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Hello World!

The start of the new year. A good time to update my Web site and to start this blog. This site is generated using XSLT and some Perl code. It uses valid XHTML and CSS.

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iPhoto slideshows to iDVD

I was creating a video DVD of some wedding photos I had taken. I was using iPhoto and iDVD, but found the video it generated was suboptimal because it generated video at the wrong resolution and frame...

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Security tips for the rest of us

Computer security is hard. Technical people have a hard time keeping up with all the issues, so what is the average computer going to do? The Security Now, podcast #229 describes a few simple rules...

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diff utilities

I've been reading the documentation for the diff command on Unix and have discovered lots of powerful options in it. The diff command can show the changes side by side. You will need a very wide...

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Storing Cygwin on an ISO image to install in a Parallels VM

Store Cygwin on an ISO image for easy re-installation onto virtual machines. I'm installing Cygwin onto a Parallels virtual machine. I wanted to download Cygwin and its packages only once, and to...

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Cygwin rxvt: a better terminal

After installing Cygwin (a very powerful Unix like environument for Microsoft Windows) I usually set up my home directory and create a shortcut to rxvt. I make the Windows "My Documents" directory my...

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Creating iTunes audiobooks with chapters

I downloaded the MP3 version of Free: The future of a radical price and wanted to create an iTunes audiobook of it. An audiobook is more convenient because it will appear as one item with multiple...

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Changing file line endings and encodings in emacs

Text files on Unix systems use a single line feed character (LF, 0x0A) to indicate the end of a line. Text files on MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows uses a carrage return plus line feed pair (CR-LF, 0x0D...

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Consumer password worst practices

How strong are your passwords? Despite lots of warnings, people still use weak passwords. In December 2009, a cracker posted 32 million passwords onto the Internet. A security firm (Imperiva)...

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Controlling URL line breaking with zero-width spaces

Line breaks for URLs often occur where you don't want them to. The solution is to use a zero-width space to suggest where it could have a line break. In HTML, a zero width space can be represnted as...

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QR codes

I've been experimenting with QR codes. These are a two dimensional bar codes that can contain a URL, phone number, email address, vCard contact information, location, SMS message, calendar event, or...

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Khan Academy

Here's an example of someone making good use of this new media. Salman Khan has created thousands of short videos to teach students everything from simple mathematics through to university science....

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File Set Diff

I wrote a utility to compare files from two directories. A friend had a large directory of photos on their computer and some of it was backed up to an external hard disk. We suspected that some photos...

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TLS renegotiation security vulnerability

In November 2009, a security vulnerability in TLS was announced. This affects nearly all implementatations of TLS, but the IETF is working quickly at revising the TLS specification to address the...

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DIY passport photos

I'm getting my passport renewed, but why should I pay for a simple instant photo when I can take my own with a better quality camera? It is easy to take a digial photo and to crop and scale it to the...

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Reality becoming a game?

IEEE Spectrum has an article about a presentation that they called The most disturbing presentation of the year. Games designer Jesse Schell describes at DICE 2010 a future where everything we do is...

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Telecommuting productivity

Telecommuting is often portrayed as the great innovation and if only unenlightened companies and managers would permit more of it the world would be a better place. However, something is lost: tacit...

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How good is facial recognition technolgy?

I recently renewed my passport and got one of the new ePassports which allows me to use the SmartGate passport control. This system uses facial recognition technology for self-processing at the border...

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Colour TV myths

Tempted to buy a new fancy flat-screen TV? Don't be. Read the Goodbye CRT article that was published in IEEE Spectrum. The article was written back in 2006, but its description of the pros and cons of...

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Newton's Y2K10 problem

The Apple iPad was released in Australia (as well as many other countries) today, but it is interesting to remember its ancestor--the Apple Newton. The Apple Newton was the original device that...

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