Hypothesis confirmed

I think I should start a whole extra category for my car. Hmm. Anyway, given that we actually had relatively nice weather today, I got out and fiddled with my car for a bit. I fixed the clock & interior light; they’re both on the same fuse, which had blown. I guess frequently connecting &… Read more

NetDoubler X!

So, here I am, trying to do some work and all that, and I start downloading something over a VPN connection. Then I notice that Activity Monitor’s claiming 90k/s. On a 50k/s ADSL connection. Awesome! I guess I’m not surprised that the VPN tunnel compresses it’s data, just that it actually works. And this is… Read more

Overly lossy video compression

Pop-quiz, young grasshopper… your program is about to embark on an 11-hour exodus into the land of the the eternal progress bar, but the path the user’s given you to save the result to is “invalid”. More specifically, it is actually valid, but contains directories that don’t yet exist, and for reasons beyond mortal comprehension… Read more

Revolutionary file & print sharing… wtf?

Okay, so, this is just too bad to let by. ComputerWorld are all excited by the newly redesigned file & print sharing in Vista. The details are here. Now, I was genuinely curious how things were being changed. About half way through the article, however, I became suspicious. For example, the Documents and Settings folder… Read more

How many passwords do you really know?

I’m probably more of an exception than most people, but not that exceptional, insofar as I have a lot of passwords. Dozens and dozens of them. Possibly hundreds. There’s 325, in fact, in my Keychain, which only encompasses the electronic side… then there’s things like bankcard PINs, secret words and such junk for all sorts… Read more

Dungeons & Dragons Starcraft

Yes, believe it or not, there is a D&D Starcraft map. Chris & I tested it out a bit together… it actually represents a huge amount of work by some very very bored person(s). They’ve really pushed the limits of what Starcraft can realistically do; well beyond what’s officially supported with StarEdit. Until now I… Read more

FAT detection

To introduce with the conclusion, I’ve finally got my little disk driver – for the electronics project – detecting FAT formatted volumes (non-partitioned), and determining whether they’re FAT12, FAT16 or FAT32. This is a surprisingly difficult thing to do, it seems. There’s not any handy flag anywhere that says what format the volume is. If… Read more