Matt’s Blog > OCD

I think I’ve alluded earlier to the fact that I’ve been trying to speed up some systems at home, and how some of them are really slow. (I’m starting to suspect Norton, actually, but more on that when I find out more.)
I just came across this spiffy application, which will write and then read a [...]

This post christens my newest category, Thinking Aloud. It’s meant to house random thoughts that pop into my head, versus fully fleshed-out ideas. Thus it’s meant more as an invitation for comments than something factual or informative, and is likely full of errors…
Aside from “time geeks,” those who deal with it professionally, and those intricately [...]

From my “Random ideas I wish I had the resources to try out…” file…
The way the “pretty big” sites work is that they have a cluster of servers… A few are database servers, many are webservers, and a few are front-end caches. The theory is that the webservers do the ‘heavy lifting’ to generate a [...]

Last night we were unloading a shopping cart. When done, the place to put it away was pretty far away. But there were about ten other shopping carts littering the parking lot nearby, so I said, “Meh, what’s one more?”
As we got in the car, I proclaimed, “Broken Windows in action!” I think people were [...]

Ed.: Because the blogs have been slow, and because this is a hot topic, I’ve fudged the date on this to appear to have been published two days later, so it will stay on the main page a bit longer.
It looks like Obama is the Democratic nominee, while Hillary Clinton, the woman who has twice [...]

This comic was pretty funny, and the age/2 + 7 formula got tossed around a lot by my roommates.
Of course, it gives us the minimum age one can date without being creepy. At 22, it’s [(22/2) + 7], or 18. (I, however, maintain that this discrepancy would, in fact, be creepy.)
But what about the upper [...]

I think the best thing about SLRs isn’t their elimination (well, exponential reduction) of shutter lag, nor the support for high ISOs, or even advanced exposure and metering modes. It’s that even at relative high apertures (f/5.6), you can keep a shallow depth of field. Consider this photograph:

(Does anyone know what type of flower this [...]

This falls into the category of things very few people would notice, but….
Microsoft provides time.windows.com, a public NTP server, operating in stratum 2.
I just came across NTPmonitor, a novel Windows app to monitor a handful of NTP servers. (Sadly, it doesn’t offer the option to sync to any of them, probably because most peoples’ computers [...]

The Web Developer toolbar, which is (1) the #1 hit on Google for “Web Developer,” and (2) now compatible with Firefox 3 beta, is totally awesome. You may recall that, in the past, if you had text after a bulleted list or similar on this page, the text would suddenly be mashed together. I never [...]

I mentioned in my previous post in passing about determining which was my “dominant eye,” something I’ve merrily gone 22 years without knowing I had.
Wikipedia refers to the subject as ocular dominance. Essentially, the brain “prefers” one eye over the other. Of course, this is something that ordinarily goes unnoticed, but it becomes quite important [...]