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Doing some estimations
This is again one of those topics which I like to rant about, so I give you the short version: when you see a number, question it! Most of the numbers thrown at us in different media can be disproven quite easily and it is our responsibility as people not to just repeat whatever we’ve…
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Audio quality
This is just one of those topics which comes up from time to time in my life (probably because I consume a lot of media). I was recently watching the Jim Zemlin interviewed by Jeremy Allison (Jim Zemlin is the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation) on the Google Open Source YouTube channel and was…
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Sorry for the malware warning!
If you have tried to visit my blog recently, you might have to a warning like this from your webbrowser: Warning: Something’s Not Right Here! hype-free.blogspot.com contains content from randaclay.com , a site known to distribute malware. Your computer might catch a virus if you visit this site. … The source of the warning is…
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mytrendyphone.co.uk review
My assignment – which I choose to accept 🙂 – was to review a mobile accessories site, namely mytrendyphone.co.uk. All the signs for this site check out: It was registered a couple of years ago and didn’t move around much It has several real seals (real meaning that they are linked to the originating site,…
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Setting up IMAP with Yahoo! Mail
I’m a long time Yahoo Mail user. Just to illustrate how long I’ve been with them: when I joined the space available was a couple of MBs! I staid with them because I was mostly satisfied (never really caught the GMail bug), however recently I started looking for options to consolidate the different email accounts…
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Manually enabling IP routing in Windows XP
While Internet Connection Sharing is a nifty tool, there are some cases where you would like to do the steps manually. One such case would be if the “primary” network is already using the 192.168.0.1/24 address space, since ICS is hardcoded (as far as I can tell) to use the same network. One concrete case…
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Is hand-writing assembly still necessary these days?
Some time ago I came over the following article: Fast CRC32 in Assembly. It claimed that the assembly implementation was faster than the one implemented in C. Performance was always something I’m interested in, so I repeated and extended the experiment. Here are the numbers I got. This is on a Core 2 Duo T5500…
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How to quickly start up a webserver with Python
Sometimes you need to quickly start up a webserver that serves up static files (I will describe such a case in the next post). Python to the rescue (works on both Linux and Windows if you have Python installed): For Python 2.x (this is what most sites show you): python -m SimpleHTTPServer 9914 For Python…
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Why you should use 0.0.0.0 in your hosts file – redux
Some time ago I (wow, time files!) I suggested that using 0.0.0.0 for host-file based blocklists would be faster than using 127.0.0.1. Above you can see an other reason for using 0.0.0.0: some applications take up port 80 on the localhost and accessing it can (potentially) create havoc. In the example above TeamViewer (which is…
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Augmenting Log4J stack traces with class versions
If you have multiple versions of your code in production, it is extremely useful for the log to include the version of the classes when producing a stacktrace, otherwise it is very hard to match the lines in the stacktrace with the lines of the source code (sidenote: there is an optimization in the Sun…