Posts
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Tesla Roadster vs. SAAB
Since I first found the website of the Tesla Roadster, the electric supercar has never been far from my thoughts. It's about time I got to making some calculations of just how far this dream is from reality. Don't worry, there are anyways too many confounding factors for this to be really serious.
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Spam punishment calculation
When a spammer is caught and convicted, how should you calculate the punishment? Here are a few factors to take into consideration:
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Is the U.S. evil?
The reputation of the U.S. has been taking a beating for decades now, and even more so since a lying adulterer gave up his office to a lying warmonger. Let's see if a few search engines can give us an idea of what people think...
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Defunct hiring process, or: How not to gain trust from potential employees
After turning down a job at a company in Geneva, and discussing the contract, employee rules, and interview process with the boss for about an hour, I'd like to summarize why I ended up not taking the job.
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The Bikeshed plugin
Here's a wish for a plugin to all the worlds' email writing software: Implement the self-policing functionality outlined by Poul-Henning Kamp in his brilliant
A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass...
. The post is well worth the read, but I'll summarize the ideas: -
Email client reviews
Considering the age of email as a technology, and the plethora of clients available, the situation is tragic. Here is a line-up of the clients I've used the last few years, and the reason I stopped using each and every one of them. Some simplifications are made, such as in the use of words like "cannot". Yes, there are often hacks to circumvent the limitations. No, I won't go into why using a closed source, 4 year old, unmaintained, 3rd party plugin is a bad idea.
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Digg 3.0 problems
After using Digg for a few months, I'm hooked. So hooked, in fact, that the following problems have been ignored until Digg 3.0 made them almost insufferable. For the record, I exclusively read the "All Recently Popular" RSS feed via Bloglines (Update: sorry, the link is dead) in Firefox 1.5.0.4 on Windows XP SP2, on a dual 2.8 GHz PC with 512 MB RAM, with a 10 Mbps line.
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Dvorak in rdesktop
This article is for anyone who is using the Dvorak keyboard layout on Linux, and having problems getting the same to work when connecting to a Windows machine using rdesktop.
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Re: Guns don't kill people, people kill people
This humungous over-simplification of a complex problem (entropy vs. optimism) seems to crop up whenever there is talk about banning something which has both practical and malicious uses. The latest example is the discussion about a stupid, frightening, or just weird proposal (Update: sorry, the link is dead) to criminalize "mak[ing] network monitoring tools publicly available [...]".
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To simplify or disambiguate, that is the question
In "Creeping featurism and the ratchet effect", Mark Dominus discusses (among other things) how adding parentheses to an expression to disambiguate the operator precedence is a Bad Thing™. Of course, in the example where there are no operators in the parentheses -
next if !($file =~ (/txt/));- he's right:(x)will never be more clear thanx.