Author Archives: majid

RIP Derek Miller (1969-2011)

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Deep packet inspection rears it ugly head

Last Friday I started noticing error messages in my production environment. URLs were being mangled, two consecutive characters being replaced by 0×80 and 0×01 or 0×80 and 0×04, causing UTF-8 decode exceptions to be logged, as well as failures for … Continue reading

Posted in Network, Soapbox | Leave a comment

Doing my bit for the Internet

My first IPv6 connectivity, courtesy of Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker. It only took me three years…

Posted in IT, Mac, Network | Leave a comment

Hey Apple…

Some improvements you should consider: Sync iPods, iPhones and iPads over WiFi. Cables are so twentieth century. Palm had bluetooth sync working ten years ago, and 802.11n has the same real-world speed as USB. You could then simply extend this to … Continue reading

Posted in Mac, Soapbox | Leave a comment

Is this a Google Street View car?

Update (2011-05-12): the answer is no, it’s a Navteq 3D mapping car with a LIDAR array. Thanks to Darrell Kresge for the clarification. As I was walking to lunch today, I caught sight of this weird contraption, and had just … Continue reading

Posted in Photo, San Francisco | 3 Comments

Changing the WordPress table prefix

This may be of use to people experiencing the dreaded “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” message when trying to reach WordPress’ admin page, even when logging in as a proper administrator. WordPress embeds the table … Continue reading

Posted in Web | Leave a comment

I love my ISP

Not only do Webpass give me fast 45Mbps symmetrical access for $45/month, with no capricious restrictions or anticompetitive shenanigans, but they are also real mensches.

Posted in San Francisco, Soapbox | 2 Comments

Putting customers first

When you visit the Dell website, the first thing they force you to decide is whether you are a Home, Small Business or “Enterprise” business customer. At one point, the thin and light laptops were only available in the Enterprise … Continue reading

Posted in Soapbox | 1 Comment

Dear Parallels

Since you keep hitting me with these spammy popups no matter how many times I click on “Do not show again”, you leave me no choice but to switch to VirtualBox (much better software in any case, and less Windows … Continue reading

Posted in Mac, Soapbox | Leave a comment

Will Adobe ever learn?

In a triumph of hope over experience, I recently “upgraded” from Adobe CS3 Design Standard to CS5 Design Standard. I hardly ever use Photoshop any more since I started using Aperture and Lightroom (originally a Macromedia product, no matter what … Continue reading

Posted in IT, Mac, Soapbox | 2 Comments