Topics pertaining to software and software development, mostly for Microsoft Windows or Linux, and mostly in C or C++.
Has anyone mentioned recently that you should use really strong passwords — or how hard it is to come up with them? I use truly random passwords, generated (and kept track of) by LastPass, for most sites; for the ones that need to be remembered, I’ve got a pretty good password-selection algorithm (which I can’t …
Continue reading ‘“A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords”’ »
The Solid State Drive (SSD) has been in the system for over a week now, so here’s an update on it: It’s FAST! Okay, that’s not news, but I felt compelled to say it anyway. 😉 After letting the Linux VM run for several days with memory-hog programs like Firefox (with about a dozen pages …
Both the new Solid State Drive (SSD) and the Data Doubler mounting bracket arrived way ahead of schedule — on Thursday afternoon, in fact, a day early for the Data Doubler and at least four days early for the drive itself. I’m not complaining. 🙂 The drive was in OEM packaging, meaning that it was …
Solid State Drives. Ridiculously fast. Ridiculously expensive too. I’ve wanted to move to one for years, but one major thing held me back: their longevity. Not only do they fail, but according to both Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky (old-school computer geeks who I highly respect), they fail catastrophically, and in a really, really short …
As some of the readers of this blog may have noticed, we posted the Linux version of our product yesterday, joining the Windows version we originally released. The product was originally developed under Linux, so it would have made sense to post that one first — except that we had no experience packaging things for …
(sigh) When I left the office last night, it looked like I was just one step from releasing the first Windows beta of our new product. This afternoon I sat down, wrote up an installer script, built the installer, and proudly handed it over to GoddessJ for final Quality Assurance testing. In less than ten …
The first Asus “Eee” machine ushered in the era of the netbook. I’ve got one of them, and it’s a nice little machine. With its upgraded 2GB of memory and the 4GB solid-state drive, it’s plenty powerful for most uses (though not my usual use, which is software development); my in-laws borrowed it to take …
As you may have noticed, I’ve been too busy this last week or so to keep up on my blog posts. That’s because we’re getting ready to release our new software product, and I’ve been working on a new website, among other things. After some initial teething troubles, I’m happy to report that it’s now …
After two and a half years of very heavy use, I am replacing my first Mac. With another one — I’m still ambivalent about some of the OS design decisions, but the hardware is first-rate. The first one still works fine, other than a little wear and tear. It’s a 13″ MacBook Pro, the higher-end …
Oops, another perfectly good disaster scenario down the drain. Unless something like the metavirus from the novel Snow Crash appears, capable of infecting both humans and computers, I think we’re fairly safe on that front. At this rate, right-leaning politicians and other fear-mongers must be seeing a new disaster on the horizon: running out of …
Continue reading ‘“The cyber-weapons paradox: ‘They’re not that dangerous’”’ »