Monthly Archives: August 2008

Remove Hardware Mystery

Updated Two different times now, when trying to “safely remove” a USB hard drive, I’ve had this error message pop up when I’m not actually accessing the drive. I closed all open applications, even logged out to make sure that … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | 3 Comments

Should VPN be this hard?

Last week we moved the crawlers from our office to a real data center where we can get more, and more reliable, bandwidth.  Getting everything installed and working wasn’t too much trouble, although the next time I have to do … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Internet | 2 Comments

The Government Rant

The best thing about our government is that it never ceases to amuse me. It’s also continuously annoying, but I guess you have to take the bad with the good. It’s not the government itself that amuses me so much, … Continue reading

Posted in Idiocy, Rants | 4 Comments

Paranoia versus productivity

We had an interesting discussion at the office about how much validation a collection type should do in its constructor. The key question, I think, came down to this: If the constructor can determine that using the instantiated object will … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | Comments Off

Hey, you deleted my files!

We got a rather strongly worded message the other day from a Webmaster who was threatening legal action because our crawler deleted a bunch of files from his site.  The news that our crawler is capable of deleting files was … Continue reading

Posted in Idiocy, Web Crawling | 3 Comments

Multicore Crisis?

There’s been some talk recently of the next “programming crisis”: multicore computing. I’ll agree that we should be concerned, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near the crisis point. Before I address that specifically, I think it’s instructive to review … Continue reading

Posted in Computers, Programming | 4 Comments