Recent posts

It’s a very basic question: given two strings a and b, how would you swap their values?  read full post

Shipping from Taiwan: 2 days. Time spent lying around customs and post office warehouses (slackers!): 2 weeks. Oh well, it’s here now. Time to unpack!  read full post

I stumbled upon Units of Measure while reading a book on F#. They allow you to add some metadata to a value (can be of any type, but is aimed at integer and floating-point values) with some additional information describing the unit this value denotes, such as centimeters, kilograms, etc.  read full post

Years ago, when I was stupid, I used Adobe Reader to view my PDF files. I didn’t like it, but didn’t know any better. Then, I discovered Foxit Reader. Compared to Adobe’s sluggish, bloated monster, Foxit was like a breath of fresh air. It was lightweight, snappy, and responsive. It did everything Adobe Reader did, only without mutilating your system’s resources. I happily installed it and never looked at Adobe again. Happier times were ahead.  read full post

My blog was off the air for a short while as I struggled with the new router’s settings. I sincerely apologize to all my readers (bored search engine crawlers). The router in question (a D-LINK DIR-655, hardware version B1, firmware 2.00) does a fine job router-wise, but I’ve seen some strange quirks that I want to shine a light on.  read full post

Of all the bad code I’ve seen (some of which I’ve written myself), this classical example is still one of the finer and more hilarious examples of a truly creative mind. From memory it looked something like this:  read full post

Implement things once, never think about them again. Cryptography is not something I’m constantly working with, so when I do need it for something I usually have to look up how things worked again and I end up reinventing the wheel. Well no more.  read full post