Arizona’s State Bill 1062 has stirred up some controversy. The gist of the bill is that business owners will be able to refuse service to customers on the basis of religion without fear of lawsuit. Religion, being a highly subjective thing (in the view of a non-religious person like myself), means refusal for virtually any reason at all. In particular, critics of this bill respond to the intent of some business owners to refuse service based on sexual orientation. Some particularly passionate individual created the image shown here, message atop the Arizona flag, presumably to inform the general public that not all Arizonans support this bill. Continue reading
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Do you plan a trip to the field? Need to be able to range targets, but don’t want to carry specialized rangefinding equipment? Such questions get asked often around the internet, but most people say it can’t be done without a mil-dot or rangefinding scope reticle and a set of mathematical formulas – often requiring a calculator, if you want reasonable precision – to compute distances. I’m writing to tell you that there is a much simpler way, faster and with little or no math, which is just about as effective, and requires only one very common shooter’s tool that you probably already own and carry on every trip to the field.
In my early days of geekhood, I was a part of the “wannabe hacker” crowd and, in my efforts to become a 1337 h4x0r, wrote a handful of programs for various purposes as my first foray into programming. Though of little value to me in my current activities, I thought I’d post them for others to use or admire. They were all programed in 1999-2000, give or take a year. No installation necessary, just un7zip and run. You may need the Visual Basic 6 runtime libraries. I do not have the source codes, but should I ever stumble upon them, I will post them here. Continue reading
On my home server is a “public” directory, where my users are able to place common files without eating into their own disk quota. The main problem I encountered in setting this up was that, when different users would write to this directory, the files would retain original ownership so that it still counted against their quotas, and others could not modify or delete them. Unfortunately, Linux does not have a simple way of enforcing recursive ownership/permissions. Continue reading
CrystalMark 2004R3 is a great free benchmarking tool for basic comparisons. Unfortunately, there’s no centralized database of results. I have been in the situation of Googling around to get benchmark comparisons on a CPU that I think has potential, but the scores that bloggers and reviewers post are often questionable and details incomplete. Therefore, here is a list of systems I have benchmarked with CrystalMark, including their specs, OS, and their categorical scores. In the future, rather than making new posts, I will add to this over time as I benchmark more systems. Continue reading
Ever wanted to have an old-school stock ticker on your website, like the kind you see at the bottom of certain news programs? Maybe for a financial blog, or a personalized search portal? If you have had this need, but don’t have much programming experience, you have probably run into a few problems. The easy way of using a pre-made java or flash applet is near impossible, as free ones are difficult to find, and they still require that you have the quote data stored locally on the server that will be hosting the ticker. To do that, you’d need a system of retrieving quote data and storing it on your server – but if you could do that, you probably wouldn’t need the java/flash applet, as you could just include the stock data in your page using super simple PHP or CGI, and then scroll it with a HTML marquee tag. Continue reading
nbench (source) is a great free Linux benchmarking tool for basic processor comparisons on Linux. Despite its utility, nbench is not a popular tool among reviewers and tech bloggers. Therefore, I have kept this list of results that I have collected, for reference. I will add to this over time as I benchmark more systems. Continue reading