This past weekend, the touchscreen part of my iPhone 3GS became what I can only describe as insensitive: it would hardly register any gestures or flicks up or down, and taps to the upper part of the screen wouldn't register. I felt completely stupid tapping forcefully on the screen: it's not as if there's anything mechanical going on that would respond better to such vigorous actions. There was even a point when I couldn't flick the slider to power off the phone: it's at the top of the screen. […]
READ MOREI use Handbrake and AnyDVD to rip DVDs I buy to iPhone/iPod Touch format so that I can watch them on flights. Since I fly quite often (to the DevExpress offices in Glendale, various conferences, home in England, etc), watching what I want to watch during these boring flights has been a life-saver, or at least a sanity saver. […]
READ MORERSA, a public key cryptography algorithm, relies for its security on the fact that factorizing a number that is the product of two large primes is hard. Very hard. […]
READ MOREEver since I read Jeff Atwood's article about Swoopo on Coding Horror, I've been fascinated about the strategies involved in bidding on such a site. Not fascinated enough (or indeed interested enough) to actually use real money of my own to do so, but to my mind it has all the hallmarks of some kind of remarkable result in advanced game theory. Basically Swoopo is an auction site where they're the ones putting up the items for auction. The suckers -- sorry, bidders -- bid for the items, but each bid costs money to place (something like 75 cents) and each bid extends the end time of the auction. […]
READ MOREOne bug with Graffiti that's been driving me nuts ever since I started using the app over a year ago is that it assumes that a commenter will naturally add the http:// to the beginning of their website name. If they don't, the code that displays the comment later will force the URL to be absolute (essentially by prepending the Graffiti application's base URL to the name). Of course that link is then nonsense and leads to a 404 if someone clicks on it later. […]
I find this quite unbelievable, considering all the palava we went through for the Y2K cavalcade, but it seems that many systems around the world have been crashing or doing bizarre things once the first of January 2010 came around. […]
READ MOREColor me stupid, but then again I was under some emotional pressure at the time. The open source version of GraffitiCMS has some changes in it compared to the final official commercial release. Well, duh, I suppose; and of course I'd mentioned some of them in my previous blog post on the subject. […]
READ MOREFor some reason, I'm getting comment spam from essay and thesis mills, that is, those sites that promise to write an essay or thesis for you for cash. Given that the spam is barely legible English already -- the words are English but the syntax is dubious -- it's (a) not a great advert for the quality of the end-product should you partake of the service, and (b) frigging annoying to me. One of them was posted to my "Bye, Dad" post, not something that would endear me to the comment or commenter anyway. […]
READ MOREI write a monthly column for PCPlus, a computer news-views-n-reviews magazine in the UK (actually there are 13 issues a year — there's an Xmas issue as well — so it's a bit more than monthly). The column is called Theory Workshop and appears in the back of every issue. When I signed up, my editor and the magazine were gracious enough to allow me to reprint the articles here after say a year or so. After all, the PDFs do appear on each issue's DVD after a few months. When I buy the current issue, I'll publish the article from the issue a year ago. I popped over to B&N this lunchtime and bought the Christmas issue, so here's Christmas 2008's article. […]
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