The local AT&T stores sold out of the iPhone 3G by around 9 AM.  The salespeople are telling customers that they can order and pay for an iPhone today, and they will get it by “direct fulfillment”, which they explain means that the phone will show up at the store in 7-10 working days for [...]

My colocation provider informed me that I went way over bandwidth for June, and would have to either pay a large overage charge, or upgrade to a higher bandwidth tier.  I couldn’t really afford to do either, and was surprised by the large jump in bandwidth, so I started analyzing the logs.  I was expecting [...]

Some years ago, a cryptographer proposed a “Chinese Lottery” in which some consumer good such as televisions sold in a particular country (e.g., China) would have an embedded chip that would be used by the government for brute-force cryptanalysis. The television that successfully decrypted a message would indicate to the user that they had [...]

I’m just starting to learn about printing in GTK+. The documentation provides a good API reference, but is a bit intimidating, and I didn’t find much in the way of sample code. There’s a sample called “printedit” in libegg, but it is somewhat out of date. I updated it for renamed functions [...]

I’m still making progress towards a new release on Nonpareil.  Sometimes it seems like the more work I do, the more I find that needs to be done.

I first met George Michael at a conference, and on several occasions we had interesting discussions about various computers including the DEC PDP-1. He had been in poor health for several years, and passed away last Thursday. Some of his computing stories may be found at Stories of the Development of Large [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]