Author Archives: molecularbear
Book Fail
Whenever I try to read science fiction lately I find myself thwarted by my own expectations. Over the years I’ve been paging through the Nebula and Hugo award-winners, apparently setting my literary demands higher and higher with each read. Here … Continue reading
PHP zlib.output_compression fails to set Content-Encoding
This is what the PHP docs say about the zlib.output_compression INI directive: Whether to transparently compress pages. If this option is set to “On” in php.ini or the Apache configuration, pages are compressed if the browser sends an “Accept-Encoding: gzip” … Continue reading
Mediawiki extension WTFs
Had a number of WTF moments when looking for a wiki2pdf type of Mediawiki extension. I came across Pdf Export which seemed to be what I wanted. But as I looked over the extension, the WTFs began to pile up: … Continue reading
Tethering the Centro: A Tale of Failure
I guess I can see it both ways on the subject of tethering. Verizon wants to charge $15 per month on top of my “unlimited” data plan to allow me to use my Centro as a mobile broadband card. There … Continue reading
Palm Centro battery drains in flaky coverage
Maybe Verizon doesn’t have any “dead zones”, but one of my workplaces has what I’ll call a Maelstrom Zone. Even though I’m stationary within the Maelstrom, the Centro seems to bounce back and forth between a Verizon network and an … Continue reading
Fantasy football non-lessons learned in 2008
I just lost Week 15 which means I’m out of the Championship game and will be playing for third place. I sort of choked because I made a bunch of lineup tweaks and started these guys: QB Shaun Hill [10 … Continue reading
Averatec 2300 series sucks
So, user comes to me with a two-year-old Averatec 2300 laptop that “won’t boot”. He’d had some weirdness with his XP install before so I went in thinking the OS was messed up somehow. But once I actually got the … Continue reading
I found XMMS again!
These past few years I’ve been frustrated with the media players that modern Linux distros have been pushing. I have my music organized nicely in a familiar directory structure and I usually just want to play an album. I don’t … Continue reading
TortoiseSVN “connection closed unexpectedly”
This burned several hours of my time so I thought I’d add this post to the others that I found on the Intertron. I had debugged every possible angle when trying to get a Vista machine to checkout a repo … Continue reading
FOSS in the workplace: FAIL x 3
While I run Linux on the servers and IT workstations, I’m always looking for opportunities to deploy the OS and FOSS in general in a “user” context. I’ve made three attempts that all failed: The Web Browser: after an employee … Continue reading