Monthly Archives: September 2009

Coupable indulgence

Posted on 2009-09-28 by majid

I am more than a little ashamed of my government’s defense of the pedophile rapist Roman Polanski. Unfortunately, it follows a pattern of making excuses for criminal behavior by people with literary or artistic talent, such as Villon, Lacenaire, Céline, … Continue reading →

Posted in Soapbox | Leave a comment

Fie on parasitic US cellcos

Posted on 2009-09-24 by majid

The Economist has an excellent article on how Indian mobile phone companies cut costs. They have an ARPU of $6.50 a month yet operate with a 40% gross margin. If US cellcos were run as efficiently, they would have a … Continue reading →

Posted in Network, Soapbox | Leave a comment

xkcd reading

Posted on 2009-09-21 by majid

From the Reddit list of questions to xkcd author Randall Munro: At the EFF organized reading tonight in San Francisco:

Posted in San Francisco | Leave a comment

Just enough Weave

Posted on 2009-09-09 by majid

There seem to be some weird sync errors with Weave 1.0 RC2. Until I have fixed them, I recommend using Mozilla’s public Weave servers instead. Like most of my readers, I use multiple computers: my Mac Pro at home, my … Continue reading →

Posted in IT, Python | Tagged | 2 Comments

Snow Leopard enhancement: Image Capture and scanners

Posted on 2009-09-08 by majid

The Image Capture utility in Snow Leopard works with my Epson 3170 flatbed scanner, and is far superior to the clunky and bloated Epson Scan software. What’s more, it can automatically deskew documents that are not perfectly level. Just a … Continue reading →

Posted in Mac | Leave a comment

Securing WordPress

Posted on 2009-09-06 by majid

WordPress has been getting a lot of bad press the last few days, as a worm is out in the wild exploiting a security vulnerability. This is leading to somewhat unfair comparisons with Windows, and thoughtful articles from John Gruber … Continue reading →

Posted in Web | Leave a comment