MarteyDodoo.com

I have been trying to write about what went wrong with my laptop and my experiences with IBM/Lenovo's warranty repair services. It is slow going, though, since the events in question encompass the last month. I have everything outlined right now, but it needs to be fleshed out properly (because nobody likes reading bulleted lists). [...]

Having come of age online in the era immediately after the first Internet boom, I was naturally a bit wary of websites that describe themselves as "Web 2.0." Their pastel colors, misspelled names, and use of JavaScript to do everything concerned me. Articles noting the continual data serfdom that such websites promote only aggravated my [...]

Selected questions and "answers" from AT&T Wireless' (formerly Cingular) FAQ entitled How much does it cost to upgrade to a new phone? I would link to this page, but I cannot find a valid hyperlink. Questions are in bold; answers follow underneath:
 
 
How much does it cost to upgrade to a new phone?
How much does it [...]

GNOME developer David Trowbridge on why the mobs posting a certain hexadecimal number around various places on the Internet are not being productive:
Most of the people copying this key did so under some delusional notion of “free speech” or “numbers not being copyrightable”. Under current US law (regardless of what you think of it), this [...]

Yesterday, I made a mistake while configuring Postfix, the program that deals with email on my server.[1] The result of this was that I received no email over a 24 hour period stretching from approximately noon on Saturday to noon today.
I have misconfigured Postfix before, but have always realized my mistake within a much shorter [...]

On the Notebooks page of the website of Taiwanese electronics company ASUS, I found several items under the heading "ASUS Exclusive Innovations for Mobile Computing." While several of the items (i.e. power management) are definitely not exclusive to ASUS, the last two items (which you can see to your right) are just not innovative.

I was in the midst of an essay about Adam Cadre's satire on Wikipedia, where I went to Wikipedia to look for a good logo and got distracted. I just finished reading the entry on the War of the Pacific, where Bolivia lost its access to the sea, an event that still has repercussions in [...]

TechWorld reports that OpenOffice.org will soon be bundled with Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning, but I think that the news that OpenOffice plans to support plugins to extends its feature set is just as important.
OpenOffice will get "Firefox-like" extension capabilities by version 2.0.4, due this month, Schulz said. The suite's existing extensions platform will get a [...]

I do not know who designed President Ahmadinejad's blog, but they did not do a good job.
The Good Stuff

Easy to remember URL.
Nice use of AJAX.

The Bad Stuff
Using Visual Studio .NET 7.1 and a table-based design to create the page. Speaking of which, the site should degrade gratefully if JavaScript is disabled.
Spelling errors. While I can [...]

The environment of Harvard Summer School is quite different from the regular school year. Instead of the 18-21 year olds that made up the majority of undergraduate students in Harvard College, I am experiencing "people of all ages, from around the United States and more than 90 countries, live and learn together as they satisfy [...]

Back when I was a senior in high school, I was naïve in many ways, including my determination of what was good music. Around that time, I recognized that my musical taste was less developed than those of many of my friends. This was not because I liked bad music, but because I had simply [...]

It is 4am in the morning. Nobody is using the Internet. What happens when I do a search on popular blog search engine Technorati?

The above error message admit that something is wrong. Occasionally when trying to search, Technorati will claim that there are zero results, even on common words like "Bush," "blogging," and "Apple."

After some careful consideration, I have decided to participate in Google's AdSense Referrals program, which pays website owners when their visitors download a number of software packages or join AdSense or AdWords. I chose Mozilla Firefox, as you can see by the button on the sidebar to the right. While the technical nature of many [...]

This entry has been sitting in my drafts for the better part of the year. I feel that it is about time to publish it.
Last fall, the Harvard Crimson, the most popular daily on campus, redesigned their website. From a web designer's perspective, the new website was not that much better than the old one [...]

In tomorrow's New York Times magazine, Kevin Kelly writes the best explanation I have recently read of why book digitization is a good idea and its potential pitfalls. The beginning of the article is a bit silly and utopian, with its claims that the "universal library" (which will include the sum of all human [...]

One might think that the fact that I have become a member of the Sprint Ambassador Program (which entitles me to a free Samsung A920 phone and 6 months of absolutely free service) might cause me to blog about how wonderful the Sprint Power Vision network is. Unfortunately for Valentine, McCormick, & Ligibel, the marketing [...]

