Category: Geek Stuff

Here’s a ray of hope for all of us geeks in the boondocks struggling to keep a 56kbs (which is usually more like 44kbs) dialup connection active over a barbed wire line, waiting for downloads from unnecessarily bloated sites designed with no thought to bandwith limitations. Wired carried aReuters report on a world conference of… Continue reading Electric Net?

I’ve had to make a few minor adjustments as a result of the sudden and unexpected move to a new host. I found a hack to make times display in EDT, even though the server is running in PDT (although it’s apparently located in Houston). That had the side effect of skewing all the times… Continue reading Minor Tweaking

If you can see this, jmatt.net is back on the air with a new hosting service. I think I’ve got most of the site working OK, but there may be some anomalies for a while until I get all the wrinkles ironed out. My former host, Affordable Host, had another major outage this weekend. That,… Continue reading New Home on the Web

Aside from the fact that driving a BMW is an easy way to proclaim to the world “I’m an asshole!” there’s a tangible reason not to want one (even if I could afford it). The new ones are controlled by Microsoft Windows CE, as glowingly described in a Microsoft press release. Anybody knows this is… Continue reading Why I don’t want a Beemer

A recent Wired article about the innovative and improvisational information technology in the Iraq war brought a new military expression to my attention. Lima Lima Mike Foxtrot. I’m going to be mean and make you read the article to find out what it means. It’s kind of catchy, but a little awkward for normal use,… Continue reading Lima Lima Mike Foxtrot

After almost 10 days of either not having time to add anything here, or not having anything worth writing about, I finally grabbed a couple of minutes for a quick Microsoft bashing (below). And it didn’t work; the story disappeared into a black hole somewhere. After first blaming myself or my browser, and trying unsuccessfully… Continue reading Speaking of flaws and incompetence

Considering Microsoft’s overall record for quality and reliability, it’s not really surprising to read a New York Times article reporting that “Microsoft acknowledged a security flaw Thursday in its popular Internet Passport service that left 200 million consumer accounts vulnerable to hackers and thieves”. It’s not even really surprising that Microsoft couldn’t find a hole… Continue reading Another Micro$oft security flaw?? Surprise!!!

OK, I haven’t written any geeky stuff for a while, so here’s one. I’ve mentioned before that we webnerds in need of a life amuse ourselves by perusing our server logs to see what people are looking for. The science of search engines is still far from perfect; blindly matching keywords can lead to some… Continue reading The Miracles of Duct Tape

In what has become a fairly routine occurrence, Microsoft announces yet another “critical” security flaw in most versions of Windows. Why not just admit that Windows itself is a critical security flaw?

Y’know, maybe getting rid of spam completely isn’t such a good idea. A few messages now and then are good for amusement purposes. Like the one this morning promising “Permanent Larger Erections!” I think permanent would really be inconvenient.