Topics pertaining to software and software development, mostly for Microsoft Windows or Linux, and mostly in C or C++.
The amount of blog-spam that Geek Drivel has gotten recently is ludicrous. Since late June (when the statistics were last reset), my anti-spam software has blocked nearly 42,000 spam messages (of which I saw and had to personally deal with maybe fifteen — that software is good). Roughly 15,000 of them came in between then …
Technology marches on — and leaves laggards behind. One of my three remaining external monitors only has a VGA port; two others that I only got rid of earlier this year1 predated any kind of digital connector. Fortunately there are adapters. 🙂 1 I got rid of them only under protest. They were old desk-hogging …
Continue reading ‘“Leading PC manufacturers dropping VGA support by 2015”’ »
I’ve mentioned the problem before, about three years ago: the platinum/iridium cylinder in France that is the official reference for the kilogram is losing weight, for reasons that currently baffle science. Any reference object is useless if it can’t be relied on to stay the same, so the science community is making a determined effort …
Continue reading ‘“Boffins mount campaign against France’s official kilogramme”’ »
Though a failure on the privacy front, this video is amusing to watch. Does anything strike you as odd about the movements of the curtain? Probably not, because we’re all habituated to computer-based automation and its limitations. But if it were controlled by a human, it would act quite different, anticipating the movements of the …
Continue reading ‘“Robotic privacy curtain moves across window to block snoops”’ »
First, for those of you who know and care about it: after seven years of work, the theory for Project X is successfully finished! (Hurray!) However, I haven’t found a simple — but not too simple — use for it so I could prove that it works. I’m not sure I’ll be able to commercialize …
Wow… I always thought of bugs as little more than self-reproducing low-level biological robots, but I didn’t realize they had bugs of their own. 😉 If this happened in practically any other species, the entire group affected by it (and the genes responsible for it) would essentially cease to exist, because once locked into it …
So take that and blow it out your saddle-bags, reactionary eighties parents! 😉
I switched to Thunderbird for my e-mail and RSS a few years ago, because it was cross-platform, open-source (so I didn’t have to worry about the company abandoning it if/when they decided they weren’t making enough money with it), and worked with GPG so I could still have my secure e-mail. I have never been …
I’ve mentioned my love/hate relationship with upgrades before. Yesterday I had another check-mark for the “hate” column. I’d run into a minor compiler bug in my Ubuntu version of GCC. Since a new version of the OS had just been released the day before, promising even faster bootups and other improvements, I thought I’d upgrade …
Something else to file in the “if only I had money to burn” category. I’d dearly love to see Ada Lovelace’s programs run on the machine they were written for.