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My Letter to the CPSC

A brief but important edit (Oct 31, 2012 ~11PM MDT) to any visitors that may have taken notice of my rather brash letter to the CPSC: I should correct that near as I can tell Buckyballs is not...

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Why Smart Posts Start Arguments

Effective sub-titles or substitute titles for this article would be “Why Arguing on the Internet is Stupid, Like Setting your Genitals on Fire” or “People Just Like Being Assholes.” But, neither of...

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KDE 4.10 Upgrade and Disappearing Windows

So, KDE 4.10 just came out last week, the Arch repos sometime thereafter, and I updated today. I really love new versions of KDE–honestly–but this time something really bizarre happened. I updated,...

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No Decode Delegates… and Conflicts

It’s not often that we run into unusual conflicts rooted in hard to find places, but those few times that they are encountered–no matter how rare–can be infuriating. I was recently bitten by this one,...

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Updating an ancient Arch Installation

A close friend of mine recently decided it was time to update his Arch Linux installation. It had been over a year since the core OS was completely updated, and I did everything I could to discourage...

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jQuery MSIE7 Attribute Traversal/Clone Crash Bug

I’ve been spending some time writing a client-side JavaScript library (more on this in a later post) that does a fair amount of DOM manipulation and has had its share of cross-browser, erm,...

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Python pip: Installing specific tags or versions from Github

Installing packages from pip is not just convenient, it’s also a requirement when working from a virtualenv. Unfortunately, there comes a time when installing a specific version of a package requires a...

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Cannibalism or Convergence?

I’ve been following some of the commentary and fallout (and some of the overblown suggestions) regarding Apple’s latest iPhone. Now that most of the hype has died down and things have more or less...

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A Lesson from Twitter

Today, I got a curious e-mail from Twitter: Hi, zancarius Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter. We’ve reset your password to...

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Extraterrestrials, Rectal Probes, and Infographics

A couple of months ago, an infographic was making its rounds in the Internet titled “Let’s Say (for whatever reason) You’re the First Human Ever to Make Alien Contact”, and I wrote this response almost...

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Lies, Damn Lies, and PHP Benchmarks

I need to get something off my chest. First, I’d like you to examine the following code:   class Test { public function output () { return 'Hello, world!'; } }   function test () { return 'Hello,...

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nginx v1.4.5 and IPv6

I recently updated the VPS this blog is sitting on. Coincidentally, this also updated nginx to the latest version and broke everything. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but when I linked a friend...

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SQL and PHP

We have a few things to talk about regarding SQL and PHP. It’s short and sweet, so I’ll be brief. I’ll start with saying that I’d like to put this tactfully, but unfortunately, I don’t know how else to...

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Updating PostgreSQL JSON fields via SQLAlchemy

If you’ve found this article, you may have discovered that as of PostgreSQL 9.3, there’s no immediately obvious way to easily (for some value of “easy”) update JSON columns (and their fields) in place...

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Password Hashing and PHP Insanity

I won’t delve into too many details in this post–it distracts from the crux of my argument–but I will take a few detours along the way. If you’re reading this, you have access to Google; thus, further...

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To 404 or not to 404?

If you’ve been following my (admittedly) rare posts over the course of the last few years, you’re likely to have noticed a growing aggression toward PHP as a language. It’s not that I hate the language...

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Porting from PyQt to PySide

I recently put together a small project in PyQt, but the license is something that makes me a bit unsettled. I wanted to release the sources under the MIT or BSD licenses, but the requirements of the...

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Some Thoughts on Bukkit

I have posted some thoughts on the current Bukkit fiasco. I won’t repeat them here since this blog isn’t intended for personal musings of the sort, but if you aren’t aware of my other blog, you may...

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Annoyances: vBulletin Version Check

I hate vBulletin. I really, really, really hate vBulletin, and as much as I’d like to pin it on their apparent disdain for K&R coding style (curly braces should, in my opinion, always be on the...

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Updates Suck (Part 1): Firefox 43, HTML5 breakage, and more

Sometimes, updates are awful. They break things, they undo configuration options you were sure you had set at some point in the past (either resetting them to defaults or removing them entirely). I...

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