Up until recently I thought I had to resort to the lottery or white collar crime to fund my beach house. However, soon after hearing a story on NPR about software patent trolling, I decided to finally apply for that patent on the blog reading technique that I’ve worked so hard on inventing (patent # [...]
Browsing Posts in Musings, Rants
I got an email request to publish this article a few days ago. I was actually on the verge of moving the email to the trash when I noticed the first name of the author: Rand. For those of you not familiar with the Wheel of Time series, the main character’s name is Rand. I [...]
If there is such a thing as divine retribution, then I’m pretty sure that most of the people on Microsoft’s SSIS product team will be spending eons merging SSIS packages. I took the following screenshot from an issue I reviewed at my old job. The developer who resolved the issue only made two property changes [...]
Here’s a tech support session from a friend of mine trying to log into his bank account. Web Customer: I’m trying to log in to my online account but the system is telling me that a session already exists. Can you cancel that session manually or do I have to wait for it to timeout? [...]
I was browsing through JQuery plugins the other night when I stumbled across this little gem. Vibrating Buttons? Really? I assumed that this was the product of some geeky joksters blowing off steam after being forced to participate in some grueling SOX or PCI compliance audits. After all, who in their right minds would want [...]
A few weeks ago I accidentally installed the wrong Cisco VPN Client while trying to set up a VPN connection and as a result I lost all network connectivity. I wasted a good 45 minutes uninstalling the bad software, reinstalling my laptop’s network drivers, and fiddling with the various network settings before I remembered about [...]
Let’s face it. We’re all losing the password length arms race. Today’s GPUs can process two teraflops (a trillion floating-point operations per second), which means that my nephew’s high end gaming PC has roughly the same processing power as a multi-million dollar super computer did ten years ago. Thanks to the power of the GPU [...]
I recently switched jobs and am now happily spending my day actually doing development again rather than just telling other developers what to do (seems like a cyclical trend in my career). In my new role, I’ll soon be doing some greenfield web development, so I’ve been brushing up on my UI skills as well [...]
Today’s featured website: European Visa Online I visited this site for the first time today and was greeted with this page. Seriously? In case you’re curious, I’m running firefox 3.6.3. Web developers and designers have scorned and mocked IE 6 for years now due to hoards of bugs and non-compliant behavior that cause endless development [...]
A friend of mine recently revealed a super, ninja-level consultant secret to me. Whenever his work pipeline floweth over and an unknown client approaches him with a job, he quotes them a ridiculously high rate that he assumes they would never accept. He calls it his “Go Away” rate. The only problem is that these [...]
