Topics pertaining to software and software development, mostly for Microsoft Windows or Linux, and mostly in C or C++.
As a programmer, I’ve always found that the more monitor space you’ve got, the more productive you can be. And multiple monitors are even better than a single huge monitor, in a lot of ways. When you’re referring to online documentation while you’re programming, for example, it’s a lot easier to just glance from one …
Very timely, since GoddessJ and I helped her mother set up her new printer over the weekend. She replaced a semi-expensive Canon inkjet printer from around the turn of the century, which never worked particularly well and was extremely slow on top of that, with a really cheap (less than $150) Brother black-and-white laser printer/scanner/copier. …
Continue reading ‘“Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell to Make Us Miserable”’ »
This does look like a problem. Here’s an idea for an easy solution, though. In the address bar, the browser could display both the address (as it does now) and the script name. Unicode is split up into different well-defined sections for different language scripts, so this shouldn’t be very difficult to implement. In the …
Continue reading ‘“How Non-Latin Domain Names Could Be Used to Steal Your Money”’ »
Just prior to the Christmas Underwear Bomber, the big security scandal was how the Predator drones don’t use encryption on their video feeds, and militants were using cheap off-the-shelf software to intercept that data. But Bruce Schneier points out the reasons for that, and why encrypting this data is likely to cause more problems than …
In the SF book Snow Crash, we’re introduced to the Metaverse, a 3D virtual world where the laws of physics are only casually enforced, and people from all over the world and all walks of life can meet up to discuss business or socialize, do research, or even have the occasional sword fight. Ever since …
Continue reading ‘“Browser makers hope WebGL will remake 3D”’ »
The answer, in my case, is probably not. At least for now. On the get-more-RAM side: I do use a several virtual machines (VMs) regularly. With eight gigabytes, I could open all of them at once, and increase the RAM available to each of them too, and still have plenty of RAM left over for …
Continue reading ‘“Do You Really Need More Than 4GB of RAM?”’ »
The last paragraph is particularly heartening: FireEye researchers said the key to dismantling the giant ring was a coordinated effort that worked in multiple directions all at once so that bot herders didn’t have a chance to counteract. “As it turns out, no matter how many fallback mechanisms are in place, if they aren’t all …
Continue reading ‘“Security firm chokes sprawling spam botnet”’ »
And I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.
I’ve mentioned before that I no longer run antivirus software on most of my Windows machines, but Bruce Schneier has just posted a persuasive argument in favor of it in most cases, despite the flaws. But persuasive or not, it doesn’t change my opinion or my stance on the systems I control. Antivirus is generally …
Joel On Software, on one of the few similarities between student projects and professional ones: It’s taken me a while, but I finally learned that long-term deadlines (or no deadlines at all) just don’t work with professional programmers, either: you need a schedule of regular, frequent deliverables to be productive over the long term. That …
Continue reading ‘“Capstone projects and time management”’ »