Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Those concerned about the “Mozilla Stealth Data Project” should really check out the Data snooping discussion on mozilla.dev.planning.
I think many who has spent some time on the project found that recent TechCrunch post was more an effort to scaremonger and generate buzz, than anything else. I guess one could argue “there’s no [...]

I didn’t even think about it until about 15 seconds after I pressed enter:

Bash [Show Styled Code]:

grep ‘call_user_func_array’ * > out.txt

Bash [Show Plain Code]:

grep ‘call_user_func_array’ * > out.txt

Sigh.

For the past several weeks, the cable modem has been getting more and more unstable. Having dealt with this before I knew the signal quality was pretty poor from looking at the stats. By using a different line that goes more direct, it made a real difference as the data below shows (sidenote: [...]

By default when connecting over SSH to my Mac OS X 10.4 box (using bash shell), there’s no ANSI color. Sometimes it’s pretty handy to have. I keep forgetting how to turn it on.
To add, put the following in the .profile file in your home directory:

Bash [Show Styled Code]:

TERM=xterm-color; export TERM

Bash [...]

From the National Post:

Airport employees in Vancouver were forced into the role of babysitters after a family forgot their 18-month-old toddler after clearing security and boarded a flight to Winnipeg without him.

Did anyone see this and not immediately think of Home Alone (yes, the title of this post came from the tagline of the first [...]

Yesterday the estimated world population passed 6,666,666,666. Interesting (though just coincidence) the estimated number of available IPv4 addresses was supposed to pass 666,666,666. Perhaps we are the beast?
An interesting thing to note is that the population is increasing at a very rapid rate. How long it’s sustainable before a Malthusian catastrophe is [...]

Ever wanted to know how Spam (not the email, the “lunch meat”) is made? “This Is Hormel“, a publicity film from the 1960’s will let you see inside the factory in a way once parodied by Troy McClure. My favorite part may be when they refer to it as “the raw material”. [...]

Sun was initially thinking of a commercial fork for MySQL with some enhanced things like encryption and compression backup for commercial users. Obviously this created some outcry. It appears they’ve now reconsidered and those features will be open source. To quote Kaj Arnö:

…expect Sun/MySQL to continue experimenting with the business model, and [...]

Last Friday (May 2), the data center where this site lives suffered a power fluctuation due to some tornado activity in the area. The actual outage (if there was even one) seemed to have been in the 5 minute ballpark based on various monitors. Apparently this somehow resulted in a routing problem resulting [...]

I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to invert Google Reader’s “read” checkbox, but it’s confusing, and in my opinion an unnecessary UI change. Way to obscure. Before it “checked” meant it was read, unchecked was unread. Now it’s just the opposite. It could have went either [...]