Say no to Variable Pricing

ICANN is  hearing a proposal to charge variable prices for domain names. This has to stop before it starts. How are they going to determine a price? What’s the fair market price of something? Does it depend on how many whois queries there are? Someobody will just slam that, driving up the price. Is it […]

Worse than Y2K–what if gravity changes?

Though the danger to life, civilization, and future of all that is good and beautiful was greatly oversold, Y2K was still a pretty big deal. It required the detailed analysis and updated of millions of lines of legacy code in all sectors, levels, nooks, and crannies of computer civilization.
We survived, somehow. Planes didn’t fall out […]

It isn’t Infectious…

My father-in-law was visiting this week and the first thing he said to me, extending his hand to shake mine was:
“Don’t worry, it isn’t infectious.”
 
(He has a temporary skin condition)

Tags: Humor

ClearType is like a new pair of glasses

Many have said it already, but let me just add my voice: ClearType technology is the most wonderful thing to hit Windows in a long time. I recently received a new computer at work (3.4Ghz hyperthreaded, 1 GB RAM, 80/200 GB disks–a screaming machine, at least compared to what I used to have). and during […]

Linux Reality Check part 2

Scoble has a great commentary on the state of Linux fonts. It’s something I never thought about much before, but now that he’s brought it up, I realize that poor font quality is something I’ve definitely suffered through when I did actively use Linux.
It’s just another example of one the seemingly-minor-but-actually-major issues facing Linux. It’s […]

Linux Reality Check

Over at Slashdot, Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack responds to some frank question about the Fedora project.
He talks about a number of topics:

Unified package managers across distros
Propritetary drivers
Differences in Linux over time
Fedora’s biggest weakness
Threat of Vista
inclusion of NTFS driver in kernel
Wacky package dependencies
a few others…

What his article demontrates to me is that Linux is going […]

Windows Live Search Toolbar — not quite there yet

I forced myself to uninstall the Google toolbar and exclusively try out the new Windows Live Toolbar. I think I’m going to uninstall it today. First of all, I like a lot of things about it:

Customizable buttons
Lots of great features
Search history with automatic drop down list that shows past/related searches
Desktop search works as well as […]

Checking all values of an enumeration in C#

I have a utility function that takes in a status enumeration and returns a string description associated with the given status code.
It looks something like this:

internal static string MailProcessCodeToString(MailProcessCodes eCode)
{
switch (eCode)
{case MailProcessCodes.mpcGoodData:
    return “No errors detected in the order mail”;case MailProcessCodes.mpcNoHeader:
    return “Could not find header in order mail”;
//etc….
I wanted to create a unit test […]

Goodbye newsletters, hello RSS

I used to subscribe to tons of CNet, TechRepulic, PCMagazine, and Builder.com newsletters, but as of today–no longer. I’ve been unsubscribing from them as I get them. Unfortunately for them, I didn’t really use their content so I’m not bothering to subscribe to their RSS feeds. Maybe in the future…
I am relying more on RSS, […]

Alexandria, Virginia has RSS Feeds available

My city of Alexandria, VA has a couple of RSS feeds available. They’re not much quite yet (DASH bus service notifications and city press releases), but there is the promise of more.
 What I’d like to see next? Daily crime reports and history and recreation news.
Alexandria also has a very impressive collection of online GIS applications that […]