Cyclopedia Square

(UPDATE 12/5/2015: moved to github) If you read Steve Yegge's Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume , you'll notice that he lists various words and phrases that you should avoid using in your resume. I was re-reading that hilarious, uncouth, yet insightful blog entry a couple days ago and started sweating that I might have a Weasel Word or two in my own resume. This could happen purely by accident, of course (we all get sloppy now and then, right?), so this obviously called for an automated tool. As a result, I present to you the Less Awful Resume Tool, or, lart. lart is a simple tool (written in Python) that searches a text file (ideally your resume) for those words and phrases called out in Steve Yegge's essay, and alerts you to their presence. I have claimed no copyright over this work, and the code is hosted at the Less Awful Resume Tool project on gitorious github. You can do a git pull as instructed there to get the code, or download a zip archive . T...

Having seen Bristlebot , I thought I knew exactly what I was looking for as I carefully disassembled my Samsung SGH-C417 phone. You see, it had accidentally gone for a ride in the washing machine and after quickly removing the battery, and then patiently letting it dry for a few days, it still wouldn't stop vibrating. Everything else worked fine, so I figured I'd open it up, find the little motor that looks like the one powering the Bristlebot, cut the wires to it, and then I'd still have a working cell phone. Here are some pics of what I saw once I opened it up: Can you see the little DC motor? I couldn't either, and as I fought with stubborn little screws and plastic tabs to uncover more of its innards, I became more frustrated with this little phone. I could still power it up and feel it vibrating the whole time, but I could not pinpoint where it was coming from. I definitely could not see a spinning motor anywhere. After a while, the last part to look un...

If you receive a document as an attachment, open that attachment, start editing, and then click save, guess what happens? You work is quietly saved in a file in /tmp . Guess what happens when you try to find that important file later? Sure, it shows up in the menu under File->Recent Documents, but when you select it, it has likely been deleted, as is the fate of most files left in /tmp for too long. Wonderful. This happened to my brother-in-law (a non-geek who has successfully been using Linux for a couple years now, well, until now, I guess) a couple weeks ago resulting in the loss of some hard work of his, and I almost let it happen to me today. Couldn't we make our apps a little smarter? If it's running on a UNIX like system, would it hurt to make it aware that /tmp is not a safe place to save its user's files? Could it at least give people a little warning before doing so? UPDATE : I don't know what happened, but I received an attachment today and O...