Category: Uncategorized

After several years of helping non tech savvy neighbors with various problems, I wanted to make this list as a standard advice that anyone should follow. This is not intended to be a list of best practices, rather a list of simple important practices. If you are smart enough to figure out a better solution…

For the past few years I have been trying to learn Spanish. My main motivation is that I enjoy traveling in Latin American and speaking the language opens up many opportunities. I have tried several different methods, cds, books, rosetta, immersion school in Costa Rica, personal tutors etc. They all have their benefits but in…

Thanks to @elasticdog I now have sshuttle all set up on my laptop. He has an excellent guide here. Personally I just went with the brew install option and its working just fine. Seems much easier to maintain than setting up a real VPN on the server side. There is really no server side config…

The html5 canvas is a very fast and simple immediate mode graphics system, but unfortunately the image quality (especially text rendering) is often lacking. A quick and easy way to address this is to oversample the canvas.  This works by making the internal size of the canvas a multiple of the size you want it…

I’m not personally a fan of either Ron Paul or Thomas Friedman, but I think these two videos are interesting as some kind of Rorschach test of your feelings about national security. Ron Paul: Ron Paul Ad   Tom Friedman Tom Friedman on Charlie Rose  

Whenever I have a significant programming task to complete I usually begin the process not by thinking about all the data structures I want, or how the output will look, or what will the biggest concerns for efficiency etc. What I am usually doing at the start is trying move as fast as I can…

So I wanted to run my django test scripts against my development database. The django test system really wants to create a database from scratch but I wanted to see whether I could run against my local scratch copy since its already got a lot of data in it and I am too lazy to…

Step 1: Get an Acer Aspire One I got mine at Costco, last time I was there they were on sale/instant rebate. Model D255E Step 2: Add Ubuntu Natty Narwal I went with splitting the disk in 1/2 because its pretty big and If I want to punish myself I can still run windows 7.…

You have a prospective client and you are discussing the project. Often the client would like you to quote a fixed fee for the work, so maybe you think thats ok and come up with some number by using a fancy estimation tool or tossing chicken bones. It really doesn’t much matter, something is likely…

A few days ago I tweeted this: getting tired of having more free space on my phone than on my laptop Which got me thinking. How much space is being used up on my laptop just for backing up my phone? Some investigation yielding the following obvious result. Alot. But what’s worse is that there…