Category Archives: Computing

A useful trick when photographing food in the kitchen

Always buy plain white paper towels. When you want to photograph something you’re preparing, just crumple up a paper towel and make sure you get it in the frame. Then you have an accurate reference for white-balancing your photograph, without … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-04-02 by | Tagged ,

Is there a photo gallery app that doesn’t suck?

Posted on 2014-03-31 by

I’m looking for a new photo gallery application, and I’ve been having terrible trouble finding one that is worth the disk sectors it’s written on. I know something about writing such things, because I wrote the one I’m using now … Continue reading →

Posted in Administrivia, Broadcasting & Media, Computing | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Fun with SQL: The U.S. city with the most AM stations

Posted on 2014-03-27 by

A friend asked me a radio trivia question with a surprising answer: what U.S. city has the most licensed AM radio stations? (This question had apparently stumped him when a friend asked him, and now he was trying to stump … Continue reading →

Posted in Broadcasting & Media, Computing | Tagged , , ,

Radio playlist algorithmics

Posted on 2014-02-15 by

If you’re building a music log for a radio station, you generally have certain rules determined by your format — for example: All of the top 10 songs get played once every jock shift All of the next 20 songs … Continue reading →

Posted in Broadcasting & Media, Computing, Music | Tagged ,

Quote: M.J. Dominus on programming languages

Posted on 2014-02-02 by

From a Saturday-evening blog post which was primarily about job applicants at his company failing a really trivial programming quiz by doing it in Java: You will not produce anything really brilliant, but you will probably not produce anything too … Continue reading →

Quote | Posted on 2014-02-02 by | Tagged , , ,

Finally updated my MBP to Mavericks

I was waiting for an OpenAFS release that worked on 10.9, and that finally came out late last week, so I took the plunge. It took a couple of hours to update everything (I had a bunch of Apple apps … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2014-01-28 by | Tagged , , ,

Cosma Shalizi on programming as expression

Posted on 2014-01-03 by

I don’t agree with everything he says in his advice for students in his Intro to Statistical Computing class, but I like this a lot: Programming is expression: take a personal, private, intuitive, irreproducible series of acts of thought, and … Continue reading →

Quote | Posted on 2014-01-03 by | Tagged , ,

LISA’13 recap

Posted on 2013-11-13 by

The first week in November I went to the 2013 Large Installation System Administration conference, one of the Usenix Association‘s two annual flagship conferences (the other being the summer Annual Technical Conference, which is part of what they call “Federated … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing | Tagged , , , , , , ,

An addendum to the findslowdisks DTrace hack

In the previous installment, I posted a script that will output a series of lines that look like this: multipath/s33d7: 417.3 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d22: 682.9 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s29d5: 699.2 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d4: 1449.1 ms … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-10-31 by | Tagged , , ,

My first (well, ok, third) DTrace hack

Posted on 2013-10-29 by

We have a storage server with a bunch of marginal disks in it. They aren’t bad enough to return read errors, and of course the SMART data claims they’re just fine, but the built-in error-recovery takes much too long (sometimes … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, FreeBSD | Tagged , ,