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. […]
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 am no shell scripting expert, but I have written a lot of bash code in my day. Most of my shell scripting know-how has come from trial-and-error and desperate googling. This has (slowly) taught me a few nifty tricks and some of the more interesting details of how bash actually “works” (for lack of […]
I have become the de-facto neighborhood tech support geek. Huh, you ask? Well, combine a pretty face with a bit of computer hackery know-how, and what do you expect? During the course of regular Windows tech support adventures, I have accidentally observed an interesting trend ever since our friends in Redmond gave us Windows Vista. […]
I have the best bash prompt ever. It took a lot of hacking and googling, but here she is: Notice that the smiley face and text colors change depending on the exit code of the last run command (red = failed, green = happy). This is handy, for example, after a big long build that […]