The Cave

PyCon 2010 will be held at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta in Feb’2010. Figures. Just 2 years too late for me

IBM’s “Blue Waters” is a monster configuration using the upcoming POWER7: If our documents are to be believed – and they’re penned by an IBM executive – this system, funded by a $208m grant and meant to go up at the University of Illinois in 2011, will be the most massive machine ever created. We’ve [...]

Ruby supports calling private methods via send. Now for those of you in our home audience who are Java programmers I’m sure you’re suddenly feeling a bit queasy right about now, but don’t go away. It gets better. This changes in Ruby 1.9; send can’t call private methods. But send! can. But send isn’t the [...]

Looks like my video card was fried. Not fun. Came home from work to find my 2GB RAM arrived from NewEgg. Shutdown the machine, opened the case and booted before making changes to make sure all is well and no start, just 1 long beep followed by 3 short ones. Hunting up the manual for [...]

Of course I remember the “McDonald’s coffee incident”, but apparently it wasn’t as ludicrous as ‘everyone recalls’ Yeah, read the McDonald’s case. They consistantly brewed their coffee at 180F. Industry standard is 140F or so. There were multiple complains their coffee was too hot, dating back years. They were warned repeatedly about this. There was [...]

Amusing rundown of the various British newspapers. The Sun: Trashy tabloid, most popular paper, tells thick people who to vote for. Banned in Liverpool after a controversial story suggesting Liverpool fans were responsible for the Hillsborough disaster The Mirror: Wishes it was the sun. Even more trashy. The Times: Owned by Murdoch, like the Sun, [...]

Documentation is a little dated but it seems sound, though I noticed an issue with RubyGems 1.3.2 (fine with 1.3.1). Sigh. Makes one yearn for py2exe

I now have a blog on MSDN. Giddyap!

RFC 2606 defines reserved TLDs for .test, .example and .invalid (among other things).

The AMA and fixing the health care system. Another group fighting for the wrong side in this war. Does this mean I shouldn’t trust my doctor? Does the AMA really want their members to be regarded as honorable and trustworthy as the finance industry?

Nice. I hope Win7 SP1 adds USB 3.0 support. I shudder to imagine the prices for 16GB USB 3.0 flash keys, no matter how mighty sweet they’ll be for ReadyBoost.

Hmmm.

An online Ruby regular expression editor and tester. How handy.

Visual Studio 2010 text is blurry because it uses WPF: Sadly the real problem is that it uses Windows Presentation Foundation, which renders text in an idealized grid rather than snapping glyphs to a pixel grid. In other words it renders the font exactly as it is supposed to look, and then blends this into [...]

I had a problem with IE8 accessing a site this morning and needed to report the issue. Pull up the About box to report the version information and here’s what I see: The scrollable text area with version information? It’s not text! Or if it is, it’s the funkiest text control I have ever seen. [...]

Nice JSON library if you use Java.

AppStore for Java. Just like Sun, always jumping on the bandwagon (and late to the party as usual…)

Here: 1. Kill a running application by its name: killall [app_name] 2. Display disk space usage: df -h 3. Locate the installation directories of a program: whereis [app] 4. Mount an .iso file: mount /path/to/file.iso /mnt/cdrom -oloop 5. Record or capture a video of your desktop: ffmpeg -f x11grab -s wxga -r 25 -i :0.0 [...]