SnakeLegs

I remember in the first grade in Mrs. Perkins’ class my eyeball had been getting looser and looser forever it seemed.   It was time for recess and I opened a door too fast and it knocked my barely hanging-on eyeball out.  Needless to say that night I put my eyeball under my pillow and the [...]

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It’s amazing what pops up when you search for “nasal drain.”

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The Problem
Multimedia performance over RDP on WAN links is suboptimal.  Users will complain of the painfully slow rendering of Flash-enabled websites.  Internet Explorer will block, so that you can’t scroll the browser window while Flash images are being rendered.
If you’re the Fed and can print your own money, Citrix’s Speedscreen Multimedia Acceleration can help.
Provision Networks, [...]

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I saw in Popular Science today that someone (Logitech or Kensington?) has a wireless keyboard with a battery life of three years.  Pretty good.  And then I thought, why not just use the energy of the person pressing the keys — I’d think there’s enough force applied that it could keep a battery charged for [...]

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I’m 35 and part of “Generation X” — the group of something-somethings who weren’t supposed to have any ambition other than paying for the Social Security and debt of the Selfish Generation.
The current generation, I dub “Generation Nod.”  They are forever looking down.  At the phones.  Texting.  Playing portable games.  They never look up.  An [...]

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Choco 2.0 is out.   Open-source constraint satisfaction, written in Java, and business-friendly BSD-licensed.
It’s the Holy Grail of computing.

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Might as well use the cache — that’s what it’s there for.  Like Vista’s Superfetch, or XP’s prefetch, or precompiling JSPs, or what have you.
For example, to load up your squid http proxy cache, just run:
 wget -r -nd -H –delete-after http://your.portal.company.local/
or
 wget -r -nd -H –delete-after -i some_file_with_URLs.html
wget’s –no-cache will force the proxy to download fresh [...]

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Just saw a Coke commercial that said if I have had a Coke within the last 80 years (which I have), then I’ve had a hand in making every Olympic dream come true.  I’m going to add that to my resume.

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My uncle taught me how to play chess when I was 5 or 6, but I didn’t stick with it and only played occasionally in the 30 years since.  My neighbor got me interested in chess again two or three months ago, so I picked up a copy of Chessmaster and sat up playing quick [...]

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The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth’s Spreadsheet Engineering Research Project publishes some interesting research on errors in spreadsheets, including causes and financial impact (”Among the remaining 70 confirmed errors, the largest error was $100 million; however, 9 of the 25 spreadsheets tested had no errors at all.”).  Collection of stories.

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Apparently, it’s a myth that “[t]he fluid from the resulting [poison ivy] blisters [spreads] poison ivy to others.”  All the same, please don’t get your poison ivy blister juice on me.

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Sick of cable.  Sick of paying for cable.  Sick of the worthless shows on cable.  Sick of entire swaths of channels on cable.  Blockbuster’s deal is fine — $20/month for 3 movies out at a time.  For regular TV, the only shows worth watching are House, Lost, and Family Guy, and I’m going to get [...]

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http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html
http://us.geocities.com/alex_stef/mylist.html

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Do you have old print drivers hanging around?
Use the Print Migrator utility to back up your printer config:
printmig -b “server_name.cab”

And then remove the unused print drivers:

cd /d %systemroot%\system32
cscript prndrvr.vbs -x

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As mentioned in Mark Russinovich’s newest blog entry, here’s a quick introductory video on ZoomIt, the 44KB screen zoom and drawing utility that should be in every IT toolbox (along with everything else from Sysinternals).

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Corporate mail should be filtered for viruses and spam at the gateway — that’s just a given.  It’s much more efficient to filter incoming email in one spot than to check it at 300 or 25000 desktops.  Web browsers should go through a scanning, filtering proxy.  Again, it’s much simpler to secure and maintain.
So, what [...]

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ABC reports that Americans fit 31 hours of activity in each 24 hour day.  Driving and cell phone usage are the most obvious doublings.  Watching TV, working on the computer, and ignoring the wife is the most obvious tripling.
On my lunch hour I go to the gym and walk on the treadmill, but I can’t [...]

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Java developers and testers should use FindBugs to find and fix Java bugs.  It’s free, and the FindBugs team has concentrated on having a high hit ratio, as developers won’t use lint’ing tools that spew out pedantic non-errors.  FindBugs can run standalone or as an Eclipse plug-in.  Watch the Google Labs video linked on the [...]

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When making charts, graphs, or other figures to be presented to an audience, use a safe color palette, and use color-alternate hints to differentiate data (e.g., shading, hatching, varying line thickness).
“How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to Colorblind people” is the best document I’ve seen on the topic.  Save the PDF for [...]

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Pie charts are worse than useless.  Use a simple table or bar graph.

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