George W. Bush authorized "Enhanced interrogation techniques" that include waterboarding among other terrible things. It's been a while since my last job interview for a software engineer. I found that the torture of the white board coding or "whiteboarding" is alive and well. I think the technique was "authorized" when there was a limited access… Continue reading Whiteboarding
Indiscriminate private bookmarking
This is the way to I do it. I use Unforget. If I encounter something remotely interesting, I just bookmark it with Unforget. I don't care about my bookmark clutter. Later, it will generate a newsletter email with some of the stuff I marked, and I have fun reviewing it if I want to.
iPhone battery drain problem
My old iPhone battery began to drain quickly and unpredictably. The Battery Health setting shows Maximum Capacity at 98% that is fine. I looked online for a solution and found a few but nothing worked. People are saying it is a hard problem to fix. Then it occurred to me what if it is a… Continue reading iPhone battery drain problem
Fake playoff celebrations
Ok, I watched the NHL finals finish yesterday. Cap's got it. Today, it's GS of NBA. Anyways, the way the NHL players are celebrating their Cup is the fakest of all. The screaming, jumping, body language, hugging, kissing the gates almost... Then, they take the Cup according some seniority rule or something, like the "coolest"… Continue reading Fake playoff celebrations
Most programming books suck
When was the last time you read a good programming book? It seems like the majority of modern programming books are actually language references, where the authors talk pages and pages about why some language committee decided to use a comma as a separator and that the 'if' statement means well: if... With all the on-line… Continue reading Most programming books suck
Image Upload – Complete Solution for iOS and PHP
Our goal is to present a way to select or take a photo and upload it to the server. Why this write up? There are a lot of info on how to build pieces of the whole process but I wanted to describe a complete (well, almost) set of pointers in a one place. The… Continue reading Image Upload – Complete Solution for iOS and PHP
Hackintosh High Sierra (10.13) update kernel panic
I have an old box with GA-Z77X-UD5H mobo that I use as my hackintosh. I just updated it from El Capitan to High Sierra using the instruction from Direct Update to macOS Sierra using Clover. The installation went just fine but I could not boot it due to an ACPI kernel panic. It turned out that… Continue reading Hackintosh High Sierra (10.13) update kernel panic
XCode 9 is a disaster
The storyboards are unusable in XCode 9. It's so incredibly sloooow... There is a long thread about it on the Apple forum, xcode 9 (9A235) horrible performance... It's been going on for at least a month. I can only guess what a huge impact it has been having on productivity. What about the environmental impact… Continue reading XCode 9 is a disaster
Convert dynamic HTML pages to formatted plain text
Suppose you want to extract plain text from dynamic web pages for example for indexing or whatever... Obviously, you cannot just parse the html and extract the text nodes. Most of the content out there is dynamic. It comes from internal AJAX calls, and gets processed by JavaScript that is executed by the browser. It… Continue reading Convert dynamic HTML pages to formatted plain text
Where did everybody go?
There are over 7 billion people on this earth but somehow I often find myself completely alone. Even in the biggest cities, I am walking around 3am in the morning in a very densely populated neighborhood, and nobody is around. I am wondering how come that out of so crazy many people I am the… Continue reading Where did everybody go?
XILTI 