General
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Tuesday, August 12th, 2008Why do they have to suck? I have owned three different brands and four different styles of KVM switches in the past eight years or so, and all of them have had major shortcomings. The only reason I continue using them is that there is nothing better out there.
Why does it have to be this […]
On Creating Strong Passwords
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008It’s getting harder to generate secure passwords these days. Part of the problem is that, the stronger a password is, the harder it is for someone to remember. A password such as ‘F7c%el(9xfka$hsa’ is an extremely strong password, but probably almost impossible to remember unless you type it many many times a day for a […]
Airport Security for Parents
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008I’ve recently been following a thread on one of my company’s internal mailing lists about tips and tricks for air travel with small children or infants. One of the major stress points seems to be getting through security.
This is stressful because parents are usually traveling with a whole bunch of extra stuff, and have to […]
iTunes Store requires WiFi
Thursday, July 17th, 2008To access the iTunes store from an iPhone, you need to be connected via WiFi. It won’t let you connect over the 3G internet connection.
This restriction baffles me. Why would they do this? The 3G internet connection is perfectly fast enough. You can connect to the App store over 3G. It seems like they are […]
Rock Band Wish List
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008I’ve been playing a decent amount of Rock Band recently. I’ve been staying away from the vocals, but I can get through almost all of the songs it comes with on “hard” on bass, guitar, and drums. This game is a great way to build or maintain hand-eye coordination.
But it has left me wanting more. […]
Disable Menu Items
Saturday, July 5th, 2008In a recent post on his blog, Joel Spolsky writes that you should not “hide or disable menu items”. His alternative is to leave all of the menu options in place, and provide messaging to tell the user why an action can’t be completed.
I have to respectfully disagree with his assessment. I think that leaving […]
Fedora Update
Friday, July 4th, 2008The Fedora system has been running for a few days now. One minor annoyance I’ve encountered so far is the way the system uses yum. It’s not that I find yum to be a bad package manager. On the contrary, it is very easy to use. The problem comes from how yum will create a […]
Set up a Fedora development box
Thursday, June 26th, 2008I decided to switch my spare (old) PC to run Fedora for development purposes. I was able to set up a reasonable approximation using Cygwin, but this will more closely resemble the environments to which I deploy my projects.
Getting Fedora running was more difficult than I expected, though this was not entirely Fedora’s fault. The […]
Ruby on Rails, Cygwin, and Git part 1
Friday, May 9th, 2008This is the first of what will probably become a series on using Ruby on Rails under Cygwin, with source control managed by Git. This might raise a couple of questions, which I will attempt to answer here.
Why Ruby on Rails? It provides a nice break from the Java and Perl development I normally do.
Why […]
Interviewing, Part 1
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008This is the first installment in what may become a series of posts on how to do better in technical interviews.
Most technical interviews have a few key areas in which you need to demonstrate some skill or experience, such as problem solving, algorithms, data structures, programming language concepts, dealing with ambiguity, writing code, and communications […]