The image to the left comes from my notes for a Bits problem set. This is my partner's handwriting, although I agree with his sentiment.
I had to brighten the picture using GIMP, so you may want to look at the image's ALT data if you cannot read it. He added "(potentially)" to the end of [...]

Back in late December, I became annoyed at the fact that a number of web-based aggregators that were looking for RSS feeds previously hosted at this site which I had deprecated through HTTP status codes 301 (Moved Permanently) and 410 (Gone). Most aggregators do not recognize these status codes (including Gregarius), so I set about [...]

Thoughts on the attempted suppression of opinions about companies, through the lens of the web hosting company Midphase.

Is the integration between Google Talk and AIM really anything to shout about?

From: "Dr. Lewis Wallace" <834egidio@access-one.com>
To: [redacted]@hcs.harvard.edu
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?B?VHJ5IFNwdXItTSE=?=
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 08:24:47 +0000
SPUR-M is an omnipotent formula. It increases sperm production by 500%.
…
Of course, theoretically, an omnipotent formula should have the ability to increase production by ∞%.

Does your copy of Mozilla Thunderbird not correctly add messages to your Sent Folder? Read on for details on how to fix this.

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.

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.

The Wikimedia Commons "Featured Pictures" is an excellent place to find photographs and other artwork that are in the public domain or have lenient licenses. Using a photograph of MIRVs re-entering the atmosphere during the test of a nuclear missile, I was able to create beautiful wallpapers.

The IBM Thinkpad has always been a good choice for Linux users who want a portable computer. Support for its integrated biometrics and hard drive protection could make it an even better fit.

I was pleased to see that the First Circuit Court of Appeals reversed its earlier decision that email messages intercepted by procmail (an Unix program for filtering and sorting email) are not covered under 18 USC 2510, colloquially known as the "Wiretap Act." The case which started this issue is US v. Councilman. The [...]

SWAT 4 is the 4th iteration of a computer game where you play the leader of a SWAT team. The game is a member of the "tactical first person shooter" (FPS) genre; unlike normal FPS games like Doom or Quake, tactical FPSs encourage the player to move slowly and carefully, as being shot by one [...]

Dreamhost, my new webhost, seems a bit strange compared to the other hosts I have been involved with. Their feature set is different than other webhosts. Not only do all of their plans come with ssh access, but they also include Jabber instant messenging. When you add ample amounts of space and bandwidth (which increase [...]

After some careful consideration, I decided to switch web hosts last night. It took a number of hours for the DNS settings to propagate, during which time I played around with the Wikipedia account I created last August but forgot about and got a few hours of troubled sleep.
When I woke up and transferred my [...]

When I installed the latest version of 7-Zip (an open-source program for dealing with compressed file formats like ZIP and RAR), I was surprised to find that the default locale was set to Danish! Luckily, fixing it was relatively simple:

Open the Værktøjer (Tools) menu and select Indstillinger (Options).
Select the last tab, entitled Sprog (Language). Change [...]

Last week, the Inquirer posted a letter in response to an article they wrote about Microsoft's claims that the next version of Windows (codenamed Longhorn, officially named Vista - at least for now) would have better performance than Windows XP. The letter, written by "snakeye" (a sketchy nickname, I know), claimed that Longhorn's (er, I [...]

AIM Fight [via Waxy Links] is pretty cool, despite its Flash-based interface. I was a bit paranoid about entering my screenname at first (spim happens!), but was reassured after I read the "What is AIM Fight?" page ("Who made AIM Fight? Two AIM programmers with a little bit too much free time on their hands.") [...]

(02:38:04) Me: actually, it's trying to get a internet connection so I < — at this point I was disconnected
…disconnected immediately after attempting to send…
(02:49:41) Me: did you get the message I sent ten min ago?
…disconnected immediately after attempting to send…
I get intermittent connectivity, as long as it is clear out (the slightest hint of [...]

My IBM Thinkpad T43 came with the standard 6-cell battery and an advertised battery life of 4.9 hours. Under normal conditions, I get about three hours. This is far better than the hour and 45 minutes that my Inspiron 9100 would receive, the fact that my actual battery life is about half of the advertised [...]