easy Way

Apparently I have trespassed against The Big Programmer In the Sky and I’m currently suffering in Coder’s Purgatory where they make me code in VBA. It could be worse. I could be in Programmer Hell (also known as the infamous … Continue reading

57 Comments

Google Chrome

Ok, by the show of hands, who has predicted that today’s post will be about Google Chrome? Seriously, I’m getting predictable here but I couldn’t resist picking it up and messing around with it shortly after it was released. My … Continue reading

20 Comments

Stop Anthropomorphizing Your Computer

“I hate computers! I really do.” said the girl crossing her arms and staring at the screen with an evil glare. Her expression was a mix of frustration, anger and intense hatred for inanimate object. Then as if to punish … Continue reading

10 Comments

Stages in Life of a Web Developer

After experiencing this interesting development in my own life, I keep seeing others go through the same 3 stages: Stage 1: TOTAL HAET! Stage 2: Careful, reserved acceptance… Stage 3: TOTAL LOVE! People in Stage 1, almost unanimously think that … Continue reading

13 Comments