Category: Computers

Everything related to using and programming computers.

Whiteboards

Post author By Ben
Post date December 11, 2017

Soon "I'd just teach a computer to do it" is going to be a legit interview answer. StackOverflowSort writ large.

Valley whiteboard interviews poised for disruption. https://t.co/NDiJ5PcdXo
— Wynn Netherland (@pengwynn) December 11, 2017

Jeff Dean and co at GOOG just released a paper showing how machine-learned indexes can replace B-Trees, Hash Indexes, and Bloom Filters. Execute 3x faster than B-Trees, 10-100x less space. Executes on GPU, which are getting faster unlike CPU. Amazing. https://t.co/PPVkrFVKXg
— Nick Schrock (@schrockn) December 11, 2017

HttpCompress moved to GitHub

Post author By Ben
Post date March 12, 2012

To get with the times, I’m moving the old HttpCompress project source, wiki, and issues over to GitHub.

Pull requests welcome.

Computers

WordPress Permalinks on IIS6

Post author By Ben
Post date September 26, 2011
1 Comment on WordPress Permalinks on IIS6

Recently, I had to set up WordPress on an IIS6 machine. Yes, WordPress does work on IIS6, believe it not. The only really tricky bit is getting fancy permalinks to work, so that urls looks like www.foo.com/2011/06/my-awesome-post instead of www.foo.com/index.php?p=6. I used IIRF to get mod_rewrite like functionality, as the supported IIS Rewrite isn’t available until IIS7. It’ll take the same .htaccess configuration as mod_rewrite on Apache, with one very important difference; you have to add a U to the [L] in the final redirect. This passes along a HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL header to PHP, which WordPress uses internally to decide what to show. Your IIRF.ini will end up looking like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / #whatever your virtual root is
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* /index.php [L,U]

(image found on tattoodesigns-design.com)

Tags iirf, iis6, wordpress

Computers

Google Chrome CR-48 Bugs

Somehow, I lucked into one of the CR-48 Chrome netbooks that Google is giving away. In the interest of sharing what I’ve learned, I thought I’d put together a list of what I’ve run into and how to fix it or work around it.

Wireless Intermittently Drops Connection

I’ve had this thing for… a month? now and it has one major problem that makes it nearly worthless to me. For some reason, if you do something that takes a little time, like writing up a blog post, the next network operation tends to fail. The wireless indicator goes from having bars, to just a plain x, and then it’ll reacquire an IP and be ok again for a bit.

I put in a call to a Chrome Ninja, which was promptly returned with some suggestions. There’s apparently a known bug with wireless networks that use WPA-PSK-TKIP, an older standard for securing a wireless network. On their advice, I’m now forcing wireless clients to use WPA2-PSK-AES, where as before, the algorithm was decided on by the client. It seems to have helped; I’ve only had one dropout since switching over to the new security protocol last night. Previously I was seeing drops every five minutes or so.

Computers

Minecraft ALU

Post author By Ben
Post date October 7, 2010

This is the most insane thing I’ve seen in, well, at least a week. Dude built an ALU inside Minecraft.