Author Archives: michael

Neither Sony nor Hulu are Internet Service Providers, so you might wonder how they can be involved in the Net Neutrality dispute. Let me explain how they relate. I purchased Hulu Plus today, with the understanding that a Hulu Plus … Continue reading →

I’ve been working on a library of sorting functions implemented in Bash. Mostly I’ve been using the algorithms from “Mastering Algorithms in Perl” by Jon Orwant, Jarkko Hietaniemi, and John Macdonald.

Just a quick note to show off a weird discovery I made. Check this CSS-only page out in Firefox. [Update: this was true with the latest stable Firefox at the time of posting. It doesn’t seem to be true with … Continue reading →

I wanted to see if it’s possible to use xslt to sort an xml document in an order specified by another document. It is, but I’m not satisfied with my solution yet. The problem is it takes too many iterations … Continue reading →

I drew up a quick note on how to handle CSS child selection, even though it’s not properly supported by Internet Explorer 6.

In response to eWeek’s review of a few Linux distributions. [Update: eweek link no longer available?] This sort of review (and there are a lot of them) is misleading because there’s no sense making a comparison between the release schedules … Continue reading →

Here is a perl script that interacts with mplayer on the commandline to rip DVDs to an iPod-usable format. It is untested so if it breaks something, sorry.

I had an interesting discussion with Joyce’s parents about the current state of North Korea. That led to a discussion of their childhood in Cultural Revolution China. It’s frightening how effective brainwashing is. Joyce’s mom said everyone at that time … Continue reading →

I have two Macs, three Windows machines, and a Linux box. My hosting company uses FreeBSD. Therefore I feel somewhat qualified to discuss multiplatform development and administration. I’m not impressed with Windows Vista. It doesn’t really seem to bring anything … Continue reading →

SSH has been a world-class solution for secure administration over untrusted networks since its inception. Remote administration connectivity tools fall into two categories: Commandline and graphical. (SSH transcends this boundary and is well able to handle graphical administration, but that’s … Continue reading →