UI Horror: No-Paste Password Fields
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 …
Kindle for Technical Reading
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 …
Updating an Amazon Linux AMI to Python 2.7
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 …
Alert Camera Gadget
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 …
The Holiday Amazon Box Problem
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 …
I want my webOS
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 …
Batch File Libraries
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 …
Sprint Makes Me Laugh
I got this flyer from Sprint. I wonder if they wrote that "protecting more than ever before" with a straight face or what.
OK, Maybe TurboTax Is Worth It
I was a bit of a masochist this year. I actually did my federal taxes twice, trying to figure out if there is a cheaper alternative to using TurboTax. But TurboTax, in spite of costing more, ended up being the cheaper option by a long shot.
The whole United States …
Suppressing CA1062 with a Helper Function
I think Visual Studio's static analysis warning for checking parameters for null before they are used is generally a good idea, but the code to check the parameters can get really tedious.
Before addressing the tedium, though, why does it even matter whether you check for null arguments and throw …