In some of the work I am doing I have had the need to create documents programmatically. Specifically I have to create documents that look a certain way based on dynamic data sources which may or may not need calculation before output. I considered a few options when deciding how to approach this, one possible […]
As mentioned previously, on December 31, 2013 my previous DNS provider (Zerigo) decided to change their entire business model and create price increases for myself and many (probably all) of their customers, which they try to defend with this cute little note: http://www.zerigo.com/news/notice-zerigo-dns-change-of-plans As I had not been sleeping very much that day I was […]
This blog has been a lot of things over time. It started as my public-facing journal and in many ways still reflects that role, but as discussed in previous posts, the need for that role is narrowing. In August this blog will be 10 years old. I have documented my experiments in ceramic arts and […]
A few months ago (May 2013) I had problems with Zerigo, their servers were being constantly threatened by denial of service attacks. They overcame those issues by partnering with network infrastructure companies to provide a more distributed system. This solution has worked well, but apparently it wasn’t the end of the changes for Zerigo. I […]
To follow up on my previous post, what sort of applications might a user find to be unnecessary of unwanted? Below is a list of things that I have frozen currently. These apps have not been uninstalled, just prohibited from running without first being thawed and authorized. This list obviously does not include some applications […]
Lately a lot of phone and tablet manufacturers have become more determined at preventing users from accessing some of the lower level functions of their devices. Things like Samsung KNOX or the overly protective Amazon Kindle Fire OS really irritate me. First of all, the device belongs to the user, not the manufacturer or carrier […]
For the past two weeks the above ad has been appearing on my Facebook timeline. I would like to air my concerns regarding this ad. There are some problems with the claims on this ad that I find to be very obvious. There is a flat assumption that storing your passwords in the cloud is […]
I have made numerous negative critiques of the things I see that are done badly in academia regarding the use of PDF scans. Perhaps its time that I document those critiques more seriously and provide a few suggestions on how to have a happy PDF experience. First of all, avoid scanning if you can. If […]
DNS servers are things we don’t like to think about, and as long as they are functioning we don’t tend to care to think about them. Every day we use DNS servers, whether to enact a query (to lookup a webpage) or to make domains accessible. This post will focus on the latter. Most of […]
I used to blog a good bit about domain names and registrars and such, but I haven’t done so much recently because in general life has settled down in that area. A long time ago I recommended eNom as my preferred domain name registrar because they were relatively small and they had a great support […]