Taking a break from computer science and model aviation for the moment, I want to make sure my readership (both of you, not counting my mother) is aware that my company is currently hiring software developers. I know that many developers in the Salt Lake City area have recently found themselves on the job market. […]

I came across a graph theory problem at work this week, and decided to blog about it to help me sort it out. At first I didn’t think of it as a graph problem, but that’s how these problems often go, shrouded in disguise and all. But I digress. The problem is this. Considering the […]

This was a record week for computer help. Like most resident geeks, I give a lot of computer help, which I like because it makes me feel useful. But this week was a record. In a single week, I: Recovered data from a “mostly dead” hard drive Rescued an iMac hard drive from a greedy […]

Every once in a while, a rare while, I come across a product that makes me say, “Wow, they actually thought about this.” I’m pleased to announce that today it happened again, thanks to a new web browser called Google Chrome. Read on for my brief review of the browser and some of the cool […]

For the first time in my life, I installed Linux on a laptop and every feature worked out of the box: video, sound, wireless network, mouse, keyboard, desktop effects, everything! I am blown away. I’m running Hardy on a Dell D630, and I followed the upgrade path after installing Kubuntu originally with Gutsy (and then […]

Lots of the spam I get uses the Cyrillic alphabet. I believe it’s Russian. I don’t correspond with anyone using the Cyrillic alphabet, so I’ve come up with a procmail recipe to filter this email out. But first some background. It seems that the subject lines of many (all?) Cyrillic emails look something like this: […]

If you are as curious as I am, you’ve probably managed to brick your iPod touch by now. I bricked mine within 24 hours of owning it. It happened sometime after I installed Apollo and changed the root password using SSH and the passwd command. After I did that, my SpringBoard process stopped working, and […]

Have you ever wanted to watch all the logs in /var/log and sub-directories on your Linux box? Well, I have, and normally I just use tail -f *.log, but that doesn’t work because some log files don’t end in “.log”. Furthermore, you can’t use tail -f * because some of the files can contain non-printable […]

I am a computer programmer by profession. In my personal time, however, I am a computer programmer. The difference between the two: requirements (or the absence thereof). In my industry, software requirements are considered a big deal by nearly all of my users, especially the paying kind. In the 5 years I’ve been working in […]

I’m a new convert to Qt’s stylesheets. They make customizing your Qt GUI much easier than other methods (like QPalette). Recently, I responded to a request for comments from Trolltech, and I thought my fellow GUI developers might be interested in it. These are my humble suggestions to Trolltech for improving Qt stylesheets: I use […]