Posts
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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. -
KittenAuth follow-up
KittenAuth is a really good subject for brainstorming about how to get a secure, usable, and accessible system for keeping bots out of public forums. I'll describe some of my ideas and the stuff people presented in the KittenAuth comments (I can't find the page any more), and then look for security, usability, and accessibility flaws in the different approaches.
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Job trends in web development
The job search service Indeed has an interesting "trends" search engine (Update: sorry, the link is dead): It visualizes the amount of job postings matching your keywords the last year. Let's see if there is some interesting information for modern web technologies there...
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Re: KittenAuth Test
The KittenAuth Test (Update: sorry, the link is dead), a very cute and brilliant Turing test which could possibly replace CAPTCHA, deserves attention for two reasons: It is much more user friendly than CAPTCHAs, and it can easily be extended with a textual variant, for anyone using a non-graphical browser.
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Re: Profiting From Your Passions
The "Lazy Way" blog recently outlined the idea of combining your passions to build yourself projects which you will enjoy working on. Several of the comments are disputing this idea, so I'd like to put in my 2 cents.
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Re: The Future of Tagging
Vik Singh has an interesting blog post on the future of tagging. IMO not so much because of the idea, since it looks quite familiar to the directory structure we're all familiar with, adding the possibility for objects to be inside several directories at the same time. But it got me thinking on what tagging lacks, which is an easy to use relation to more structured data about what the tag means.
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More practical HTTP Accept headers
Isn't it time for user agents to start reporting more fine grained which standards they support? The HTTP Accept header doesn't provide enough information to know whether a document will be understood at all, and can lead to quite a few hacks, specially on sites using cutting edge technology, such as SVG or AJAX.
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Re: Bug #1 in Ubuntu
Ubuntu Linux has become very popular in the open source community in only two years, last confirmed by the 2005 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. But being number one in a community of computer literates, nerds, and geeks is not enough to gain a significant market share, as shown by their #1 bug, entitled "Microsoft has a majority market share".