On weekday afternoons, the Toronto Star publishes an eight-page PDF edition, “Star PM.” I download this for one reason: the free crossword puzzle. But sometimes I forget to download this, and since there’s no archive, I lose the opportunity to do that day’s crossword. So I wrote a script to automatically fetch today’s Star PM …
Category Archives: tech
How to fix Safari if it can’t view plugin content
For a while, I haven’t been able to view plugin content (Flash, QuickTime, etc.) in Safari. I decided to do some quick regression to determine the source of the problem. First, I viewed the pages in another browser, Camino, and they appeared correctly. So my plugins themselves were not corrupt. Next, I logged in as …
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Why C++ sucks
If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base pure virtual private destructor, and when was the last time you needed one? —Tom Cargil, C++ Journal (via KDE)
When marketing attacks
AOL’s marketing is so pervasive, it has snuck its way in to their bounce messages: : host mailin-02.mx.aol.com[205.188.155.89] said: 550 We would love to have gotten this email to [email protected]. But, your recipient never logged onto their free AIM Mail account. Please contact them and let them know that they’re missing out on all the …
Vote for my SXSW interactive panel proposal
I’ve proposed a panel for SXSW interactive 2007, “Getting to Consistency: Lessons Learned from Big Cats.” The panels will be decided by an online vote. Head over to the 2007 SXSW Interactive Panel Proposal Picker and vote for me. :) Here’s the description: Making software predictable and consistent makes it much easier to use. This …
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best.review.ever?
So the idiots at Sprint send Joel Splosky an LG Fusic phone to review, thinking he will promote their service. Phone companies, as Joel points out, have a history of bad decisions: And it’s 2006, and I almost can’t believe I’m writing this, because way back in 2000 I wrote almost exactly the same thing …
Mixing your metaphors
One of my favourite mixed metaphors—which I had somehow internally misattributed to David Johnston—was this one, from University of Waterloo registrar Ken Lavigne: Admissions is a crap shoot, and this year we won in spades This week, Peter Lewis of Fortune may have topped it: Apple is making applesauce out of the old canard that …
Lessons from interviewing
As part of my job, I perform technical phone interviews (“phone screens”) for our group and a couple others. The basic phone screen is more about breadth then depth, touching on C, Unix, object-oriented programming and some data structures and algorithms over 30 to 45 minutes. During this process, I’ve learned a few things, including: …
Mailman mailing list backup script
I’m sure there are some of these around already, but I have written a script to back up your Mailman mailing lists. It dumps the member roster and list configuration into separate text files, zips them up, emails them to you, and cleans up after itself. The script is called mailmanBackup.py, and its syntax is …
unix humor
Funny things you can do with the unix command line and linux sex positions.