Archives
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Cigar's in Silicon Valley
If you're in Silicon Valley and looking for a place to buy and smoke cigars, check out Castro's Fine Cigars in downtown Mountain View. Located on the main drag, next to a Starbucks, this shop has good prices, an excellent selection and a cozy sitting room - a rarity in the State of California.
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Ghost Town - Words and Images from Chernobyl
Today is the 18th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at
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Copy message box text to the clipboard
Ever get a error message and need to write it down? Particular one with an obscure error number like 0x80040e09? Starting with Windows 2000, you can copy the entire contents of a message box to the clipboard by pressing CTRL+C.
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Thoughts from IBM System/360 40th birthday party
Last night I went to the party at Mountain View's Computer History Museum hosted by IBM. I figured it would be a low key affair with other curious folks like me. Nope the parking lot was full and the lecture hall packed. Had several laughs listening to Fred Brooks talk about the development of the System/360. Fred’s the author of “The Mythical Man-Month”, one of the great project management books. He also was the manager of the Job Control Language (JCL), which he terms “the worst programming language ever.”
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Linux won't stay up for longer than 16 months?
Apparently until recently, the Linux kernal value that measures “uptime” was a 32 bit number. Uptime is measured in centiseconds (.01) and thus after 497 days, 2 hours, 27 minutes and 53 seconds, the counter wraps around to zero. Doing a Google search on “Linux uptime 497“ produced a number of folks who encountered the issue and discussions about it.
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TSA Steals Cigars
Oooo am I mad! Maybe someone from the TSA saw my rant two weeks ago on inconsistant security standards and decided to get even.