Bored with a game, I wrote a solver
Today I am going to tell you about a game I got into a few weeks ago. It's kind of addictive: very simple, click-click, tap-tap, no need to think too much. All ...
Kategoria: English
English is my second language. Not much here I’m afraid.
“Walking to Aldebaran”. Book review.
Actually a review of a portion of a book, as I didn't make it to the end. I let myself go at about 28%. The paperback is 95 pages long, so you could say I...
‘Artemis’. Book review.
Andy Weir wrote "Artemis" on the success of "The Martian". I've been meaning to read it for quite some time, but was put off by the overwhelmingly unflattering ...
Black matter, or Schrödinger’s cat on steroids.
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger died in 1961. Even assuming the cat was a long-lived Siamese breed, the beast has been dead for at least 40 years. Joke...
“Recursion”. Book review.
I had never heard of Blake Crouch before. I found out about this book by reading an interview with Andy Weir ("The Martian", "Artemis", "Project Hail Mary" and ...
“Staged”. Mini-series review.
Why mini? Because each episode is about 20 minutes long, so the whole first season can be easily watched in two and a half hours, with loo breaks. "Staged" is a...
Undying Mercenaries: Machine World.
I didn't manage to finish the fourth part of "Undying Mercenaries". After quite a start, when McGill takes part in an exam for a higher position (a classic set-...
Slow RSS feed on your blog? Here’s what to do.
A friend was trying to subscribe to my RSS channel recently but his NewsBlur was reporting a timeout nine attempts out of ten. I tried accessing my /feed/ url l...
Reader View in Firefox: why is it bad and how to disable it?
What's wrong with the Reader View in Firefox.
Copy variables between SSIS packages
How to copy-paste multiple variables between SSIS packages.
How to speed up WordPress blog: REDIS
About the Redis caching engine.
Supersedes
What happens when the same word means two different things in two languages.
Economical mumbo-jumbo
Whilst browsing the Internet I recently ran into an interesting (and probably totally unreallistic) idea: universities should be free from charge for all studen...
Next prime date
Dates in Ireland are usually written as DD MMM YYYY i.e. 5 Sep 2016 or 12 Jan 2000 and so on. However, from database perspective (which is my personal favourite...
0, 1, 8, 144 (EN)
While surfing the Internet I recently found an interesting (although completely incomprehensible) proof of a conjecture stating that 0, 1, 8 and 144 are the onl...
Reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits, again
A little bird told me that car insurance prices are going up again this year - both in Ireland and in other EU countries.
Dates clusterfuck: MSSQL vs Excel
Dates are usually the most error-prone element of various computer systems. There are so many different date formats, standards and representations. On top of t...
How to create an empty file in Windows cmd shell
I faced an interesting[citation needed] task recently. For each file sent over via the ftp channel I was supposed to generate an empty *.OK file and send it ove...
Xenial Xerxus and WordPress – upgrading your VPS
It is very important to keep your software updated. Forget to upgrade your apache to the latest version and you're screwed. Forget to install recent security pa...
UTF != UTF
I have recently faced a very annoying issue with one of the ETL processes. Very annoying issues are often easily resolvable in simple ways[citation needed] and ...
WordPress: conditional widgets
Have you ever pondered over how to make a WordPress widget (in)visible only on certain pages, or categories, or just on the home page etc? If you haven't then d...
Sh*t happens
As Confucius used to say, shit happens. He was a smart lad so there is no point not to believe him. Shit that happens to happen is usually a bad shit. Mo...
apt
I'm not a fan of any particular OS. Horses for courses. Certain operating systems are tailored for certain tasks, period. For the end user, Windows seems to be ...
“I’m lazy, not stupid”
This is what my fellow colleague used to say when someone was trying to explain Things to him. Being lazy is actually a good thing. It's just that some people m...
A short story about (in)consistency
Few years ago I made a small purchase for my blog: a WordPress menu plug-in called UberMenu. A really nice, fully featured, with all the necessary bells and whi...
A Third Variable
If you still remember my recent post on moving my hosting onto a brand new, shining VPS server (from an old, equally shining one) then I feel deeply sorry for y...
Memcached and W3TC
If you ever wondered why, despite all your efforts and Goole-jistsu, you still couldn't get W3TC to detect your local memcached install, well. You haven't googl...
Bloody Thursday
So, you think you know what "boring" means? You think you've watched some three hours of Parliament discussions about legal ways of composting farms' waste, and...
Yop Poll – do not upgrade to 5.0!
If you are reading this post, chances are you are either one of my three returning visitors (although there is a possibility that some - or even all - of those ...
Big G Down Again
Gmail went down for about half an hour this afternoon. This is a second disruption of the service in the last two weeks. I am starting to wonder whether I shoul...
Back to roots
Somewhen in June 2010 I got my very first smartphone. It was a Samsung Galaxy S. OK, to be completely honest, I used to use one or two Windows Mobile based phon...
Ups & downs
You can't fight entropy. You can pretend it doesn't apply to you but it does, all the time.
The Ultimate Solution
In my last two articles I explained how to generate all 3-letter combinations, starting from AAA, AAB, AAC (and so on) up to ZZX, ZZY, ZZZ.
Out of juice
It happens to me every now and then to drain my car's battery simply by leaving it overnight with some electrical device powered on.