Oh, apparently, Blizzard still hates gays (2012/01/07)
Apparently (it says a lot about Blizzard’s continued relevance to my world), back in October, Blizzard aired a long homophobic rant at Blizzcon. (No, it wasn’t bleeped at the actual con. EDIT: Or at least so some bloggers claimed.) Then there was a sort of half-baked apology. Eventually they posted an actual apology.
[read more...]Buffer overruns (2011/12/22)
My spare cognitive capacity for the forseeable future will be on buffer overruns. I just saw a hunk of code which struck me as truly spectacular, in a number of ways, and it occurred to me that there is some kind of fundamental barrier here. I don’t think there’s been any time in the last fifteen years where I could possibly have made that mistake. I’m alert to this in some kind of structural way; that particular subclass of errors just leaps out at me.
[read more...]numb3rs instant review (2011/12/18)
He’s an FBI agent. He’s a brilliant mathematician. Together, they fight crime!
[read more...]Black bars on TV with ATI/AMD video (2011/12/05)
Okay, this one took me a while to figure out, and it turns out there’s not a solution I can find. (Before you rush to link me to the articles on this: Yes, I know about the overscan setting, I messed with it, it did not do what I need.)
[read more...]That's sorta spooky (2011/11/30)
Siri is uncannily reluctant to talk about abortion.
[read more...]Can programming be taught? (2011/11/29)
Apparently, many people simply cannot comprehend programming. That is to say, if you look at the people who come into a programming course, and give them a really, really, simple example of what programs look like, some of them Just Don’t Get It. Nearly all of these people fail out, because they never learn to program; they simply can’t get their heads around it.
[read more...]Free advice: Learn to cook (2011/11/28)
Many people seem to regard cooking as some kind of strange magical skill that ordinary people cannot have, and restrict themselves to prepared food that only needs to be microwaved or whatever.
[read more...]True names and aphasia (2011/11/11)
A running theme in fantasy literature is True Names – each thing (or at least person) has a true name, and knowing the true name of a thing gives you power over it. But why’s that? Here’s my theory. If you use a normal word for a thing, the word has connotations and shades of meaning that distract you from the thing itself. Thus, the use of carefully-crafted “true names”, words which exist to be directly mapped to the thing itself without connotations, puns, and other distractions.
[read more...]Razer's gaming stuff: Disappointing support (2011/11/10)
Okay, I gotta say. I like the hardware as such. Nice hardware. Good feel on the keyboards.
[read more...]Smartphones and servers (2011/10/14)
Apple’s new “intelligent agent”, Siri, is taking a page from Wolfram Alpha and trying to answer questions in a funny manner – leading to an amusing blog entitled Shit That Siri Says.
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