One of the biggest hurdles in going from JavaScript as a trivial gimmick for making divs change color to a powerful language for building real applications is its single-namespace weakness. It’s easy to accidentally cause variable names to collide when you start combining scripts, and there’s no native library or module system to alleviate this. […]

Templating is one of those must-haves for building websites; separating content from presentation is sliced bread compared to cavalierly interleave logic and HTML into one file. In Scheme, I think that quasiquotation could be used in wonderful ways to create templates; namely, every template can be a function that simply takes parameters and directly uses […]

An Ubuntu package of Petite Chez Scheme seems to be a common request among students, given the popularity of Ubuntu among the techno-capable.  Currently, only RPM packages are provided on the Chez Scheme site, and the traditional recommendation was to use alien to convert the RPM into a .deb. There’s no reason to have everybody […]

Update: I now have an improved C version of this program: usbscale. I got suckered into one of those hard-to-cancel Stamps.com trials. The upside is that they give you a $10 USB 5 lb. scale to use with their software. The downside is that they want you to only use it with their software, and […]

The symptom is typical: you check out the partitions on your hard drive in Windows Disk Manager only to find out that there’s a weird, inaccessible partition that’s of the type “EISA Configuration.” What is it? Can I get rid of it? What is it? It has become standard practice for manufacturers to include recovery […]

Objective: Create a single-file PHP installer for WordPress that will automate the downloading, unpacking, and setup of a WordPress blog. Reason: As of right now, setting up a WordPress blog involves a lot of fiddling with files. The user must download the archive, unzip it on their computer, open a ftp connection to their server, […]

Firefox Quick Searches have become an ingrained habit for me after a lot of repeat searching. Recently I’ve been working on a Java project and I’ve found myself needing to look up classes in the Java online documentation quite often. To that end, I’ve set up a quick-search bookmark that will take me to the […]

Update: There used to be an unhappy blog post about my experience with Musicnotes.com from 2009 here, but I don’t know if any of it is relevant or not anymore. If you are looking for open-source software for music notation, I encourage you to check out MuseScore.

Scanners have been around for a long time, and today’s scanners are cheap, are fast, and produce high-quality output. Still, people haven’t figured how to make good scans—just take a look at scanned scores, manga, etc.—from their scanners. This means the difference between: and Guide follows:

Ubuntu’s partition editor, GParted, usually scans all the hard drives when it starts. However, in some cases, it will get stuck on this “Scanning all devices” step indefinitely. By knowing what hard drive you want to edit, you can launch GParted specifically for that hard drive. Either go into run or a terminal, and run […]