Tony Alfrey has put together a fascinating page with some history, analysis, and possible explanations for what ultimately went wrong with the recent emergency repair of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The bridge has been closed for da...
I've got an old laptop that I've been trying to resurrect. It has a 486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM, a 720 MB HD, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 640x480 VESA video. It does not have a CD drive, USB port, or a network port. It has PCMCIA, and I have a n...
I'm a university student, and I like to take notes on my (non-tablet) computer whenever possible, so it's easier to sort, categorize, and search through them later. Trouble is, I'm going into higher and higher math classes, and typing f_X(x)...
'With the economy the way it is, it's a little iffy to even think about switching careers completely, but lately, I've gotten more and more fed up with trying to keep up with the technical demands of companies and customers that are financia...
SATA and IDE flash solid-state disks are all the rage these days faster and, allegedly, more reliable than traditional spinning-rust disks. My organization dipped its toe in the flash-disk waters, buying a handful for some PC and Linux boxes...
For years I've been using a home server with Linux, but recently I've been having doubts about the electric bill. I'm not touched by the recession yet, but I would like to cut costs, and going from a 100-Watt system to a 30-Watt system would...
I continually have to remind our end-users to be vigilant about the usual web security hazards, such as not clicking links in the occasional spam email that passes through our filters, avoiding suspicious websites, why some websites aren't e...
I am a n00b system administrator for a small web development company that builds and hosts OSS CMSes on a few LAMP servers (mostly Drupal). I've written a few scripts that check out dev/test/production environments from our repository, so w...
'Searching data on a shared volume is tedious. If I try to use a Windows desktop search engine on a volume with hundreds of gigabytes the indexing process takes days and the search results are slow and unsatisfying. I'm thinking of an agent...
Well, c'mon, yes let's admit it. As a veteran coder discusses as he looks at his career, software development is brimming with the offbeat, the quirky and the downright odd . As he remembers, there was the 'Software Lyrics' guy and the 'Inap...
Has anyone setup a system to aggregate multiple ISP connections to form a high bandwidth site-to-site link? Load Sharing SCTP looked interesting, but it doesn't look like it has been widely adopted. Multi-Link PPP appears to be more widely s...
'I'm a recent university graduate and I have been offered a software developer position in a company that supplies software to the gambling and betting industry. At first I was very excited about the opportunity, however, a few of my friends...
I have been a contract programmer for a few years (with some time off when a contract-for-hire paid off and made me a full-time employee). Currently, I'm between projects, but I'm a little worried about one of the contracting companies who'...
Last week I won an Xbox 360 Pro . However, I am not a gamer, and after looking at the current MS offerings, I am not tempted to become one. But I am in the market for a Media Center PC that I can use for streaming TV shows off the 'net as we...
I have been asked to help develop a literature course for Science Fiction and Fantasy literature. What do you consider to be appropriate selections of short stories and novels in these genres for high school students of all ability levels? I...