Hello kids. Yes, if you are writing applications for consumer companies, there's a good chance I'm talking to you. We need to have a talk, urgently. It's about a whole new way of doing things, and it's a new word in your dictionary. The word is "secure" (linked to Webster's for your convenience. Security is a …

Today I listened to a podcast called "For Mac Eyes Only", in which people were complaining about how Time Machine does not work "the way they want it to". I think this is utter crap, and I will explain why. To start off, I think I am safe to say that 99% of the people complaining about Time …

Last week, I hapily installed OSX 10.5 (Leopard) on my trusty Mac Mini. The upgrade from Tiger went without a hitch, and the system even got a bit "snappier". For a week, I had no major issues with Leopard. The Dock dissapeared once, and I had a non-reacting keyboard once when waking from sleep mode. Other …

If you are using luntbuild for your continuous integration builds at work, you probably want to remove anonymous user access. In stead of adding that feature to the administrator "Properties" page where I'd expect it, you have to hack the Spring configuration in the webapps directory of luntbuild. Sigh. Here …

A few weeks ago, my Dad and my Brother both bought identical Windows Vista machines, at the same shop, at the same time. Although the hardware specs of these computers were terrific, the performance of Windows Vista was "moderate" to say the least. An even bigger problem was that some of the older XP programs …

For those people out there designing user interfaces, web frontends or anything else displayed on a screen: About 8% of all males are color blind. This could mean that because of a simple color choice, 8% of your target audience (customers) could have serious difficulty in using your design. 5% of all males can't …

Hi, just a quick reminder to myself and users of the AFP protocol (Apple File Protocol) who are wondering why it is not working. For some strange reason, if you start messing (deleting) the "Public" folder of any user which is on the system providing the AFP share, you will break the AFP protocol. I just …

It is a long time since I read this stuff, but I stumbled upon a paper discussing the non-executable stack on OSX (a trick to prevent buffer/stack overflow exploits). Ah, the good old days. And with all this markup, it's good to see that Phrack magazine stuck to their format. It's still the same as over 20 years ago... …

Just found this funny page where you can take a Programmer Personality Check. My programmer personality type is DHTB, which is explained as follows: _ You're a Doer. You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the …

Seth Godin did a talk at Google campus in Februari last year. I recently stumbled upon this video of his talk, in which he explains to the Google people why Google sells. He is very clear in explaining to technology people that technology does not sell. It's technology that gives you a shot at marketing, nothing more. …