Experiments in making money online

Is it possible to make money on the internet, if you try really hard? I want to find out. I have always been interested in getting money for doing nothing.

A little VIM hacking

Installing the Latest Debian on an Ancient Laptop

The challenge: Install Linux on a really old laptop. The catch: It has only 32 MB of RAM, no network ports, no CD-ROM, and the floppy drive makes creaking noises. Is it possible? Yes. Is it easy? No. Is is useful? Maybe...

Boring Date (comic)

The PenIsland Problem: Text-to-speech for domain names

Recently, I was contracted to run a list of domain names through the custom-built pronunciation engine that powers my rhyming web site. On the first attempt, I found that the results were embarrassingly bad. A quick inspection revealed the problem: most domain names are severalwordsstucktogether.

barcamp (comic)

When programmers design web sites (comic)

Compress your JSON with automatic type extraction

JSON is horribly inefficient data format for data exchange between a web server and a browser. Here's how you can fix it.

Rules for Effective C++

The rules for safe C++ code are surprisingly controversial.

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.