I’m doing it wrong.
Today I came to a realization: I’m different.
The difference between me and other programmers cannot be understated.
Category Archives: Technical
How to learn programming
“I hated high school. It was the worst time of my life. [Then] college … was just awful. When you’re in high school, everyone tells you, ‘There’s a lot of repetitive bullshit and standardized tests; it’ll all be better once you’re in college.’ And then you get to your first year of college and they’re like, ‘Oh, no– it gets better when you’re in grad school.’ … I couldn’t take it. So I dropped out. And I’m glad I did.” – Jamie Zawinski (jwz), one of the world’s best programmers.
Rumors of the Sidekick’s death are not exaggerated
Have you heard of the T-Mobile Sidekick?
The Sidekick is now dead.
From what I’m reading, everyone– yes, everyone– who uses a Sidekick was affected by a network outage that began on October 2nd.
Localizable.strings Not Working
The iPhone offers good localization support the same way Mac OS X does. For strings, developers use a file called “Localizable.strings”. It’s a bit tricky, though. The syntax of the file is strict; any small error will cause it to stop working without warning. Unfortunately, the compiler (which doesn’t touch the file at all) can’t give any warnings or errors when a mistake is present in the file. So check your Localizable.strings closely.
NTFS-3G Will Not Mount FAT32 DMG Images
I have an external hard drive which is formatted NTFS. Just one of the many hazards of using a Mac is that they do not support NTFS, which is a far superior filesystem to FAT32. Fortunately, there is a program called MacFuse which allows you to use many different things as filesystems, including SSH. Someone at Google wrote a read/write NTFS driver, known as NTFS-3G, which works with MacFuse to allow read/write mounting of NTFS volumes. Exactly what I wanted, so I downloaded and installed MacFuse and NTFS-3G, taking care to get the latest stable versions.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /blog/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 31
WordPress 2.5 is not compatible with older versions of K2. You’ll know if you have this problem because this error message appears:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_register_sidebar_widget() in /blog/wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php on line 31
I had this problem, and found a solution in the WordPress Forums. I wonder why it happens and how the K2 people fixed it. Continue reading
Comparing Images and Measuring their Similarity in PHP
I’m very proud of myself tonight. You see, I’m a programmer at heart. Yet it has been a long time since I just programmed something for fun. Not a contest, not a class. Just out of pure usefulness and interest. Here’s the story.
I setup a webcam to watch my room for the day, and some software that uploads the webcam’s image to my server via FTP, 6 times per minute. The software is Active Webcam, and I just used the free evaluation version. Over the course of the day, it generated 6,522 images – way too many to view at once. So I decided to script something to make looking at the images more interesting.
The first obvious problem is that most of the images look exactly the same. Nothing happened during the day, so the images have no easily visible distinction. Yet they are not the same in terms of bits: the brightness has slight variations, the JPEG compression differed, etc. So doing an md5 comparison (which will be the same for files which are the same) doesn’t cut it. I need to actually look at the image data.
Fortunately, PHP has a great built-in image library known as gd. You have to have PHP compiled with it, but my host does, so I suspect most others do, too. After much trial and error, I managed to do the following: Continue reading
Grab the Latest Post from Multiple WordPress Blogs
I searched for a solution to this for hours, and ended up adapting some older code I’ve been using on my own website for years. Sometimes the best solution is the simplest one.
Weird Tab Behavior in Firefox
Is this a bug?
I was working on the TCF website, happily coding along, until I hit a snag: whenever I’d click on a link, it seems to be redirecting me back to the page I was on.
Okay, I shortly realized I was mistaken: I was actually not moving at all, and just staying where I was. What’s going on?, I thought. I clicked again. I realized the link was opening in a new tab… unless that page was already open in a tab. In that case, it wasn’t a new tab at all– it was the same tab, but not the one I was looking at. So when I clicked the link, if my Internet connection was fast enough, it looked like nothing happened!