Matt's Blog

I’ve been tinkering in my spare time with setting up a killer mailserver; something that will hopefully fend off spam with great accuracy, yet never at the expense rejecting legitimate mail. One great weapon in the fight has always been Spamhaus, which runs a series of extremely high-quality blacklists. It turns out that they’ve recently [...]

This is probably so ludicrously obvious that it goes without saying but, in my experience, it really needs to be said: When building your architecture, you should design it so that things you do every day are easy. For example, if you have an often-used object, don’t split it into two halves and require that [...]

To Whom It May Concern, Christian warrior is an oxymoron. Please consult this document, particularly this subsection, for further clarification on the matter. Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated. kthxbye, Matt

If you’re reading this, we’ve moved from Scranton to Chicago, and things aren’t horribly broken.

I tend to like comparing working with computers to working with cars. I’m not sure why. I think it probably has to do with the fact that everyone has a vague idea of what mechanics do, but computers are often seen as a black magic. So here’s a list of things that I’ve found handy [...]

I just realized something that kind of blows my mind. 1990 was twenty years ago. I feel old.

One thing that always drove me crazy in school was when teachers stressed that we had to take what we read on the Internet with a grain of salt. This was, of course, excellent advice: the Internet is filled with blatantly misleading information, and those are just the nice parts of the Internet. But what [...]

Awesome discovery of the weekend: bacon-jalapeño pizza. I want to try to create this, possibly with chipotle instead. Bacon and jalapeños are an amazing combination in general, I think.

I’m still uneasy about the “all black people leave the store” announcement, but for two very separate reasons. The first, of course, is the appalling racism. We’ve all known that racism is still alive and well, but it’s really quite scary to see it going on. But the other thing that leaves me uneasy is [...]

It’s really interesting to me how there are no Walmart locations in or around Boston or the Waltham area. See for yourself.