I was just having a conversation on Friday with someone about a bunch of Google employees who had ordered up a ridiculous amount of silly putty so they could do an experiment with dropping it from a great height. As someone educated in a faculty of engineering, this made tremendous sense to me: I’ve done [...]
I am unable to resist “obscure words” lists, and generally most of the words on them are actually familiar to me. Not so with this list, on which I knew these ones from prior encounter: agraffe, bathykolpian, blandiloquent, callipygean, defenestrate, mumpsimus, slubberdegullion, and yclept. These, while I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before, were obvious in their meaning from their components: autohagiographer, autotonsorialist, batrachophagous, cruciverbalist, dephlogisticate, interfenestration, and preantepenultimate. And the rest were new to me. I think the most fun one to say, although rarely called for, would be “zenzizenzizenzic“, the one with the most fun definition is “sphallolalia“, and the one least likely to come up in my life is “mallemaroking“. There are several, though, that I could easily see coming up in my life, not least of which are “gambrinous“, “philosophunculist“, and “ultracrepidarian“.
(0 Comments)You know, sometimes the right tool for the job makes problems remarkably simple to solve. For a lot of my small computer problems, the right tool is sed. I remember the first time I encountered it, and I estimate it’s saved me around an average of about an hour a week since then–which works out to something like 117 working days.
(0 Comments)Hey, did you notice the “aside” formatting is working again on that last post? You might remember my saying, way back when, that I had noticed that the upgrade to WP 2.8 had broken AsideShop, the plugin I used to do styling for my “aside” posts (Oh yeah, this is going to be some deep [...]
Yesterday was a marvelous mail day at the McLaren household. Through a confluence of mail karma–or possibly because our mailman seems to be skipping a day whenever he gets bored with the route–I had several books arrive from several different publishers. This will consequently be one long post full of book porn. If you’re not [...]
Have I previously discussed my enjoyment of the word flux? I don’t think I have. In fact, I like the word enough that I’ve just officially adopted it for the next year at Adopt-A-Word. As the word’s new guardian, I will, of course, be traveling the web to ensure the word is not misused, or [...]
So, because of the recently discovered vulnerability in DD-WRT, I figured it was time to update the firmware on my router. Yes, I know that since I don’t allow remote configuration of the router I was somewhat protected from the threat, but I was due for an upgrade anyway. However, I do have to ask [...]
Let’s see if we can close some of the myriad tabs I’ve opened in the process of trying to catch up with everything that happened in the non-work world while I was off spending time at the Melbourne office: I’m quite impressed at the 16-year old (from the city where I did my university days) [...]
You know what you never want to see? Ever? This: That’s a particularly nasty variant of that old companion of people who do computer things for money: the BSOD. This one usually means one of three things: you have a virus on your Master Boot Record, the drive with your swap partition on it is [...]
Most mornings I try to check out the interesting new links on the particular categories of Reddit that interest me. For the most part, I don’t bother with the comments–they are generally noise, not signal. However, the best computery thing I read last week, and possibly for a significantly longer window, showed up in one [...]
What does it say about me that when I read a piece on scientists attempting to create human/animal hybrids in order to harvest stem cells from animal eggs, that my immediate reaction is “Oh noes, they’re going to make the cat girls and some skeevy people will be way too excited about it”?
(0 Comments)Mean Tricks To Play On Yourself #345: Install Linux on a laptop with only wireless connectivity (i.e. not just not plugged in, but nothing to plug in to), where that connectivity is provided by a Broadcom-based wireless adapter. Level 2: Once you have that working, enjoy it for a while, and then do a distribution upgrade, so that it will break and you can have that fun all over again. Level 3: Repeat with every distribution upgrade.
(0 Comments)So, a few months back I was thinking about an upcoming trip to Boston. A trip not unlike the one I’m on right now, albeit shorter and without the 9 day, all-day meeting marathon. Anyway, I was thinking about this trip with particular reference to the USA’s apparent new policy of having border guards copy [...]
OK, let’s do one of those patented link posts to clean out some of these open tabs… Let’s start with Mario. As far as programming goes, I’m a kernel guy–an engine guy. I don’t do UI, and trust me, you’re happy I don’t. I make it work under the covers. As such, I often deride [...]
So we’ve pretty much established that I’m 35, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m basically still a child. When I see something like the page of “revenge” items at Spymall, I just laugh like an evil ten-year old, and spend time coming up with ill-advised scenarios in which I could use that stuff. (And [...]
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