Tag Archives: rant

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 →

“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 →

Not so long ago my university’s email got blacklisted by Comcast and Microsoft due to large amounts of spam streaming from our network. This lovely email explains the details of the situation: To Our Campus Community- Information Technology has received … Continue reading →

I prefer to use specialized tools that were designed to perform a specific job, rather than universal tools that claim they can be adapted to perform a multitude of tasks. While in many cases they are perfectly serviceable, I usually … Continue reading →

I think that the perfect kind of a leader for our country – for any country – would be a hacker. And when I say “hacker” I don’t mean “computer criminal”. I use it in its original meaning. To me … Continue reading →

A while ago Shamus posted a list of his WoW Nitpicks. Since I agree with most of them I’m not going to repeat them here. I just wanted to add few little nitpicks of my own. I still like the … Continue reading →

I have a nice little binary clock from ThinkGeek standing on my desk. It is a silly gadget, but as any geek I lust for this sort of things. Awesome little toys which remain incomprehensible and mysterious to mere mortals. … Continue reading →

I previously ranted about strange password restrictions that disallow usage of special characters such as spaces or alphanumerics. This time I want to complain about another boneheaded security feature out there – word length restrictions on your “secret” password recovery … Continue reading →

Back in the day I did my 10 day World of Warcraft trial and blogged about it. If you recall, I was able to convince myself that WoW was not for me in the end. Then recently I started having … Continue reading →

I was always a little bit on the fence on the issue of piracy. I do not want to openly endorse it here on a public blog. I agree that conceptually it is a wrong thing to do, and that … Continue reading →

There is one thing that totally kills my immersion in a video game – it is the Monty Phythonesque realization that “it’s just a model”. In other words, if I see a piece of scenery – such as a house, … Continue reading →

The other day Shamus posted about the self imposed censorship of Indigo Prophecy also known to Fahrenheit outside the US. I played this game in it’s original form with all the sex scenes a while ago. Because of the paths … Continue reading →

I have fallen off the wagon, and I’m fully addicted to Morrowind once again. Every 5 or 6 months I reinstall this game, mod it up to the point where it looks presentable (I’m currently using a complete re-texturing mod, … Continue reading →

I previously wrote about two of my observations regarding use of email among the young and technologically clueless college students. First observation was that none of my students ever had a straight POP3 or IMAP email account in their life. … Continue reading →

For like a week or two now, I noticed something strange and yet not entirely unpleasant happening to my inbox. There were no angry emails from students complaining that I didn’t grade their homework submitted 3 weeks late the very … Continue reading →

I’m posting this a day late because it took me a whole morning to figure this one out. It appears that Comcast has completely blocked both inbound and outbound traffic on port 25 for my company. For a few years … Continue reading →

I wasn’t going to comment on Joel Spolsky’s Martian Headsets ramble for two reasons: it was an obvious troll-bait, and people much smarter than me already pounded it into the ground. But alas, the Spolsky FUD seems to have infected … Continue reading →

Here is a question for my IT/Sysadmin readers out there. When you get a user who has an apostrophe, or an unusual character in their last name, how do you go about setting up his or her email address? Do … Continue reading →

The internet is killing Microsoft these days. Ever since man climbed down from a tree, learned how to walk upright and figured out how to write AJAX apps, the number of chairs thrown at unsuspecting developers in Redmond has been … Continue reading →

I noticed a disturbing trend recently among many users. This includes my coworkers, students and family. See if you noticed it too. I can for example tell someone to go to some website – let’s say I want to point … Continue reading →

I came to accept HTML email as somewhat necessary evil. Or rather, I’m wiling to acknowledge that it has legitimate uses. For example HTML links are much nicer and convenient than those 5 mile long URL’s. Most email clients will … Continue reading →

Here is a fun little game we play around here. This is ideal for IT shops or generally places where you have bunch of geeks installing crappy software on windows boxen. It’s called the PK Master. The goal of the … Continue reading →

Folks at Wachovia recently decided that all the confidential information they exchange with contractors and field examiners via email and the internet must be encrypted using at least 128 bit AES. Good for them! I applaud this move but then … Continue reading →

Rant time! This one may or may not ruffle some feathers, but frankly I don’t care. I’m probably late to this party and missed out on all the big flame wars seeing how 2.0 was released at the beginning of … Continue reading →

Most people never run into the MAX_PATH issue when using windows. I run into it every other week. Windows has thins funky little quirk about long file paths. The fully qualified path of any file on your NTFS file system … Continue reading →