Julie Inlow of the University of Maryland has recently interviewed me about FOSS, for her research. I decided to publish this interview in the hope that somebody else may find it interesting, as well. I strongly believe in the open-source. If this posting helps at least one person to consider FOSS more seriosuly, I will...

New Mac ads are out. Check them out and have fun :) http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Do you know how many microseconds are there in a nanosecond? You thought it was 10^-3^, eh? Heh, think twice and no, I have not gone nuts. At least, not yet. Read on. More seriously, what am I ranting about, here? Time precision in Java, is the topic. Today, I needed to profile a process which...

There are several GUI programs allowing different “tricks” on OS X but one of the tricks - enabling Debug menu in Safari, is too easy to require an extra mile of installing a GUI application. Debug menu in Safari delivers a wealth of additional information, essential for web developers, web designers and other enthusiasts. Using...

Roman Mittermayr wrote an awesome article about main trends of Web 2.0 and what makes a website design Web 2.0-ish. Highly recommended reading.

Say you have a user account on server1 and want to create user on server2 with the same credentials, but you do not actually know the password of that user. on server1, you can see the encoded version of the password with: > grep username /etc/shadow | awk -F: {‘print $2’} and then create user...

I was just reading Valachi Papers and one passage was too funny not to share. I hope you will enjoy it as well :) The passage starts by describing a Senate hearings of one Valachi, the first Cosa Nostra insider that gave informatio to FBI, the person who actually first confirmed that the name of the...

To be honest, good programming books are very rare. I doubt it would take more than two digit number to count great ones. If you think about it, with thousands of books coming out every year (or maybe even month) that is very, very few. The bookshelves are mostly bloated with wanna-be magicians, promising all kinds of bullshit...

Skype is pretty much the only service, I know of that denies business to its own customers. What will happen if you buy lots of SkypeOut minutes? You think, what happens everywhere else - Skype will reward you as a loyal customer, right? Nope! Don’t even dream about that. THEY WILL BLOCK YOU. The following...

I\‘ve been real busy lately and have not posted much. It is going to be like that for a while, so meanwhile why don\‘t you check out Maria Bamford on iTunes She\’s real cool :) One of those rare comedians who manage to be funny without overdoing the stupid part.

iTerm is a nice, open source terminal utility for Mac OS X which has some additional, useful features (e.g. Tabs) over the default Terminal program. However, if you use your terminal to log into Linux boxes over SSH and then edit files there using “vi” (very typical purpose) - you have to configure key bindings...

The banner from the promotion campaign Rackspace runs for its Cisco firewall service, is kinda neat:

I am not a big TV fan. Tell you the truth - I do not remember the last time I turned on my TV. I should. probably, sell it or donate or smth. but what place better would I put scented candles on? Just kidding :) Anyway, since iTunes introduced downloadable TV Shows, I have...

I can hardly believe I am saying this, but Opera 9 is REALLY NICE. I\‘ve been playing around with it for several hours, only but I really like it. The feature set is trully amazing (speech plugin is more than decent). Surprisingly, I have not encountered any compatibility problems, so far, either. GMail works like...

I was recently considering a servlet container to embed into a standalone application. My choice was pretty much between Tomcat and Jetty. I like Jetty\’s compact approach. It only takes two jars: org.mortbay.jetty.jar (664KB) and javax.servlet.jar (138KB) to get going. In Tomcat\’s case you need much more jars total worth of 3.5MB in size. I,...