I’ve subscribed to Dr Dobbs journal off and on for decades, probably for ten to 15 years in total. Wherever I turn in this house, I encounter stacks of old issues of DDJ, even though I’ve thrown away quite a number. A couple of years ago I stopped subscribing, since the main focus of DDJ [...]

Comment spam on a site like this is out of this world. Completely nuts. I just looked over the stats and this is what they look like: Click the image for a better look at it. No, you’re not misreading it, 99.27% of all comments I get are spam. Un-frickin-believable. Only between one and five [...]

Like this company X I know, in the vertical application business. Same as company Y and Z I also know in the vertical application business, all of them doing healthcare applications like record systems, pathology systems, etc. Doesn’t matter exactly what they do or who they are, they are all representative of how that entire [...]

I went to have my suit (yes, I do have one) dry cleaned. Looked up dry cleaners in Uppsala, found one that even had a web site. On the web site I found their address, used my GPS to go there, walked around the block with my iPhone until I very precisely located the exact [...]

I habitually block outbound connections to tracking services like google-analytics.com. (I use Little Snitch for this.) Just because I don’t like them. Recently I noticed I often can’t connect to youtube.com, getting “server not found” errors. Amazingly, once I let google-analytics through again, everything works. I haven’t verified exactly why this happens so I’m guessing [...]

Just a piece of warning: Seagate has a serious problem. It seems that some series of drives have total failures within the first couple of months. It is claimed that up to a third of the drives will fail this way. This is all due to a firmware problem, according to Seagate. I’ve heard rumours [...]

One of the supermarkets I go to used to have self-scanning handhelds based on Linux but recently changed to Windows CE based scanners instead. I have no idea why. Can’t be the resilience, since I saw at least as many disabled scanners as I used to see with the old ones, if not more. One [...]

So I had this old office chair that’s been with me since 1982. It was expensive back then, which explains why it lasted this long, but lately it’s become wobbly. The back rest seems not to know exactly what’s vertical and what’s not. Parts and padding are falling off every now and then. It’s a [...]

Browsing through the people LinkedIn recommends I should link to, people it thinks I may know, I just discovered that LinkedIn not only flags what people I may enjoy contacting, but it often clearly flags what people to avoid. There are a small number of people around that I’ve had a very bad experience with. [...]