December 16, 2012

How Big is the Curiosity Cube? About 2048 layers, Finish in 5/25/2013

The iOS game “Curiosity — What’s Inside the Cube?” presents an enormous cube composed of billions of minicubes that you can chip away, earning money to buy tools to, you guessed it, chip away minicubes more quickly. This “social experiment” promises to give…
July 20, 2012

Oracle Nightmare: Recovery With Missing Redo Files

Here’s a mistake you only do once: delete Oracle’s flash_recovery_area thinking that you can save space.  You see, to quickly configure Oracle Backups (here is a great and brief how-to), it’s best to turn on “archivelog”, which instructs Oracle to create transaction…
July 5, 2012

Board and Card Games in Your Google+ Hangout

If you use Google+ Hangout, you can now play board and card games during your video chat by using the Anywhere Board Games Hangout App.  Kick off ABG in a Google+ Hangout using the following button: It’s in beta and we’re…
January 30, 2012

My Southwest Flight Hit a Light Pole, but They Really Impressed Me…

My wife and I happened to be on today’s flight #792 from Los Angeles to Denver that hit a light pole. (Since we were taxiing, most of us had our phones turned on, and were able to get some pictures…) We had…
December 30, 2011

Firefox 4 Saved My Android

As a side project I have been working on an HTML5 app designed to permit real-time playing of board and card games on multiple devices (PC, iPhone, Android, etc.).  This led to some interesting research about touch events and getting click events to…
December 1, 2011

Elegant Code’s Wonderful Blog Series on JavaScript

Up until this point, JavaScript was something I held my nose and used to get dynamic and Ajax interactions working on my websites.  jQuery made it more tollerable with its mysterious “$” syntax and its ability to zip through the DOM…
September 14, 2011

Use your iPhone/Laptop/Android as a remote control for MythTV

Four years ago, a blogger named Kyle blogged about a simple but effective web script that allows most smart phones to control a MythTV setup.  Though he built his script for MythDora, it works wonderfully on MythBuntu with the following steps as root (assuming…
August 16, 2011

Fight Mail Bounce Spam with a Catch-all Address

If you send an email to a non-existant address, most mail servers are polite and will send you your message back with a notice that it couldn’t be delivered (called a mail “bounce”).  Alas, this service can be hijacked to send spam. How?…
July 6, 2011

Emergency Recovery of Zimbra’s OpenLDAP

Last weekend (July 3rd, 2011), Washington had a tremendous thunderstorm, which led to a long power outage.  We have a number of experimental and development virtual machines in our local server farm that were impacted, but what was truly hit hard was an…
May 5, 2011

Why 0.99999… = 1, proof, and limits

If you took calculus, believe it or not, you have the tools to prove that 0.9999… = 1 .  Think back to the concept of a “limit.”  OK, I really don’t expect you to remember it, so please be patient as…