Tag: geeky
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Copy-Pasting Passwords into Steam
Valve are running a security theatre by pretending that a "feature" in Steam provides protection, when in actual fact it simply makes things harder for users with good security sense. Here's how to circumvent the feature, as well as some tips on great password safe programs.
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They Say that Programmers Never Die
Dan writes poetry using programming languages, and wonders whether or not any of the code he's written in his life, thus far, will outlive him.
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The Worst Server Infection I've Ever Seen
Dan discovers a mountain of malware on a client's database server, and wonders how it all got there.
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Favourite Firefox Four Feature FAIL!
I've been playing about with the beta of Firefox 4 for a little while now, and I wanted to tell you about a feature that I thought was absolutely amazing, until it turned out that it was a bug and they "fixed" it. This feature is made possible by a handful of other new tools …
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A Video Game Movie I'd See
Video game movies are notoriously bad, no matter how awesome the game that inspired them. Wing Commander took a classic video game series and completely ruined it. Doom was incredibly dull, even though it was based on one of the most popular game series that have ever exited. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time …
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Parsing XML as JSON
This morning, I got an instant message from a programmer who's getting deeply into their Ajax recently. The conversation went something like this (I paraphrase and dramatise at least a little):
Morning! I need to manipulate a JSON feed so that [this JSON parser] will recognise it.
Here's what I get out of the JSON feed … -
Civilization V Release Day
For those of you in the USA, at least, today is the release day for the much-anticipated Sid Meier's Civilization V. With the promise that this will be the most groundbreaking Civ game since Civilization II, I've managed to acquire a leaked screenshot of the very first thing that players will see when they launch …
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The Modern Programmer's Dictionary
In the field of software development, there's always something new to learn. Whether it's a new language, framework, API or methodology, your need to study is never through - even if you're a FORTRAN developer. But one of the more esoteric areas of your education will come in the form of the language programmers use, …
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Troma Night Adventure
Because I promised you some Aber-nostalgia.
Do you remember the RockMonkey Wiki? Many years ago, Ruth bought the domain name rockmonkey.org.uk as a gift for Andy K, who'd been nicknamed "Rock Monkey" for longer than anybody could remember. He decided that what he wanted to host there was a wiki engine, and I helped him get … -
The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of System Tray Icons
What the fuck is that icon for? Despite the best efforts of icon designer to (apparently) make clear and comprehensible icons, and by computer users to learn and understand them, I still remain perplexed from time to time by the plethora of icons in my system tray (sorry, I mean Taskbar Notification Area). Let's take …
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BiCon: The Game
I shan't be at BiCon this year, but I thought I'd share with you all something that tickled me today. Last year, at a Naked Lunch, I ended up chatting to several geeks about Interactive Fiction, and I through out a few ideas for a BiCon-themed piece of Interactive Fiction. Little did I know that …
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The Best Mouse In The World
This was one of my most-popular articles in 2010. It continues to be popular in Spain (¡Hola! Mucho gusto). If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy:
Why I believe that it's wrong to lie to children about Santa (2009).
The Ten Weirdest Sex Toys I've ever seen (2009)!
A dirty-looking calendar I found at … -
Kitty
~$ sudo gem install kitty
Successfully installed kitty-0.0.2
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for kitty-0.0.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for kitty-0.0.2...
~$ kitty
____
(. \
\ |
\ |___(\--/)
__/ ( . . )
"'._. '-.O.'
'-. \ "|\
'.,,/'.,,
~$ kitty
/\_/\
/\ / o o \
//\\ \~(*)~/
` \/ ^ /
| \|| ||
\ '|| ||
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Hiding In Plain "Site"
I've written a program called PicInHTML, which makes web pages with concealed images which are shown when text on the page is selected. What's clever about these page are how they work: they're a single file, with no dependence on images nor Javascript, and they work by leveraging the little-used ::selected CSS selector. Each individual …
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One-Time Pad In Javascript
A few months ago, I spent one lunchtime writing a One-Time Pad Encryption/Decryption Engine in Javascript. I'd meant to blog about it at the time, but I forgot, but I came across it again today and thought it was cool enough to share with you all.
If you already appreciate why that's cool, go play with …