DIY wins the day In the mid-90s, I was a college student, newly relegated to a dormitory room after having had ample room for my music endeavors at my parents’ home several hours across the state of Pennsylvania. What I lacked in space, I made up for in newly-acquired access to the wonderful World Wide Web of information. You see,…

Do experts teach best? I’ve taken the title of this post from one of the sub-topics in this article about learning to learn. The article makes several good points and is certainly worth a read, but I want to focus on one question that was brought up near the end of the article: who should teach? The article’s argument pointed…

Running a Linux GUI app on a headless machine We all know that several remote desktop solutions exist for Linux, the most popular being VNC . Sometimes I don’t want a full desktop login though – I just want to run a single application. Linux is able to do this by design, but we do have to install a piece…

Lazy css gradient hack I was creating a new site template for a website that I’m working on and I found myself in need of some gradient images for the header bar at the top of the page. I fired up Gimp and whipped up a png file to use for the top bar. As I progressed through the site…

Personal note taking and information management I have been meaning to write a series of posts related to how we use personal information and notes in our daily lives. I have been living and breathing this topic over the last few years, culminating in the development of Ubernote . I don’t even know where to begin with this expansive topic,…

Permission to not have the answers As I wind down the hours of 2009, I’m reflecting back on some of the themes that have popped up for me over the year. One theme that has been at the front of my mind is that of giving yourself permission. I haven’t really started writing about this, but I’ve been gestating the…

The web is the future of mobile computing too I’ve already blogged about Palm’s WebOS and mobile computing in general in the past, but I saw something today that really excited me. Palm announced that they are introducing a fully web-based development environment for PalmOS called ` Project Ares ‘. Palm has already embraced the Web full-on as their platform…

Balancing sponsorships and authenticity I was reading a small, relatively unknown blog the other day while looking for some pointers on setting up eBay accounts. Within a minute or so of reading, I realized that the entire point of this blog’s existence was for link bait, referral links, and cross-promotion. I clicked through a few more articles just to make…

Git newline handling between platforms Previously, I had written/complained about the way that the Git version control system handled newline characters. I wanted to update that with some new information here. The cause of my frustration back then was that I hadn’t created my working copy correctly. I had been under the assumption that since each Git repository is a…

Separating syntax and semantics I’ve been a fan of so-called `curly-brace’ languages for most of my programming career. I’ve gone from C to C++ to C# and Java. Somewhere along the way I fell in love with Javascript. I’ve dabbled a bit with languages like Perl and certainly done a fair bit of Posix shell scripting, although I never really…