A co-worker got this error message today, and I thought it was quite humorous:

Today I discovered a nifty way to do socket programming in bash without the need for netcat (nc) or telnet: /dev/tcp. Say you want to connect to Google and fetch their front page. Just do this: exec 3/dev/tcp/www.google.com/80 echo -e “GET / HTTP/1.1\n\n” >&3 cat

I’ve seen some confusion online lately about the purpose of the “@” operator in PHP. Let’s figure out exactly what the “at operator” does. PHP holds your hand with error reporting during development by printing error messages to the user’s browser automatically when something goes wrong. This often looks something like this: Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: […]

SpeedScheduler, a little Azureus plugin that I wrote a while back, was featured in an article that made Digg’s front page: Top Azureus Plugins Revealed. Scroll to the bottom of the article for a few screenshots and a little write up. That’s pretty nifty.

I’ve update my LDS General Conference podcast feed with the April 2006 Saturday sessions. The Sunday sessions aren’t available yet. I’ll post them when they are. For instructions, see my previous post on General Conference podcasting.

I’m usually an avid fanboy of Qt, but the more I use it, the more I find myself wanting two changes: 1. More slots please 2. More control over signals  Read on for a couple examples.

I just watched a Microsoft video preview of Office 2007. I was impressed with the new “Ribbon” concept to replace all the old toolbars and menus. When I say all, I mean all! Finally, the “File” menu is gone! I think it looks quite nice, and it shouold save us from being drowned in an […]

Last Saturday I turned on my iPod nano to discover that about a third of the horizontal lines were solid white, obscurring the volume bar. I was momentarily devestated that my black beauty had broken. In desparation I googled “apple ipod support” and came to the iPod support page. I didn’t have a lot of […]

The GNU crew improved Make with lots of handy stuff. One such gem that I found today is the ?= operator, which only defines a macro if it is not already defined (like as an environment variable). It behaves almost like wrapping the assignment in ifndef. John Gramm-Cunning has a good explanation of this subtle […]

It’s not everyday that a man page makes you laugh out loud, but this blurb from the page for statfs did the job for me: Nobody knows what f_fsid is supposed to contain I really did laugh out loud, until I read below in the page that basically explains that f_fsid just holds different things […]