Hacks Blog

Would you rather be a lucky hacker or a smart hacker? 14 years ago
We've got this silly tendency to glamorize the concept of being irreplaceable. "Yay!" you say, "I can be so cool that, even if I have a bad day, the company will lay every other engineer off before they get rid of me! I'm irreplaceable!" This is often about luck. Being the last guy to actually…

Unlike the rest of America, I'm not eating enough salt... 14 years ago
I've been feeling kinda cruddy for the past few weeks. I'm better now. The story of this is a bit interesting, however... Heart disease runs on both sides of my family. And, on one side, it's not "normal" heart disease. As such, growing up, my mother always fed us a low-sodium diet. And so I never…

The iPad 15 years ago
I, of course, didn't pay for my iPad. Which kinda blows the cost-effectiveness argument out the window for me. And along these lines, if iPads were to grow on trees, I'd pick at least a half dozen of them to be distributed through my living space. Because that's how cool they are.

Keyboards vs. Whatever 15 years ago
Ever have a discussion between somebody where you described something of crucial importance to you and had them shrug their shoulders back at you? I'm realizing that, as far as phone input goes, it's kind of like that. As far as I can tell, either you care, vehemently, about having the fastest…

Unsorted iPad and Android thoughts 15 years ago
I got an iPad at work as a reward for exactly how above-and-beyond I've gone. Which is coincidentally not very long after I got myself a Motorola Droid and said a number of things about Steve Jobs' mother to Ajit. Which now means that Ajit got a lot of joy out of congratulating me on acquiring my…

The Apple II rule 15 years ago
After getting the Apple II emulator going on my Droid and noticing that most of my phones and laptops and desktops have been able to emulate them, I''d like to propose a simple rule: All useful computing devices must be able to emulate an Apple IIe (or Commodore 64, for that matter). If you aren't…

I finally got a Droid 15 years ago
Because you know the only reason why the PADDs on Star Trek beeped was to keep Worf from playing Doom 97 while Riker droned on...

Last person out of the Windows Mobile world, remember to turn the lights off 15 years ago
One thing that distinguishes a good leader from a poor one is that, in the midst of the situation, they are able to make a tough call instead of choking and not deciding anything. It's easy to armchair quarterback. Be should have done this. Amiga should have done that. If Atari and Amiga had…

Upgrading major versions of PostgreSQL with Debian or Ubuntu 15 years ago
One problem with PostgreSQL as compared to MySQL is that PostgreSQL is a real database, whereas MySQL is a bunch of hacks. This means that PostgreSQL doesn't let you just drop a new version of the executable on an old database file. Which is pretty much the way that real databases prefer to work…

Little bit o' Droid-lust 15 years ago
My VX6800 has been falling apart, of late. Since nothing out there was really impressing me enough to spend money, I took it to the Verizon store, complained about how the keyboard wasn't working, allowed the rep to test the phone to verify that it was, in fact, not working, and got a new…