I’ve been enjoying looking down my nose at the world ever since getting my Apple iMac, but today my haughty soul was humbled by a personal fail. I bought some more RAM to upgrade it. The RAM works fine. I tested it in my Dell laptop. The iMac, however, rejected it like an English queen […]
For several years I used BAStats on my blog to get visitor statistics. It gave me nifty info like which Google searches lead people to my blog. After a a few years, my blog pages started loading very slowly, annoyingly slow, and I finally tracked it down to BAStats (using MySQL’s “show processlist” command). The […]
A few months ago I gave a presentation to the BYU Unix Users Group on Qt GUI development. During the meeting, we created a simple chat room program called chatterbox. At the time I promised to post my source code with comments, a promise on which I am now making good. Here is the code. […]
To celebrate Independence Day, I flew my T-28 with red, white, and blue streamers around the park.
About 12 years. 12 years ago I bought a new computer with 3GB of hard drive space (yes, just three). Today, the average new computer has about 3GB of RAM. It took 12 years to convert all that disk space to RAM. If this pattern holds, then by the year 2021 we should have computers […]
Today in Windows XP, I double clicked on a scanner icon under “My Computer” after installing a new scanner. Here’s the dialog that popped up: A few gripes worth considering: The phrase “Microsoft Word” is mentioned 4 times. 3 out of 4 of my options have repeated text (once in black, and again in gray, […]
How many more years am I going to have to wait before I get a Linux desktop that doesn’t look like it was cobbled together? Before I rant about the Fedora 11 user interface, I have to say that I am a huge fan of Linux. I write code for Linux all day at work […]
The prolific Mark Twain wasn’t talking about computer programmers, but he could have been. There are a lot of differences between excellent computer programmers and your average, run-of-the-mill hackers. But there’s one major difference, and it’s subtle but critical. And, in my experience, it doesn’t have anything to do with age or tenure. Great programmers […]
Have you made this classic programming mistake? You’re 2,000 lines into developing this awesome framework that is going to make your team’s life so much easier when you realize that you’ve just done it: You just reinvented the wheel. This happens because you are a programmer, and therefore you are lazy. You love to write […]
I finally updated the LDS General Conference Podcast to include the April 2009 sessions. Sorry it took me so long. I just plumb forgot until now. If you’re already subscribed, you don’t have to do anything. The new sessions will automagically download. For more info, check out the General Conference Podcast page. Enjoy!