Matt's Blog

If anyone’s in the mood for a new Linux install, you’ve got a lot of choices on your plate: Ubuntu 10.04 is out. While most Ubuntu releases last a fairly short period until the next one, 10.04 is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, so it’s here for a very long time, and the important fixes [...]

I suspect most readers here knew, or at least suspected it all along: most registry cleaners are, at best, useless. Lifehacker has a good piece on this, although it unfortunately begins by talking about how to edit the registry, which is really something I’m content with people not knowing. The people who have good reason [...]

Our newest site at work is a 40+ dating site, a new industry for us. And one of the things I really love about the team I work with is that all of the engineers do what they do because they love programming, which means that we’re all giant nerds. Consequentially, we all found this [...]

From CNN: “During the past five years, the SEC OIG (Office of Inspector General) substantiated that 33 SEC employees and or contractors violated Commission rules and policies, as well as the government-wide Standards of Ethical Conduct, by viewing pornographic, sexually explicit or sexually suggestive images using government computer resources and official time,” said a summary [...]

What makes someone think, “You know what would be a prime market to get into? Making discount network equipment and keyboards and competing on price!”? If we look at just the big players, the companies that anyone who’s ever walked down the networking aisle at Best Buy could name, I come up with HP, Cisco, [...]

I modified the main page a bit. It tries to parse WordPress cookies and see if you’re logged in. If so, it offers a “micro-post” option. A few things you should know… The first is that these ‘microposts’ are not stored on your real blog. They’re stored in the generic posts table that RSS feeds [...]

As devices like the Kindle, Nook, and iPad become more prevalent, a lot of libraries are showing interest. One problem is that eBooks are following the Digital Restrictions Management* trend, which cripples content so that it will only play for approved purchasers. The goal is to limit “piracy,” such as someone buying a piece of [...]

I want to experiment with shorter, more link-rich blog posts. I also love tips and tricks that are based on nifty little things not really documented anywhere that work reliably. So, without further ado…

If you do web development of any kind and use Firefox, you either use Firebug on a daily basis, or you really need to learn about Firebug. I have a handful of plugins for Firebug, but I just came across two that look immensely useful. XRefresh will watch local files and reload a page in [...]

You might notice that I’ve brushed up the main page a bit. In addition to a few styling tweaks, you’ll note that I’m now showing the “excerpt” (short preview) of a post instead of the main thing. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. I’m toying with a few ideas. For the heck [...]