Standards for handling passwords
Every time we sign up for a new service on the net, we have to make a new account and pick a password to go with this account. We’re going to be stuck like this until something like OpenID becomes...
View ArticleSonos finally adds search!
At long last, the world’s best digital music system has fixed a glaring UI hole. With today’s release of v2.5 of their software, Sonos controllers (both hardware remotes and PC/Mac based software) can...
View ArticleHeavy laptops: there’s no excuse
The way I see it, there’s no compelling reason to buy a heavy laptop. Light laptops are great because they’re portable. Their processors might be a little slower, but local processing power rarely...
View ArticleThree weeks inside Google
Sorry for going dark for a little while there. As expected, starting a new job while taking a full load of classes at school has been challenging. Also unsurprisingly, the Google job is very...
View ArticleDRM-free music sales
I’m glad the music industry is finally allowing legal sales of music online without DRM. Before this, the situation was absolutely screwball. Consumers had three choices for getting music onto the...
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Flashbacks to College Math
Callin’ out to all the Mudders in the audience. Ever take math class from Dr. Benjamin? I did. Sophomore year I think. Real Analysis maybe? It bent my brain sideways. Fun class. Got an A. I...
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Recovering a RAID Array after Lightning
The EVMS RAID 5 array in my linux fileserver crashed recently due to a lightning storm, and I thought I’d lost everything. But with some luck and intuition I was able to recover all my files. I’ll...
View ArticleXMPP PubSub: a great compliment to Atom/RSS
I spent the day yesterday at XMPP Summit #5 alongside OSCON in Portland. It was a great chance to catch up with old friends and meet a few new ones. But my favorite part was the break-out discussion...
View ArticleHow to protect yourself from DNS hacks
A couple weeks ago, Dan Kaminsky found a flaw in DNS. Without getting into details, this flaw enables a malicious attacker to fool your web browser into connecting to the wrong computer to get your...
View ArticleRepairing a degraded EVMS RAID 5 array
A while back, lightning scrambled one of the disks in my home RAID 5 array. I figured out how to recover it. And I got the critical data off. Here I describe the steps I took to add a new drive and...
View ArticleRAID repair successful
For everybody who has been waiting with baited breath to hear whether or not the repair of the RAID array worked or not, it did. It took several days, but since we were away on vacation seeing my dad...
View ArticleMoving from Typepad to Blogger
For a while now I’ve wanted to move this blog from Typepad to something else like Blogger. I keep finding more reasons to do this as Blogger improves and Typepad stagnates. Some reasons include:...
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Rhapsody Profiles FTW!
Excuse my newbie exuberance, but OMG Rhapsody.com finally launched profile pages!!! They’ve been up for a while now, which makes me think they’re for real this time. A couple of you might remember...
View ArticleBlogger file format converter for MovableType / Typepad
I recently blogged about my efforts to move from TypePad to Blogger. My friend Brian pointed out that Google just announced a set of tools to convert to or from popular blog export formats, including...
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Creative Commons Licenses
Creative Commons is a type of license, which is somewhere between a traditional all-rights-reserved copyright and public domain. There are many variations of CC licenses, and they’re onto the 3.0...
View ArticleDinocams – The legacy of SLR cameras in the 21st century
DSLR cameras make very little sense today. Modern imaging technology is rapidly turning them into dinosaurs. The forces keeping them alive are a combination of a physical legacy in hunks of glass,...
View ArticleParticipatory Culture and the Democratization of Information
An example of the trend towards information democracy is the democratization of culture. “Participatory Culture” is the modern trend of many individuals contributing to the mass of popular culture...
View ArticleEscape from Typepad to WordPress
It took a long time, but EmbracingChaos has finally escaped form Typepad. About a year ago (just before the end of the previous billing cycle) I started trying to move this blog to blogger. I like...
View ArticleLearning to do Math in your Head
I recently picked up a book called Secrets of Mental Math written by one of my college math professors. It has very practical advice on how to learn to multiply large numbers in your head. He gives...
View ArticleCreative Commons Notification Required
I love the Creative Commons licenses. I use them for most of my photos and rely heavily on other people’s CC licensed material. As a result, my photos have ended up in all sorts of fascinating places...
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