Articles by Eric

I can't figure this one out...

By Eric

It is true that I'm a fan of Orson Scott Card -- Ender's Game is one of my favorite books. The relationship to professional wrestling generated by Amazon's recommendation engine is... puzzling.

Customers interested in Orson Scott Card should be interested in WWE

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Handy Tax Tip

By Eric

Kind of off-topic for this blog, but since it is tax day, I thought I'd share this handy tax tip that I found at the IRS website in a document titled "How long should I keep records?"

For all of you folks out there that file fraudulent returns -- if you …

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UI Horror: No-Paste Password Fields

By Eric

Sure, it makes sense to disallow copying passwords from a password field, but disabling pasting is just being annoying.

News flash for developers doing this (such as Intuit, in TurboTax): I'm not thrilled about manually typing my 20 character random password. Just let me copy it from my password vault …

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Kindle for Technical Reading

By Eric — 2 minute read

I've read several novels in Amazon Kindle format (on an actual Kindle device, the PC client, or an iPad), and the experience is pretty good. But having now finished reading a technical book that way, I think it's not quite there yet.

The book I read is Jez Humble and …

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Updating an Amazon Linux AMI to Python 2.7

By Eric — 2 minute read

I've been doing some work with Linux lately, a new thing for me, and feel a bit like I've been thrown into the deep end and told to swim. Today I updated Python to version 2.7 on an EC2 instance.

Amazon Linux (Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2011.09 …

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Alert Camera Gadget

By Eric — 1 minute read

Download

Download Gadget
Version 0.8.0 (beta)
26 Sep 2012
Around 74 KB

The Alert Camera Gadget lets you keep an eye on your Logitech Alert cameras by rotating through snapshots (still images) from all the cameras associated with your account. This gadget is not provided by or supported …

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The Holiday Amazon Box Problem

By Eric — 1 minute read

By the time Christmas comes around, our house is usually awash with boxes from Amazon. It gets a bit tricky at that point, because I'm never sure if the box is something I ordered to give to my family, or something someone else sent me as a gift. In the …

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I want my webOS

By Eric — 3 minute read

It's become fairly clear that HP is not webOS' savior. It's also unlikely that webOS can come back from the dead for the second time. But it makes me sad, since webOS and its devices hit a sweet spot that no one managed to exploit.

The currently winning smartphone platforms …

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Batch File Libraries

By Eric — 2 minute read

I've always considered batch files as kind of ghetto. Anything too complex devolves into a morass of gotos and labels. But I recently put together some install batch scripts that I was actually pleased with, including a clean mechanism for sharing common code.

A while back, I used WiX to …

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Sprint Makes Me Laugh

By Eric

I got this flyer from Sprint. I wonder if they wrote that "protecting more than ever before" with a straight face or what.

Protecting more than ever before

New program? \$1 more!

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