Category: Technology

  • Twitter… for men

    With recent advent of Woofer, the Twitter clone that requires the use of 1400 characters, I’d like to add my own entry into the foray. Introducing Twitless: Twitter for Men. “140 Characters. A month.” You can use your 140 characters any way you want, but if you use ’em up early, you’ll just have to […]

  • New MacBook Pros have hard drive problems

    When the new unibody MacBook Pros (MBPs, henceforth) came out, many owners were up in arms over the fact that the new, supposedly high-end models lost SATA 2, and were only capable of 1.5 Gb/s SATA 1 speeds. Some people felt this was fair because Apple only provides SATA 1 drives, but this isn’t entirely […]

  • Accelerating code using GCC’s prefetch extension

    I recently started playing with GCC’s prefetch builtin, which allows the programmer to explicitly tell the processor to load given memory locations in cache. You can optionally inform the compiler of the locality of the data (i.e. how much priority the CPU should give to keep that piece of data around for later use) as […]

  • Classic Atlantic article on the diamond scam

    One of the more useful things to be aware of as an American is the surprising ruthlessness of Madison Avenue’s manipulation. Nowhere is that more evident than in a classic Atlantic story from 1982 exposing how the public was fooled into thinking diamond rings are an integral part of marriage custom. I’d read it a […]

  • Running Real’s Rhapsody in Linux

    Every once in a while I have to put something actually useful up here. I just spent a while trying to get Rhapsody to work in Firefox 3 under Ubuntu 8.10. Having an entire music store at my disposal is one of the things I miss most from my Windows machine when I need to […]

  • Major bug in Ubuntu 8.10 networking for static IP addresses

    There is a bug in the new version of Ubuntu (8.10, or Intrepid Ibex), where static IP network settings are lost after every reboot. Kind of makes it hard to connect to your box remotely with ssh. Pretty big bug, huh? You’d think it would be rather embarrassing when your latest operating system release breaks the […]

  • A new problem with the iPhone: stress cracks

    I noticed a crack in the back of my iPhone, between the mute button and the metal bezel. It just appeared, not caused by a drop or anything. Looking online, this is happening to a lot of people. The reason why this is happening, I think, is that Apple bonded a plastic back to a […]

  • Zen and the Art of Linux Maintenance

    Linux provided me with the illusion of feeling useful and productive on a regular basis as it required me to put my knowledge to work fixing the never ending litany of problems.

  • WordPress 2.7.x, automatically updated from SVN

    Just switched the blog software over to the new WordPress 2.7. The biggest change you’ll be able to see is the ability to have threaded comments, and hopefully faster performance. Since this blog is anything but critical to anybody, I’ve also decided to just run the latest code in the current branch from now on. Every […]

  • Apple’s iPhone 2.1 software: Lipstick on a pig

    Among the myriad problems the 2.1 firmware was supposed to solve was poor 3G reception. How did Apple achieve this? Apparently by simply artificially displaying more bars, at least in part: In their release notes for the update, they list “improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display.” That’s just corporate speak for “we can’t […]