Isotropic

Despite working in IT and owning several electronic devices that allow note taking, I use a lot of paper notes. Paper is portable, instant on, available in many form factors, works in adverse conditions, disposable … you get my drift. It may be a legacy system, but following my maxim of “just because [...]

If I were feeling mean, I’d point these two guys at each other.
[ Someone asked where I'd been -- no posts, no email, not online. Well, it was a busy weekend. I offer this post as a blip on the radar. ]

“Who doesn’t long for household help at times? Service robots will soon be able to relieve us of heavy, dirty, monotonous or irksome tasks. Research scientists have now presented a new generation of household robots, the ‘Care-O-bot® 3′.” — ScienceDaily, New Generation Of Home Robots Have Gentle Touch
It is interesting that (according to the [...]

The post “Guidelines on Memory and the Law” at Neurophilosophy summarizes a report, commissioned by the British Psychological Society, regarding the implications of memory research for the legal profession. “These guidelines, which are available as a PDF, are intended to inform those who work in criminal and civil law - for example, the police [...]

For those of you who think you produce bug free code …
As told at New Otto malloc helps spot ancient bug, “Otto Moerbeek recently found and fixed an ancient bug (some 33 years old) in yacc(1). Here is his story….”
image: Dave Pape, Bos grunniens - Syracuse Zoo.jpg, Wikimedia Commonsh/t: Bob Plankers, links for [...]

No, I’m not.
In Name Scrapers I mentioned the non-uniqueness of my name in an example. That must have sensitized me to pick up on Kevin Kelly’s GoggleUnique Names.
After mentioning several well-known strategies for choosing names, he goes on to discuss two new strategies, which he calls “global branding” and “GoogleUnique”.
The first is about names [...]

Just in case things don’t go as planned …
A heads up from my hosting provider (which I had intended to post earlier than this): “On July 11, 2008 starting at 10pm [Pacific Time] we will have a brief network outage to restructure our routing tables. We are planning two hours to deal with any quirks [...]

Bacon. What more can be said? Too much, apparently.
I don’t recall how I found out about John Scalzi’s blog Whatever, but I’m glad I did. Not only did I discover a great science fiction writer, but also a daily source of humor and insight.
But sometimes he can go too far. [...]

The Slashdot headline “How to Fight Name Scraping Scammers?” caught my eye, and I had to follow it up. Curt Monash discovered his name on a dating site, but he’d never registered there. It appears that the site paired up first and last names at random and then presented them as being [...]

Backup is an essential responsibility that comes with owning a computer, but it is more honored in the breech than in practice.
Echoing what I said in MySQL Backups, some situations may require more elaborate techniques, but these scripts are “good enough” for my needs. I hope you find these scripts useful, and welcome [...]