(One in a continuing series on the slide rules I own. [list]) […]
READ MOREHandy hint, Frontier Airlines: if you don’t have my name in your database, just don’t send the email: […]
READ MOREThe iPhone 5 comes with a new connector: out with the decade-old 30-pin dock connector and in with the Lightning connector. The new connector is way smaller (meaning that iOS devices can be even thinner than before), doesn’t depend on being inserted the ”right side up”, and of course just doesn’t work with all those devices you may have had with the old connector. At the time Apple promised an adapter to convert from old to new and also provided new USB cables. […]
READ MOREI can’t remember the genesis of this particular article on the Turing Test, but this year being the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth certainly makes it very apt a year later. […]
READ MOREA couple of months ago, I was told some pretty sad news: after 26 years in the business, PC Plus was closing down. Future, the publishing company that owns it, decided that the magazine was no longer economically viable and that October 2012’s issue (number 326) was to be the last one. The news was made public about two weeks ago: […]
READ MOREA couple of weeks back, we went to the Pasta in the Park gala evening for TESSA, a charity that provides help for victims of domestic and sexual abuse here in Colorado Springs. Taste testing of pasta sauces by sponsors, silent auctions, raise the paddle auctions, drinking, eating, and supporting a great cause. […]
READ MOREA photography topic this time: HDR photos. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is a set of algorithms that attempt to widen the range of detail in a photo from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights to more closely mimic what the human eye can see. […]
READ MOREAfter part one (generating the board) and part two (hooking up some basic mouse handlers), it’s time to refine the interactions. Specifically last time I noted that, as written, it was possible to change the preset 0s and 1s of the initial game, and it was all too simple to select the 0s and 1s as we navigate around the board. Let’s fix those issues right now. […]
READ MOREPossibly a rather lightweight topic this one, but at the time (and frankly since) it was certainly in the news. The topic? Websites getting hacked, having customer data downloaded, including passwords. Sometimes the hacks are really simple, and I talk about a couple in the article: SQL Injection (which, even after all this time, is still one of the primary ways to hack a website) and XSS (cross-site scripting). Sometimes users bring the problems upon themselves by, say, having the same passwords for several sites (your password then is only as safe as the security at the weakest site). I also talk about the need to salt-and-hash passwords in your database if you are a website developer, and the need to use a good password manager if you are a user. […]
READ MOREIn part one of this series, I coded up a basic 8×8 Tazuku board as a web page and populated it with an initial game. Time now to make the board interactive: I want to allow the user to alter cells with their guesses (or rather, “logically deduced answers”). […]
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