OddThinking

Microsoft are porting bash to Windows. Microsoft may as well tell me that they are going to support those old Sun mice that required the special gridded mouse mats. Why would we want to go back to that?

Report generation involves a conflict of interest, leading to proliferation.

To decide who is “it” (or “in”) first, in a playground game, such as chasey (a.k.a. tag), a fixed algorithmic process is used to make a pseudo-random choice.

Of course, this is a deterministic procedure, and we can, with diligence, careful calculation, computational power and just a little bit of luck, reverse engineer the algorithm and determine who will be eventually selected.

Here is a software analysis anti-pattern I have seen many times in my career. It is popping up in my current project, and I am trying to work out how to subvert it early.

The law is a not a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting away society’s ills. It’s an axe. So, on the spectrum of morally good, past acceptable and tolerable, politically incorrect, unacceptable through to downright evil, the law can only really pick off acts on the extreme end. There is much that is socially unacceptable and morally wrong […]

I predict no end to the End-Of-The-World references.

I have decided to abandon screen, and am returning to having to re-login each day.

I am filing this under “I am doing Linux wrong, but I don’t know where.”

So, there is this spam web-site, that has grabbed snippets from a number of RSS feeds about Kakuro solvers (including this site), and put them all on one page in the hope of getting some Google juice for a search term. To squeeze some of my Page Rank, it then attempted to leave some pingback […]

Look at media players including YouTube, iPhones, VLC, Windows Media Player, etc.

Underneath the video is a slider bar representing the progress through the movie, and (where applicable for streaming players) how much has downloaded.

It is time for some new widgets to control sound and video.

I ask my friends to choose between two items with equal expected value, and no reason to prefer one than the other, and they can’t decide.