Stephen Hawking is Dead… and Alive… Again…

This man is truly super-human:

Hawking, who suffers from a progressive neurodegenerative disease that has almost completely paralyzed him, was due to travel to Seattle from San Francisco. But when he was taken off his respirator Monday morning, “he basically flat-lined,” said Terry Bristol, ISEPP’s president and executive director.
“They had to resuscitate, and that panicked a [...]

SQL Query Analyzer: Viewing Variable Values

Say you’re in SQL Query Analyzer writing some SQL that will one day grow up big and strong into a stored procedure and it isn’t working. You’re getting a cryptic error message when you execute*:

DECLARE @timezoneOffset float
DECLARE @baseDate datetime
DECLARE @sqlStr varchar(40)
SET @timezoneOffset = -3
SET @baseDate = CONVERT( varchar(40), DATEADD( hh, @timezoneOffset, GETDATE() )
SET @sqlStr = [...]

Sony Rootkits its DRM, Part V: Amazon Attacks

Amazon has stepped into the Sony Infected CD fiasco by contacting everyone who bought an infected CD from them and offering a full refund:

The Sony CD(s) listed above contain XCP digital rights management (DRM) software. Due to security concerns raised about the use of CDs containing this software on PCs, Sony has recalled these CDs [...]

Ubuntu: Launching Applications on Startup

I hunted for half an hour trying to figure out how to launch an application on startup in Ubuntu. Hint: it has nothing to do with .xinitrc. You can try but I couldn’t get that approach to work. Finally Jonathan turned me onto How to get ubuntu to automatically start programs when user logs in [...]

Sony Rootkits its DRM, Part IV

Poor Sony, now they’re getting it hard. Even though they’ve announced that they’re pulling their CDs from the shelves and instituting an exchange program they’re still getting burned for treating their users like crap.
It’s amusing to see a massive corporation humbled by the power of consumer outrage. Sony Corp has gone from petulant irritation:

“Most people, [...]

What I Want in Safari

I want to get rid of the Bookmarks menu. Entirely. Gone. I dislike it immensely. It’s not the concept of bookmarks I dislike mind you, for I use them all the time. It’s Safari’s implementation of the Bookmarks menu that gets up my nose.
I never intentionally use that menu. In fact I’ve trained myself to [...]

Resolution-dependent Web Design

Resolution-dependent design: scaling the data presentation to fit the available screen size. This reminds of some of the stuff people used to do with Java apps, before it was universally decided that doing this with Java apps was a pretty bad idea.
Dynamic Resolution Dependent Layouts from Particletree:

With dynamic layouts, the possibilities really are quite endless. [...]

WebKit Bug Bounty-hunting

If you like hack with Teh WebKit and you’ve got Teh Programming Skills you can make money fixing bugs in WebKit thanks to a new bounty program offered by Karelia Software:

So here is our offer: for each bug from our list (below) that is fixed (via a patch attached to the report in the WebKit [...]

iTunes Beat With the Ugly Stick

Sometimes the developers on the Windows side of the world are just so cute. They look at the Mac and see that it’s superior, and then go out and try to mimic that without actually understanding what makes it superior, and then we end up with crap like this UI of a Windows media player [...]

Why Does Sony Hate You?

The Sony saga gets stranger and stranger. Once upon a time a guy would think about buying some consumer electronics, ask a bunch of friends for their recommendation, and often as not a couple people would say “Buy the Sony, you can’t go wrong with Sony.” Then Sony discovered DRM and decided that those [...]

« go back — keep looking »