Category Archives: General

Re: DevDays 2011 is Cancelled

Posted on September 6, 2011 by slacy

Woah, Joel & Jeff.  This is NOT your fault. Want to know something?  People don’t care as much about StackOverflow as they did in ’09.  Back in ’09, it was the model success of how to bootstrap a scappy idea into … Continue reading →

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ThinkPad T520 Wireless Drivers for Ubuntu 11.04

Posted on August 31, 2011 by slacy

Just got a new laptop, a ThinkPad T520, and I’m running Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) With no additional drivers, the wireless (RealTek 8188ce) would work somewhat intermittently.  Sometimes it was great, and other times it wouldn’t associate at all. The correct … Continue reading →

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A quick lesson in how to subvert the democratic process.

Posted on July 27, 2011 by slacy

Imagine that you wanted to subvert an election.  What do I mean by “subvert”?  I mean, that you wanted everyone involved in the process to think that it was a fair majority, but in fact, it was not.  Let’s go … Continue reading →

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Simulated HDR look in The Gimp

Posted on July 25, 2011 by slacy

I had these instructions written up in about 2002 (at least that’s the timestamp on the HTML) and I’ve since nuked that section of my site, so I’m replicating it here.  If you want that “simulated HDR” look in your … Continue reading →

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Passing of a namesake

Posted on July 25, 2011 by slacy

My thoughts and prayers today are going out to family and friends of Googler and namesake Steve Lacey who passed away this weekend.  You’ll be sadly missed.

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New Google black navigation bar images.

Posted on June 28, 2011 by slacy

I’ve taken a thin vertical slice of two Google properties below, and horizontally tiled it.  This accentuates how out of place the black bar looks in the Chrome world of blue & white.  I wonder how Google is going to … Continue reading →

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Proposed scheme for per-user database field encryption.

Posted on June 17, 2011 by slacy

I’ve been thinking a lot about hackers, stolenpasswords, rainbow tables, and credit card numbers in databases. But, the question remains:  ”How should I store credit card numbers in a database for maximum user security?” Typically, user authentication for web sites … Continue reading →

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Django + PostgreSQL + virtualenv Development setup for Windows 7

Posted on June 2, 2011 by slacy

Here’s what you need to do Django development on Windows 7. As I go through the install, I’m writing down all the steps to make sure that I don’t miss any. I’m going to focus on: Python 2.7.1 from python.org … Continue reading →

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Quick experiment: A QR-Code clock.

Posted on May 5, 2011 by slacy

What will happen if you use your phone’s QR code scanner to try to scan a QR code that’s not static?  For example, what if you implemented a clock as a QR code?

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git pull says “You are not currently on a branch…”

Posted on April 4, 2011 by slacy

Was working through some git error messages generated by pip installs of some Python code, and found that the issue was caused by this error: $ git pull You are not currently on a branch, so I cannot use any … Continue reading →

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