Archive for June, 2009

New hardware ordered: printer and kitchen computer

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

The kitchen computer project will be powered by a black ASUS EeeBox B203! The ancient 800 MHz (VIA Samuel 2 crap CPU) Mini-ITX machine I use for the prototype is very slow, has issues with the USB network adapter (NetGear WG111v3, ID 0846:4260),  and freezes occasionally so it will be ...

Firefox 3.0 freezes waiting to resolve safebrowsing-cache.google.com in DNS

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

My current daytime setup is for various reasons a Windows XP installation with Ubuntu Jaunty running inside VirtualBox. I use Microsoft Windows for Outlook, SQL Navigator and some web browsing while using the Linux installation for development. This morning I started Firefox in Windows XP, changed focus to VirtualBox or ...

Boot original Xbox directly into XBMC

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

I have some things left to say about installing XBMC on the original Xbox, in part because they are not done yet. Today I finally made the Xbox boot directly into XBMC and not to EvoX.  Searching the web for instructions on how to do this may give some different answers, ...

Good at programming, bad at communicating

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

I can't remember how I originally found the link (was it in someone's tweet?) but I managed to find it again in order to share it here. The message may seem silly in retrospect, but I think it was enlightening. The article is called Sometimes, The Better You Program, The ...

Permute an array in PHP

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

I wrote this function recently when I could not find it in the PHP function list. Please provide any optimizations you discover! function permute($array) { $results = array(); if (count($array) == 1) { $results[] = $array; } else { for ...

Amount of type checks in Java

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Martin Fowler writes about DynamicTypeCheck: Recently some of our developers ran into the accusation that with a dynamic language like ruby you use so many dynamic type checks that you end up effectively writing your own type system. So they thought, since we've written a ...

Recommended reading: “Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism”

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Brian Marick has created a site for AR⊗TA, short for Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. I do not expect that a movement with a name like that will catch on in "the enterprise" but it seems like a good reaction to software development processes that are called agile but ...

I’m an HTML Tag Criminal

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

I read the 10 HTML Tag Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit article and while I had suspected it for a while, I now know myself to be an HTML Tag Criminal. My biggest crime is: Crime 4: Using <b> and <i> for Bolding and Italicizing Actually WordPress will convert <b> and <i>to ...