There used to a freely available wordpress plugin called Smart Links, but it no longer works with recent versions of wordpress. Since I had hundreds of posts using this form of link, I posted on the wordpress forums and got advice on how to write a replacement, which was easy. Here it is for your [...]
It annoyed me that the Google Calendar Notifier extension guy gave up on maintaining his extension, which really is one of those “must have”s, mainly because when I upgraded to FF3 it stopped working. So I hacked the install.rdf of the extension to allow FF3 to install it. You can install it by downloading and [...]
Big Buck Bunny is the second open film project headed up by the Blender Foundation, an open film being one created entirely with open source software and with all production materials being made freely available to the public upon completion. The first project, “Orange,” produced Elephant’s Dream, a dark, trippy short, heavy on dialogue [...]
None of the eclipse plugins I tried worked well with our postgres DB, so I dug around the Ubuntu repositories and found Tora, which is a simple & useful SQL Editor. Run queries, see results in tables.
To install on Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install tora
Damn, and I thought the DAISY Spec was tedious reading.
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is sometimes applied in computer science to postulate that programmers skilled in a certain programming language may not have a (deep) understanding of some concepts of other languages. Though it may equally apply to any area where languages are “synthesized” for specific purposes, computer science is especially fertile when it comes [...]
Novel way to do multi column layouts.
I created a right border on the content div of the same width and color as the rail, then floated the rail div over it. The margin-right:-150px on the content div allows the rail div to move into the newly vacated space. If the content div is taller than [...]
Not only are there no silver bullets now in view, the very nature of software makes it unlikely that there will be any–no inventions that will do for software productivity, reliability, and simplicity what electronics, transistors, and large-scale integration did for computer hardware. We cannot expect ever to see twofold gains every two years.
First, one [...]
Are mozilla insane? I would have assumed that crack teams of developers were being actively funded in integrating Sunbird and MS Exchange. In fact, the bug tracking this integration has been open since 2002, and assigned to only one developer for the past two years. What’s worse: his most recent comment on the bug (six [...]
An IBM Java Developer gives a whirlwind tour of Ruby’s syntax in this article. Worth a read. NB, this is Ruby the language, not Ruby AND Rails, the web development framework. Whoops.
As you’ve seen, Ruby’s syntax is quite different from that of the Java language, but it’s amazingly easy to pick up. Moreover, some things [...]
Why is “Enumerating Badness” a dumb idea? It’s a dumb idea because sometime around 1992 the amount of Badness in the Internet began to vastly outweigh the amount of Goodness. For every harmless, legitimate, application, there are dozens or hundreds of pieces of malware, worm tests, exploits, or viral code. Examine [...]
Want to know if you are vulnerable to being hacked?
Click here, browse to and click on Shields Up, then click through each of the scans, e.g. “All Service Ports”. The service will tell you what the results mean.
The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), formerly known as Palladium, is a software architecture designed by Microsoft which will implement the controversial trusted computing concept on future versions of the Microsoft Windows Operating System. Microsoft’s stated aim for NGSCB is to increase the security and privacy of computer users[1], but critics assert that the technology [...]
The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us.
Initial estimates are that more than half a million computers worldwide are infected with this Sony rootkit. Those are amazing infection numbers, [...]