Optimizing Ubuntu to run from a USB key or SD card

Fortunately, by following the tips below, you can make your USB or SD card based linux system fly!

Building a better rhyming dictionary

Back in 2007, I created a rhyming engine based on the public domain Moby pronouncing dictionary. It simply reads the dictionary and looks for rhyming words by comparing the suffix of the words' pronunciations. Since that time, I have made some improvements.

[comic] Appreciation of xkcd comics vs. technical ability

Drawing Graphs with Physics

To my surprise, I found that there is a very simple way to arrange graphs that can be expressed in only a few lines of code, using force-directed placement...

UMA Questions Answered

A bunch of questions answered about UMA wireless technology.

The Curious Complexity of Being Turned On

In software, the simplest things can turn into a nightmare, especially at a large company.

Finding awesome developers in programming interviews

In a job interview, I once asked a very experienced embedded software developer to write a program that reverses a string and prints it on the screen. He struggled with this basic task. This man was awesome. Give him a bucket of spare parts, and he could build a robot and program it to navigate around the room. He had worked on satellites that are now in actual orbit. He could have coded circles around me. But the one thing that he had never, ever needed to do was: display something on the screen.

UMA's dirty secrets

Recently, many carriers have started offering UMA, or WiFi phones. These are cell phones with WiFi capabilites. Don't be fooled -- you won't be able to get free calls and run skype on them. The UMA technology is meant to extend the carrier's cellular network into your home using your broadband internet connection.

Regular Expression Matching can be Ugly and Slow

If you open the first few pages of O'Reilly's Beautiful Code, you will find a well written chapter by Brian Kernighan (Personal motto: "No, I didn't invent C. Who told you that?"). The non-C inventing professor describes how a limited form of regular expressions can be implemented elegantly in only a few lines of C code.

"Your program is stupid. It doesn't work," my wife told me