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Monthly Archives: September 2005

Duplicate Items in Gregarius. Duplicate Items in Gregarius.

The problem with duplicate items showing up in Gregarius, which was troubling me earlier last month has started again. As I mentioned on the Gregarius developers' mailing list, the problem is ridiculously hard to debug, since it occurs in a seemingly random fashion, and is only happening to me.
Part of me thinks that this is [...]

Cambridge is Beautiful in September

There is something about Cambridge in early September that makes me happy. It might have been the subway ride on the Red Line, or walking through Johnson Gate and the Yard, or the fact that my Early Housing is exactly two floors below my actual room (this will make moving next week incredibly easy) or [...]

Hotmail Tech Support Cannot Open Attachments

When I got this email, I was not sure whether I should laugh or cry:
Hello Martey,
Thank you for writing to MSN Hotmail Technical Support.
This is Nat and I will be assisting you today.
Due to safety and security reasons, we are not authorized to open any attachment. If you have received an unsolicited e-mail with the [...]

Dreamhost Doubles their Disk Space

Dreamhost doubles the disk space available on all of their hosting plans.

After Katrina, a Political Deluge?

David Brooks' latest New York Times column is tame in its suggestion that the aftermath of Katrina will cause political upheaval, but also devoid of a legitimate conclusion.

Anonymous Programming Sucks

Sometime last week, I switched from Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 to a more recent build. How is this possible, when 1.0.6 is the only version available for download on Mozilla's site?
The answer is that while Mozilla Firefox is open-source, its development is also open. This allows regular Firefox users like me (and hopefully you) to actively [...]

Spam, SevenTwentyFour Hours a Day

I respond to spam sent by the Internet company SEVENTwentyFour about a broken hyperlink that is not actually broken.

'Get FoxIE' Gets Infringing

The Internet Explorer plugin FoxIE may claim to be a combination of the best in Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer, but its website shows that it is but a weak copy of the popular browser by Mozilla.

Brooks: A Change is Gonna Come

In his most recent New York Times column, David Brooks further explains the conclusions of his previous column on the political aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:
Reaganite conservatism was the response to the pessimism and feebleness of the 1970's. Maybe this time there will be a progressive resurgence. Maybe we are entering an age of hardheaded law [...]

Spam Worries

An anti-Microsoft spam message from Robert Soloway's SPAMIS organization suggests that the amount of email he is sending will increase.

iTunes Music Store and Napster are Not Your Friends

The Electronic Frontier Foundation publishes an excellent roundup of the most popular online music stores, identifying their flaws and explaining how they limit user freedoms. Of the four online music services that the guide suggests that users use instead, I take a look at Bleep and Audio Lunchbox.

So, Where were We?

Despite the fact I have work at 9 tomorrow, I have so far been unable to go to sleep. I was able to doze off for maybe half an hour around 1am when there was a lull in the partygoers congregating outside my window, but was woken up again by loud voices. There is still [...]

Another Reason to Hate ZoneAlarm

I must admit that I have never liked ZoneAlarm, despite its position as one of the most popular Windows firewalls. Whenever I used it a couple of years ago, I would find myself quickly uninstalling it, turned off the benefits of firewall protection by ZoneAlarm's blinding traffic light lookalike interface (entirely too much bright yellow). [...]

Broken (Computers)

I found this on my desk when I came home from work. Click on the image to enlarge.
Hopefully, a hive restore will do the trick. Regardless, seeing this made me feel as if I was in some kind of simplistic video game, with wave after wave of broken computers attacking or something.

Open (Registration) Season

Per my earlier thoughts about the possibility of private posts, I have decided to enable user registration. If I have never met you in person nor conversed with you past midnight, do not bother registering, unless you are really famous or something.
There are perhaps 50 people or so whom I would accept user registration from [...]

iTunes Now Playing plugin

This open source iTunes plugin adds functionality that I have been looking for a long while - notification of the track currently being played through a small popup window that automatically disappears after a short period of time.
Via Chris Gonyea.

Two Perspectives on Panafest

I was a bit annoyed back in August when I read Travis Kavulla's description of his time at Panafest, a biannual festival in Ghana which celebrates pan-Africanism. While I have liked the incisiveness of some of his past writing, this piece took too many cheap shots. For example, his second paragraph:
PANAFEST—not an acronym, but unfailingly [...]

Personal Paparazzo

The best part of my room is the ridiculously large window and the view it offers - the Dunster courtyard, Memorial Drive, and the Charles river. It is above the House library (which has even larger windows) and a few floors below Dunster's tower. If I was going to take a picture of Dunster, the [...]

Thundery Thursday?

Do not get me wrong - ForecastFox is a wonderful Firefox extension, and I fully realize that the text from their forecasts comes from AccuWeather. Regardless, seeing "Thundery rains in the p.m." all day for today's forecast has had me shaking my head in amusement all day. It conveys to me nothing that is not [...]

A Matter of Audience

Another entry about the difficulties of writing for different sets of people.