Monthly Archives: July 2009

“Cash for Clunkers” is a wreck

President Obama and those members of Congress who approved the cash for clunkers program as part of the most recent war funding bill are celebrating today and telling us how they knew that it “would work.”  What’s their definition of … Continue reading

Posted in Idiocy, Rants | 1 Comment

Downloading with wget

GNU wget is a free program for retrieving files from the Web.  I freely admit that I’m just a casual user and don’t know all the things that it can do.  But it does one thing that I use quite … Continue reading

Posted in Computers | Comments Off

Another .NET Framework bug?

When faced with inexplicable program behavior, inexperienced programmers often blame the operating system, the runtime library, the compiler, or some other external force for the error.  Even when they discover that the bug is in their code, these programmers often … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | Comments Off

“Highly Unlikely” is not the same as “Impossible”

One of my programs crashed the other day in a very unexpected place:  inside the runtime library.  The exception stack trace is pretty clear on where the error occurred: System.OverflowException: Negating the minimum value of a twos complement number is … Continue reading

Posted in Programming | 3 Comments

Getting attention the new way

So let’s say that you’re a musician on your way by airplane from Point A to Point C with a stop at Point B. Trusting the airlines to handle your luggage, you check your guitar. While sitting in the airplane … Continue reading

Posted in Internet, Music, Odds 'n Ends | 1 Comment

Tribal drum beating

To summarize a long reply I sent to a mailing list message ranting about the evils of the Obama administration: Don’t get me wrong. I’m no more an Obama supporter than I was a Bush supporter. The game is rigged, folks. … Continue reading

Posted in Rants | Comments Off