On Friday, I was at work participating in a demo before an audience of a half-dozen decision makers. It's such an important demo that this was the dry-run for the demo, where we're taking notes to prepare for the Big Demo next week. I participate in demos regularly, so I'm familiar with all the […]
Yes, I agree that Premature Optimization is the Root of All Evil, at least within the programming paradigm where this concept arises, and likely true in a much broader concept also. If you're a developer, and you think about it (just stumbled on this idea here, your search engine will give you more […]
It should be easier to change your scrollbar back from the ridiculous default, where it disappears into a tiny vertical slice that only reappears when you hover over the thin vertical slice (!) which is such bad UI design, it's probably intentional. Normal people have clamored for years to get rid […]
Einstein said time is an illusion; funny, because he also merged time and space together to create timespace for his early theories. Was he confused? Not really, just contemplating concepts that had gotten more clear over time. Time is not an illusion "because the past and future are happening […]
This came up while trying to load a disassembled project that was then reassembled with dnSpy, but you may find it for other reasons. If you encounter this error: C:\Users\Me\source\repos\MyRecompiledProject.Web\MyRecompiledProject.Web.csproj : error : A numeric comparison was attempted on […]
My computer just crashed itself, according to Microsoft policy, right while I was working on it. I'm up at 1:00 a.m. working on a project with a complex enough work environment that it takes an hour just to get the work environment fully functional. I have over two dozen tabs open in my browser, I'm […]
Taking the Shortcut by W. H. Norton Moving from binary logic to ternary logic is harder than from ternary to binary. Today I suddenly realized this, and was delighted because it solves one of the deeper "why" questions on the prevalence of binary logic, which is everywhere, in everything […]
I was pleased to find this blog entry with a handy list of all the shortcut aliases you'd ever need for gandi's webmail approach. It also has a nice explanation of the issue, but as I will never use an email starting with a number, I was able to half the list. Here it is, 676 items, which is 26x26, […]
This seemingly-useful link on askubuntu did not work as I wanted, and neither did a few other similar sites. Trying to make it easy for the end user took longer than the 5 minutes I had available, so I'm posting the correct way to do it here for future use. The key missing ingredient was provided in […]
Long ago I was puzzled at references to unicorns in the Bible, and after thinking about it for a while, decided that the descriptions that accompanied unicorns -- a massive, powerful creature that was shaped like a bull and associated with the tribe of Ephraim -- made more sense applied to the […]
You tried to connect to your own Nukkit server running on Pteradactyl. However, it failed quickly and you got this message: "logged out due to Outdated server." You look in the logs for more information, and that's all the logs show, also: "logged out due to Outdated server." So […]
I originally wrote this for a particular person to read, but in a style which looked like it was for everyone. He is from an older generation who prefers to teach rather than to listen. We have known each other for decades. I know from long experience that if I wrote to him directly, as I do in most […]
I call my weblog "Rough Drafts" even though some of the entries are fairly well polished, published after weeks or even months of careful writing and editing before release. But in other entries, I write wild stream-of-consciousness gagompoofery like this. This one is so rough it's right […]
I found a fix for that here. I wrote about it here: Configuration for FreeBSD inside VirtualBox with Gnome3, sudo, nano, and bash, including avoiding the black screen Here's the TL;DR answer in a screenshot: […]
Coming into FreeBSD anew from the Linux world. I'm happy with it as a server, no changes needed. I like the much-more-secure ambiance. But now experimenting with it as a desktop, I've already decided I like sudo, bash, and nano better than su, sh, and ee. And I want Gnome. At this point, I've […]
Got it. Been working on this one for a while, I've seen it in glimpses over the years, but it just fell into place. Infinity is the backside of zero. Just like a quarter has a heads and a tails, this thing I've been calling "the origin" for a long time has a heads and a tails. This idea is […]
(I sometimes craft my headlines to be search-engine-friendly, which is why they sometimes look odd in person). If you have multiple VirtualBox images running in Ubuntu or similar Debian-based flavors of Linux, you know it can be frustrating to switch between the different images using the favorites […]
On Debian flavors like Ubuntu, apt and dpkg default to starting a service as soon as it is installed. This is almost always a good idea, but I ran into the strange problem that the service was misconfigured. Starting it was not a good thing. Stopping and re-configuring it after it started was not […]
An out-of-the-box install of Ubuntu 18.04.5 at Digital Ocean will not work for a SecurityOnion installation, because of the way cloud-init is managing the network. Security Onion prefers NetworkManager to manage the network. Cloud-init is required by Digital Ocean for deployment of a custom image. […]
Digital Ocean cannot deploy a Custom Image larger than 100Gb. Security Onion requires 200Gb to install. To workaround the Digital Ocean limitation, create a 100Gb custom image of Ubuntu, configured with only three partitions: /boot, /, and /tmp. (Leaving out /nsm and swap requirements for the […]