The Joy of Hack

Over the past year I have written about moving over to Google+ and switching away from emacs.

I’m currently in the last 48 hours of my first ever visit to the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

Whose streets these are I think I know.

After only being able to do a single one-legged medicine ball burpee last week, I was able to do 12 last night.

In this post I’ll show you how I added tag clouds to my Octopress blog.

There have been times when I’ve had to extract a particular column from a tab-separated or comma-separated file.

In my last post I wrote that I followed some instructions to exclude myself from Google Analytics’ reports on my Octopress blog.

Over this past weekend I switched my blog over from WordPress to Octopress.

[Another in my series of posts on Vim] If you’re writing natural language text you may wish to format your paragraph so that the text wraps before lines get too long.

In a previous blog post we learned what a histogram is.

Jessica Hische has just published a very well written article on “why it’s ok to copy people to learn, but never ok to publish that work.”

[Another in my series of posts on Vim] Sometimes when you’re typing natural language text, you find yourself wanting to rephrase the sentence you’ve written so far.

A key aspect of good photography is exposure - the amount of light that enters the lens.

[Another in my series of posts on Vim] If you’re a developer, you will often find yourself having to insert a line of dashes or hashes (#) or asterisks into your comments.

Let’s say you have two text files, FileA and FileB.

I don’t like running unless I’m running towards something or away from something.

When I first learned how to exist on UNIX, in 1988, I used vi as my primary editor.

I’m trying to formulate a sensible strategy to overhaul my net presence.

Fire marks were used in the 1700s to designate homes or buildings protected by the fire insurance companies.

I hadn’t really given much thought to how the iPhone handles scrolling until I recently had to implement it myself.

Yesterday I started learning how to write applications for the iPad and the iPhone.

When I recently switched from the iPhone to HTC Evo running Android, I found the Evo’s Alarm Clock app surprisingly primitive.

When you’re working in Unix or Linux or even Mac OS X, there are often times when you need to apply the same command to a list of files.

In a earlier post I wrote about how important it is to have your data backed up.

Google reported yesterday that their search engine will now include a website’s speed in the list of factors it uses to decide how high to rank the site in its search results.

Wow.

SourceForge.net has a blog in which they feature a different hosted project every day.

A few day ago the data center where I used to host my name servers lost its connection to the Internet for a very long time (almost 36 hours).

Happy with my experience with a custom WordPress installation for this blog, I decided to try using the blogging platform for the TaskForest website.

I’m not a professional photographer.

I recently discovered David duChemin’s blog.

I remember in my first Computer Programming class in college, the instructors wanted to make sure we understood the concept of persistence by saving application data to disk.

The #grid website has a great tool for web designers -it “inserts a layout grid in web pages, allows you to hold it in place, and toggle between displaying it in the foreground or background.”

The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) has released their list of Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors.

Humans have been using rope as a tool for thousands of years, even before we started recording history.

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time jumping from project to project in a Linux shell.

In yesterday’s article about Google Buzz, I guessed that “the problem was that the population for whom the system was designed wasn’t necessarily the only population actually using the system.”

In the first few days after the release of Google Buzz many people (including myself) criticized Google for exposing their users’ private information.

I came across some comments made about an open source program that I had written in perl.

I had this dilemma a few days ago: I had taken almost 4,000 pictures during a vacation 12 months ago.

In a previous article we looked at how lenses work.

One of my favorite activities in spring, summer and even early autumn is sitting outdoors by a campfire.

When I first started dabbling in woodworking at the age of 15, the only tool I used to cut wood was an old, rusted woodsaw.

As of this past weekend it’s been fifteen years since I started my career as a software developer.

I’m interested in tinkering with High Dynamic Range photography, but before I get Photomatix, the software that’s recommended most often, I thought I’d try out a technique that’s a very crude approximation of HDR.

This is the first in a series of blog entries on photography.

As I walked along the Corniche, I saw a huge flock of gulls in one spot in the lagoon.

This boat looked out of place on the Khalid Lagoon by the Al Buhaira Corniche in Sharjah.

This picture was taken on my walk along the Sharjah Corniche on January 6th 2010, shortly after dawn.