I'm still a business newbie, I'll admit it. I haven't made a million dollars yet and I haven't been on the cover of a magazine in a while. Although I was the subject of a Fortune cover article back in the day. But it's been m...
Continue readingThis article explains why thin form-factor servers like blades may not be a good idea....
Continue readingThis article describes a system for making useful transcripts of Voice over IP VoIP chats....
Continue readingThe Intellectual Property Wage Slave or Why You Should Quit Your Job A study of the productivity of software programmers shows the most talented coders to be over 100 times more efficient than the meanest. It is clear, however, that there is nowhe...
Continue readingA few days ago, it occured to me that it would be useful if my alarm clock knew to awake me an hour before my first appointment of the day, as automatically pulled down from my Yahoo! Calendar. All the alarm clock would really need to do is to have a...
Continue readingA number of friends have asked me of late what my take is on podcasting. It's certainly a hot new buzzword; but is it really the "next step for blogging"? It doesn't seem obvious to me....
Continue readingThe cell phone market bugs me. It seems to have been taken over by marketers utterly out of touch with the reality of what people are looking for in a phone, their singular focus instead on a cheap game of one-upmanship with the competition. In recen...
Continue readingSo here we are, post-election, and George Bush has won. A lot of people, Bush supporters and otherwise, are dumbfounded by the numbers. The Republican party...
Continue readingYour blog can and will be used against you in a court of law....
Continue readingSo I'm back from Ghana, safe and sound minus a nasty cold I picked up on some continent. I never get sick! The camp was a resounding success; sorry for not posting more here earlier, but it's been a total zoo. I got back last night at 2pm a...
Continue readingOh, every day has such ups and downs! It's hard to compress it all here. Immediately after the last update, I think I gave the talk of my life &8211; the kids in the afternoon were a lot more jazzed up than the morning kids, which shouldn't...
Continue readingI just got done teaching the morning session; with two classes a...
Continue readingBusy Internet strikes again. Internet here is 12,000 cedis per hour. The exchange rate is very roughly 10,000 cedis per dollar. It's actually more like 9k and change So that's around $1.25/hour, which isn't so bad and certinaly doesn&8...
Continue readingI'm at "Busy Internet" in Accra right now. We've been calling the people who did and didn't manage to make the program. It seems that instead of taking 50 kids, we're going to try and take 100 kids, doing two sessions a...
Continue readingSo I'm writing this from a computer lab in Accra; it's nicely modern, with about 50 pentium 4-2000 machines, but it's about 1500ms to anything really interesting on the Internet backbone and the speed's not that fabulous. But it w...
Continue readingOh boy. I'm two days away from hopping on a plane to Accra, Ghana to go teach kids about science, technology, and the Internet. Much of our planning is very last minute as we're trying to slap together a curriculum, local sponsorship, etc....
Continue readingI would like to thank President Bush for his efforts to expand democracy around the world. He's done a really incredible job, but not in the way that he may have anticipated. In his efforts to found democracies on the other side of the globe, he...
Continue readingThe following is the poem "Ithaca" by the famous Greek poet Cavafy, in its translation by Rae Dalven, the original Greek, and also with my own horribly-bastardized pronunciation guide for the Greek. Note that the translation is not line-bas...
Continue readingI wrote the following letter to my pastor Brian Emmet at Covenant Ministries1, in response to his latest newsletter2, which decried permitting homosexual marriages....
Continue readingThe middle east is pretty damn annoying. Specifically, the whole Israel / Palestine deal. I mean, it feels like there's good evidence that there are a very large number of totally reasonable people on both sides who are being totally ignored by...
Continue readingI've recently employed a very simple mechanism for spam control. So far, it's been quite effective and required the installation of NO new software, tunable Baysian filters, or anything. So I thought I'd share it with you....
Continue readingThis message was posted on October 27, 2003 to a mailing list in response to a post that claimed that IPv6 would be widespread by 2005 due to an IPv4 address shortage. Given that 2005 has come without IPv6 having taken off, this post feels vindicated...
Continue readingFor protocols there's Ethernet, TCP, IP, UDP, AIM in ICQ, OSCAR, and TOC flavors!, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, IRC, SOCKS5, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, POP3, FTP, Shoutcast, SSH, and Kazaa&8230;and that's just what's running on my desktop...
Continue readingUnicode1 is just about the coolest thing since sliced bread. It's the kind of thing after which you wonder how things possibly worked previously. The idea is simple: one character set can represent any character in any language. There are a few...
Continue readingI've learned a lot in the last two years about what it means to be professional. Here are some of the things I've learned; I hope you can learn them without having to be the fool I am! Please note that I'm not smart enough to actually...
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