http://www.ourada.org/blog Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:39:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Occasionally you get a PDF of a scan of a printed copy of an automated email, and you say, "huh, that's kinda funny". http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/243 Here's a phrase, of sorts, from my past. I wonder if anyone out there in Internet-land can identify it. This is from memory (I can't find the original source material right now), so hopefully it's still right: "that's a little too much high that's that's it low". http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/241 I was just looking at a travel itinerary sent through email, and it reminded me of something. There has been a great failure in the computing profession. I'm a computing professional myself, so I feel some responsibility to repair this failure, and if my blog does nothing else, I'd love it ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/239 I like it when random things collide in an engaging way. I stopped "Blade Runner" in the middle to browse the web (yeah, I'm prone to random shuffling of activities), and found an interesting article on vagueness through a link on del.icio.us's 'recent' list (which I've talked about before). The ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/237 It's interesting how one develops a different group of skills to work with open source elements that with closed source ones. 'course, the skillset change is also related to the availability of the web and search engines, which are resources of inestimable value to software developers whether or not they're ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/235 Hmmm, one annoying and potentially dangerous thing about Linux on my Toshiba A105-S4134 is that there doesn't seem to be a way to get fan control to work. When first booted, the fan goes to low mode and just stays there forever, which means I could end up with an ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/234 I just noticed that in a certain usage, the phrase-forms 'hang ... off ...' and 'hang ... on ...' mean the same thing. (Of course, you could find a lot of examples of such phenomena in English, but hey, this is my blog and I reserve the right to post ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/233 Did you know that in Tomcat 6, you apparently... well, I can't quite say what the cause is, but here's what happened: I have a webapp that's using a library that might be doing some slightly tricky classloader things If I access that app through the AJP connector, it fails to find ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/232 Oh, forgot to mention in my "TV all over again" post that that was the last app I had to run in Windows. So now, in the normal state, there isn't a lick of Windows running in my house. I run it in a VM when I need it, and ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/231 So this morning I learned that one of my hard drives had died during the night. Luckily it was just holding backup data that was waiting to be burned to DVD-RW, so it was not a huge loss. But annoying nonetheless. While I was in there replacing that, I figured I'd ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/230 Mixing metaphors can be a great source of humor, intentionally or not so. I don't know which category this one fits in, but it's great. (I haven't actually read the article, I just happened to stumble upon this little quote and hadda point out how much I love it.) There are ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/229 Maybe I'll make a thrilling serial out of my suspend experiences. "S3: Miami: Drivers and BIOS Division: Data Loss Prevention Unit", maybe. The first episode would be where I used suspend and had a mixed bag of results. Things seem to stop and start alright, but I have this fan problem... ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/228 Speaking of suspend, it's cool that it looks like Ubuntu supports it well in Hardy Heron (8.04). I'm not giving the credit all to Ubuntu; I'm sure lots of people contributed to that, since it's certainly a huge endeavor to get the whole chain, from the kernel-BIOS interface up through ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/227 The summary: after breaking a lid latch on my Toshiba Satellite A105-S4134 laptop, I was unable to reliably use the 'suspend' function. I repaired this with a fairly simple procedure. I took the long way around to get to that procedure; you don't have to. The whole back story: I had ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/226 I bet you could run Cygwin under Wine to get a Linux-like environment in Linux. http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/225 Have you ever had to try to replace a hard drive in a machine with a dead built-in DVD drive and an old BIOS (i.e. one that doesn't really boot off USB devices)? It can be a frustrating endeavor. My favored way to replace a hard drive (and yeah, I know ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/224 Hmmm... I think I pretty much have to agree with Donald Knuth on this one: multicore processors are basically not that great of an idea for general-purpose computing. Problem is, this looks like one of those wrong turns that will lead us quite far afield before we get back to the ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/223 When I made the switch on my main desktop machine from Windows to Linux (I mean, a Linux kernel-based operating environment solution incorporating elements from FSF projects as well as thousands of other contributors, including but not limited to: Apache Software Foundation, Sun Microsystems Incorporated, the GNOME Foundation... ah, I ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/222 I'm pretty interested in watching the proliferation of little computers everywhere. Here's the latest example I saw: a Linux firewall machine that fits inside your Windows laptop. I don't exactly love the architecture of this particular beast (redirecting network traffic out to the firewall and back in via a hacked-up ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/220 It's funny how the evolution of consumer products leads to odd outcomes, sometimes. For example, my refrigerator has a vestigial ice-maker. I noticed this one night when I heard that clunk-clunk noise you hear from ice-makers. But I don't have an ice-maker (or so I thought). I looked in my freezer and ... http://www.ourada.org/blog/archives/218