Readability I’m not exactly the model programmer, but I’m a big nut on readable code. I’ve been doing a lot of PHP, but now I’m starting to get back into Perl. And I’m realizing that, in Perl, it’s very easy to write code that makes absolutely no sense to anyone except the most...

Arugula I woke up in the middle of the night, and glanced up at my clock. 1:33 AM. But wait, why is it light out? There’s no way I slept 15 hours and it’s 1:33PM? No no, my phone says it’s 6:30 in the morning. I went back to bed, and woke up a few hours later, at 1:33 AM. My clock radio crashed....

Just Sayin’ PRQ is the Swedish company that hosts sites like The Pirate Bay and some of their affiliated sites, like free image hosting and so forth. It seems that The Pirate Bay benefits from a mix of strong consumer protection laws (so that it’s harder to crack down on hosting a torrent tracker, which doesn’t...

Trampled Why is it that, every now and then, I read a news article and start to wonder if the people we share this planet with are really human, or if they’re slightly less-evolved than apes? Who tears down the doors to Walmart and tramples an employee to death so that they can get a good deal on a new...

Badware Out of all the talk of viruses, trojan horses, rootkits, spyware, adware, and so forth came the very helpful terms “malware” or “badware,” to encompass all of the harmful software out there. It might try to delete all your files, steal your credit card data, or just display advertisements...

Caches Like most posters and readers here, I’ve been using computers for a very long time. One thing that’s always baffled me is people’s obsessions with clearing out caches. I’m sure that there are some programs that do caches wrong, and never purge anything, so that purging caches...

Losing Disk Space on Vista? I went to run a defrag in Vista last night (via Defraggler), and noticed that the most-fragmented files were hundreds of files, each hundreds of megs, in C:/ProgramData/ Microsoft/ Windows/ WER/ ReportQueue. A bit of poking around revealed that they don’t serve much of a purpose. Rather than emptying...

Undercover Nashua PD do a lot of patrols on their strip of Route 3, driving their trademark Chevy Impalas. Besides the fact that they just look like police cars, they’re seen driving them so often that I think most everyone who drives on Route 3 knows to slow down when they’re near an Impala. In Boston,...

Boston Politicians I’ve been listening to various talk radio programs on my way into work, and most are based out of Boston, so there’s been a lot of discussion about the FBI stings that have been uncovering a lot of corruption. One day it was about Boston’s Chuck Turner, and how he had announced that...

IMAP from Perl I’m quickly finding it necessary to get back “into” scripting: I’d throw stuff together here and there, but it’s been a while since I wrote anything more than a dozen lines or so, and I haven’t done anything with Perl in far too long. For a project I’m going...