Matt's Blog

“In 1855, when Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino wrote an English phrasebook for Portuguese students, they faced just one problem: they didn’t know any English. Even worse, they didn’t own an English-to-Portuguese dictionary. What they did have, though, was a Portuguese-to-French dictionary, and a French-to-English dictionary. The linguistic train wreck that ensued is a [...]

I’ve always loved watching Cops. Tonight’s episode reminded of two things I’m quite certain about, though. The first is that most criminals are astonishingly dumb. The first thing to happen in the show was a routine traffic stop that turned into a pursuit in which the driver crashed in the woods and fled until he [...]

This is one of those things that should be really easy, and that a lot of people probably already know… But in the hopes of saving someone 30 minutes of frustrated searching, here’s what you should know. If you want to change your session cookie’s path globally, there’s a documented setting. But what if you [...]

I saw this poem to Piet Hein and had to share: The road to wisdom? Well, it’s plain And simple to express: Err and err and err again, but less and less and less.

I assume most people know this, but for the benefit of those who get paged at 4am and are maybe not at their mental prime, here it goes: If you see “sshd: root@notty” in your process list and find yourself wondering what box “notty” is and assuming you’ve been hacked and it’s some malicious connection [...]

With the coming storm, I can guarantee that every news station is going to have on a state trooper or highway safety official, and they’re going to give advice like this: Watch your speeds in inclement weather. Increase the following distance between you the car in front of you, because slippery conditions may increase the [...]

One thing that boggles my mind sometimes is that there are people living who witnessed racial discrimination as codified in the nation’s laws. Crazier still, when I say that “there are people living” who remember a time when the law actually required racial discrimination in many places, I’m not referring to a handful of octogenarians [...]

I was on Facebook and happened to see something from a really old friend, going back to elementary/middle school. Being fried after 12 hours of work, I poked around and looked at their friends, and found a lot of people I haven’t so much as remembered the existence of for close to a decade. And [...]