A quick howto, since I recently had to do this. To create a digital photo for use with a passport you'll need the following:

• digital camera
• computer
• software (I used Gimp though photoshop may work too)
• tripod/or person to take picture
• white background

Heres a link the department of …

One of the biggest shockers for me at OSCON happened during the first day. I was sitting in the second row of the Rails session and I looked behind me to see what type of laptops people were using. I would guess that 80% were PowerBooks. Of the x86 laptops …

Up above Silicon Valley, IBM has a big research facility. One of the big projects they are working on over there at Almaden is called Web Fountain. Think of it as Google on steroids. A search engine that can determine sentiment (can determine what ambiguous terms on pages actually mean …

I'm going through my OSCON notes and compiling my notes and a list of interesting websites. The websites will be found here (using my oscon2005 delicious tag):

Yaml

This is the markup language that the Ruby on Rails is using (rather than xml). There are bindings for various languages. The …

I'm up at OSCON and have attended 4 sessions in the past two days. My favorite so far was the Rails talk.

David Hainemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) did a great job presenting, and I was very impressed by the framework he has implemented. The main gist of Rails …

Argghh, Windows keeps coming back to bite me. (Or rather me being a "nerd" means I give free support to my friends, who sadly all run some variant of windows)

While having dinner with some friends tonight (who happen to be another uninformed computer user that I blogged about while …

From my experience commercial testing of software consists of manual qa (grunt labor). Little is automated. I personally feel that even with a slight investment by developers to create unit tests, that effort would pay off later (especially in the crunch time before a big release where fixing a bug …

I guess that's one of the benefits of the "long tail" of blogging. I can get on my soapbox and speak directly to my audience. I know what to say and how to tweak their buttons. Most of my family and friends stay pretty far away from my blog since …

So after spending around 16 hours (and writing about 700 lines of original code) on Saturday preparing an entry for The Eighth Annual ICFP Programming Contest, I thought I'd share my notes and some thoughts. A chunk of this is Python specific. (see this thread for metrics of entries using …

I recently read an interesting interview with Linus. While I would recommend reading the whole interview, here are some highlights that tend to support some ideas I've been throwing around on my blog.

Open source programs have clearly made some great advances in the past few years. We've seen it …