When should you make the effort to learn something? It’s a question of investment strategy regarding time, energy and, not infrequently, money. One approach is to assess if the learning can be put off until just prior to its anticipated time of need, and if so, do that. This follows the wisdom that you should wait to invest until waiting any longer ( Read more... )

I was upgrading Virtualbox on an XP host the other day and it seemed to stall toward the end. I hit “Cancel” and nothing happened, but when I logged off it politely rolled back its changes and quit. I tried it again, same thing. Then I realized I had dropbox running, closed it, and the upgrade carried on to completion. I’m guessing this is because ( Read more... )

echo “This goes to the clipboard” > /dev/clipboard

It’s that simple… usually. For some reason some program output going to STDOUT doesn’t end up there. There is a simple fix, that being to pipe it through cat first:

echo “This goes to the clipboard” | cat > /dev/clipboard

Originally published at BeyondLogical.net/blog. Please leave any comments ( Read more... )

Upon upgrading to 3.2.8 and re-starting a client you might get an error message such as:
“differencing image not associated with parent”
“differencing but not associated with any parent in media registry”
“Parent medium with UUID x not found in media registry”

For some reason, inaccurate info ended up in your vdi file. VB is now more strict, and ( Read more... )

The Soladey-J3X [toothbrush] has a solar panel at its base that transmits electrons to the top of the toothbrush through a lead wire. The electrons react with acid in the mouth, creating a chemical reaction that breaks down plaque and kills bacteria. The toothbrush requires no toothpaste, and can operate with about the same amount of light as ( Read more... )

Suppose you want to take a picture of yourself laying down in the mud in front of a bulldozer. What side should the bulldozer be on when you take the picture?

Does the directionality of a person’s primary writing system (left-to-right, top-to-bottom for English) affect the way in which they take in other compositions, such as a photo or painting, ( Read more... )

Due to (a bug in) the way fonts are rendered in the “SQL Query Area” of the MySQL Query Browser[1], most of the fonts available end up looking clipped. Beyond aesthetics, you might want to change the default font due to its lack of support for UTF-8 characters. You can change the “Code Font” choice under Tools > Options > General Options.
I prefer ( Read more... )

It’s not just an admonishment, it’s the name of a project I maintain at code.google.com.

test-more-php version 0.1 is out now and ready to help prevent hours of debugging with so little effort it’s ridiculous not to use it. The API is a direct port of the popular Perl Test-More library with some minor PHP adaptations. Both object and procedural ( Read more... )

The title of this post at dagolden.com really struck me. The post, about a new CPAN client that doesn’t mimic the “swiss army chainsaw” mentality of the Perl community’s approach to software design, is apt in its critique not only of the project itself, but of its reception by the community. There is a religious type zeal some people express when ( Read more... )

This talk by Douglas Crockford, standard bearer of JSON, is an interesting history lesson on JSON’s origins. Douglas provides plenty of amusing perspective on JSON’s position as the popular data interchange format it has become and the landscape it evolved in. He seems to enjoy taking a “heretical” perspective, which is usually more fun to listen ( Read more... )