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January 2009

"What kind of coder am I?"

29Jan2009
tung's picture

I try to avoid personal pieces, but hey, maybe you can get something out of this too. An article about taming perfectionism over at defmacro.org got me thinking. On the perfect vs. good-enough scale of making stuff, I'm clearly in the good-enough camp. However, ugly code and bad design, even in small doses make me want to vomit.

So what kind of coder am I?

I'm a nerd. I've been one for a long time. That much I know. But what kind is a tricky question.

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pdnsd: Local caching DNS

21Jan2009
tung's picture

I love watching Firefox forever display "Looking up www.example.com...". I love it when it says it can't find a server, even when I can ping individual IPs just fine.

No, actually, I hate it.

Why doesn't my machine just remember which IP matches which domain name, even if the router or my ISP craps out? Well, looks like somebody else was thinking like I was, because that's exactly what pdnsd does: it looks up domain names, and remembers their matching IP addresses.

So here's how I set it up for myself.

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Let's get Spelunky!

20Jan2009
tung's picture

Spelunky is described by its creator as "La-Mulana meets Nethack": a horribly addictive mix of unforgiving yet compelling platforming action. It's been covered by many other places, so all I'm going to say is that if you've got Windows, you want to download this right now.


So instead of reviewing the game, I'm going to tell you how to kill the shopkeepers.

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Site upgrade!

19Jan2009
tung's picture

I just upgraded the site from Drupal 6.3 to 6.9.

Wow.

I'm so exhausted. It took me a couple of hours. What happened was that I discovered that I'd mixed the custom modules with the core modules, so not only did I have to go through the Indian rain-dance, I had to re-upload the GeSHi syntax highlighter via FTP (God, that was slow, thanks shitty ISP upload cap!) plus all of my modules.

Not fun.

I changed the colour scheme because I was getting tired of tan brown, proving to myself that I don't have any design sense. Ugh.

Font smoothing under Wine

5Jan2009
tung's picture

Use Linux? Use Wine? Want smoothed fonts?

Get font smoothing in Wine.

If you don't like links, here's what you do. Put this in, say, whatever.reg:

REGEDIT4
 
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002
"FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578
"FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:00000001

Then as a normal user run regedit whatever.reg. Done!