I’ve finally received in the mail a letter from Mission College confirming that I’ve met the requirements for my Associate of Arts in Mathematics degree, that the degree will appear on my transcript after the end of the semester, and that I’ll receive my diploma by mail four to six months after the end of [...]

On the CCTALK mailing list, I found myself in the unusual position of defending some of the design decisions that went into the original IBM Personal Computer (PC), which was introduced in August 1981 and with which all modern PCs are still largely compatible. At the end of the posting, I wrote:
[Geez, I can't [...]

Les brought to my attention that Google seems to think my blog hosts or links to malware, as shown here. I certainly don’t deliberately host any malware nor have any links to such, and a brief investigation doesn’t turn up any evidence that my site has been compromised, so I’m baffled as to what [...]

Surplus in inches is absolutely necessary
If they’re necessary, by definition they aren’t surplus.
When the first first Gulf War broke out, I was watching the television coverage with coworkers in the company auditorium.  There was a commercial for a pickup truck, bragging about the size of its engine.  The voiceover said “there’s no substitute for cubic [...]

On the way to a friend’s house, I went to a drive-through and ordered a burger and a shake. I still had the several-day-old remainder of a beverage in the cupholder that I needed to dispose of, but there was a waste can just beyond the pickup window, so after I got my order [...]

I used LVM to increase the size of a logical volume containing an ext3 fileystem from 300GB to 500GB. After expanding the logical volume, it is necessary to expand the filesystem to use the added space. In theory, this can be done online (while the filesystem is mounted) by using the resize2fs command. [...]

I just got a refurbished Apple Mac mini, with the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It is mainly intended for use compiling my open source programs such as Nonpareil for Mac OS X. I am extremely surprised at the user experience of booting Mac OS X Leopard for the first time, [...]

The California Lottery is running advertisements claiming that over a million Californians win the Super Lotto Plus each month. Obviously their definition of “win” is different than mine. I don’t think it can be counted a “win” for the month unless the player is cash-positive for the total of all his or her [...]

I wanted to clone an image of the internal hard drive of a new Mac Mini before booting it up. It is common knowledge that a putty knife is the tool to use, as long as it has a thin blade. However, I found a posting to one of Apple’s own forum claiming [...]

I was on Frontier Airlines flight 169 from Denver to San Jose this morning.  It was scheduled to be a nonstop departing Denver at 8:25 AM MDT and arriving in San Jose at 10:06 AM PDT.  We departed a few minutes late, but the real reason we didn’t arrive in San Jose until 12:06 PM [...]