When Google Voice stopped receiving my SMS messages, I was reminded how bad support can be for non-paying customers.

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Nobody likes getting ripped off, and I’m no exception. I search the web from time to time to see who’s copying my stuff, and it’s always a little disheartening. This week I ran a check to see who was copying my 20-year old LZW Compression article. Mind you, I’m not talking about isolated quotes taken [...]

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I spent a pretty big chunk of the 80′s and 90′s toiling away on Greenl af Commlib, a C/C++ library that provided support for RS-232 communications on MS-DOS and Windows machines. Despite the fact that serial communications ports were standard issue on IBM-compatible PCs, Microsoft provide little or no support for their use under MS-DOS [...]

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This semester I’m teaching a class on Linux/UNIX, and am enjoying it immensely. With every lecture I’m reminded that you simply never stop finding new tools and tricks to use in an O/S that is now well into middle age. One of my midterm questions from last week was a basic query regarding filename expansion [...]

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Email-based reminder services are a handy tool for keeping track of pending activities. I recently gave a try to a service called FollowUpThen. It works by simply sending an email to a specific address in the followupthen.com domain, which then creates a reminder. Examples on their web page include: 3hours@followupthen.com tomorrow@followupthen.com 11am@followupthen.com

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Microsoft has added a new keyword to C# as part of the 4.0 release earlier this year. Objects that are typed as dynamic bypass normal static type checking, allowing C# to have the flexibility of other scripting languages. This is all well and good, but the headline writers of the blogosphere have taken a decided [...]

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The New York Times has an interesting article today examining the curious fact that certain types of terrorist organizations have an unusually high ratio of engineers among their members. An interesting point to study, no doubt, but what caught my eye was this little blunder: William A. Wulf, a former president of the National Academy [...]

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One of the annoying things that old school Artificial Intelligence researchers have to deal with is the fact that simple brute force is such a daunting foe. Back in the dawn era of the field, attempts to replicate human thought processes used deductive reasoning, symbolic representation, and incremental learning to solve problems. As an example, [...]

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Not understanding some basic rules of mathematics or logic can be a problem if you are a computer programmer. It can stand in the way of a good solution to a problem, or worse yet, can cause you to spend a lot of time working on a dead end. In the case of New Zealand [...]

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You may have never heard of Vinay Deolalikar, but there is a chance that he may become next year’s Turing Award winner, not to mention an overnight millionaire. It seems that Vinay dropped the news at the start of this week that he had proven that P does not equal NP. In short, this proof [...]

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