Archives for January 2010

January 2010 (19)
SMTWTFS
« Dec Feb »
12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31

Like this Archive Calendar widget? Download it here.


Freeze Frame Fail - Spooks series 5, episode 9

Another in an occasional series where I freeze frame a DVD to see that the producers skimped on something they really shouldn't have skimped on. […]

READ MORE

How identifiable are you on the net?

class="posterous_autopost"> I'm sure we're all aware that the browser we use (the User Agent in internet-speak) reports back information to each web server we visit. But could a web server gain any information about who we are just from the browser? Could we be identified when we visit later on? You might think: easy, just turn off cookies and we'd be pretty much unidentifiable, but is that the case? […]

READ MORE

Unbiased tosses from a biased coin

This is a very handy algorithm that I came across today, which is, according to this paper, due to John von Neumann. […]

READ MORE

Windows 7 Home Premium: turn off password expiration

class='posterous_autopost'>I use Windows 7 Home Premium as the OS in the various virtual machines I run. This is a space saving thing more than anything: I've limited the boot drive space to 20GB on my base VM so that I can have as many cloned VMs as I want on my external drive, and I'm assuming that Ultimate takes up a lot more room. Anyway... […]

READ MORE

"Nothing To Be Frightened Of" by Julian Barnes

I picked this up the last time we went to England in September, and I was half way through it when I got the phone call from my sister in mid-December that my Dad had been admitted to hospital with a heart attack. […]

READ MORE

Firefox 3.6 and S3Fox

class="posterous_autopost">A quick warning for those who use the S3 Firefox Organizer in Firefox on Windows and are contemplating upgrading to the new Firefox 3.6: S3Fox does not yet work in Firefox 3.6 and is automatically disabled when you upgrade. […]

READ MORE

Posting mini blog posts from Posterous

Back in December, I commented that I could, with a judicious bit of additional code in the open source GraffitiCMS codebase, accept posts from Posterous and publish them on this blog. Well, it turned out that it wasn't that brilliant a code change: it broke the validation for XHTML. So, this evening, I fixed up the current HTML and took another look at my code. […]

READ MORE

Megapixel Madness

Found this site this morning: Petavoxel, a brand new blog that so far seems to talk mostly about the hardware aspects of photography, especially about why the rush for more megapixels in a point-and-shoot camera is an exercise in stupidity. […]

READ MORE

Best case, Worse case, Amortized case

A couple of weeks ago, Hacker News pointed to an article about how bad hash tables could be in a worse case scenario. […]

READ MORE

MacBook hardware update

I have a second-hand black MacBook that I bought some 12 months ago (it's just over 2 years old by now, well outside any warranty) so that I could experiment writing iPhone apps. It's served me well. The only update I've made to it so far is to upgrade to Snow Leopard (OS 10.6), but it's about time I did some further upgrades, hardware related this time. […]

READ MORE