I was cleaning out some miscellaneous files from my computer today when I found a folder called “eyeos”. EyeOS. My friend and I thought we were uber-cool when we set up eyeOS on our shared hosting accounts and looking back, yeah, well, we were. EyeOS was an ambitious open-source project to give you a desktop […]

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: