Yippee-Ka-Yay

It was a royal PITA to get Adobe Flash Player 10 installed on my Ubuntu 64-bit workstation, so I figured I’d make a quick note and hopefully spare others the pain. This is an Ubuntu 8.10 AMD64 install (a.k.a. 64-bit Intrepid).
You’ve probably gotten the following error while trying to install Flash thru either System [...]

I wanted to do something very simple, considering it’s the last year of the first decade of the 3rd millennium (Gregorian calendar, of course). Namely, to check the status of an Air France flight from Miami to Paris Charles de Gaulle.

I typed airfrance<Ctrl+Enter> in the address bar, which brought me to airfrance.com, where I clicked “USA Site,” which in turn redirected me to airfrance.us. I don’t think this is the best way to do things, but that’s just a minor complaint. Another minor one: it doesn’t automatically redirect on subsequent visits (hint: set a cookie!).

I had this scanned itinerary to go on (ignore date, AF95 flies daily):

I got to the flight status page:

My first attempt was af95 (the fact that I’m counting attempts should give you an idea of what’s to come). I hit search, without crossing fingers:

No info! This is quite misleading. What exactly do you mean you have no information? Is it lost in your system, is it top secret, has the flight disappeared?

The technology doesn’t matter. While technology matters, the technology does not. In the grand scheme of things, technology is a critical ingredient, and any particular technology may matter for a set time horizon. More often then not, the technology is just a means to an end.
Most successful internet businesses have not succeeded [...]

After installing, and subsequently uninstalling, some software on one of my Vista x64 boxen, Control Panel from the Start menu brought up a menu- & title-less window which hung for 15-30 seconds, then closed itself. Printing also stopped working, and trying to Add a Printer (the way I got some Control Panel functionality was [...]

The few times I had to use proper Romanian in emails, a language I’m fluent in, I used Windows with a Ro keyboard layout to type its 5 extra glyphs (ăâîşţ). I’ve grown somewhat accustomed to using keys like [, ], ;, ‘ for input, and its strange flip of letters YZ. I [...]

As some of you may know, one of the more popular Linux kernel patchsets is going away. Con Kolivas has released the last ever -ck patchset. This may not seem all too important, but I became curious as to why this was. So I started to scour the net for info, educating [...]

Calling computer science computer science is like calling mathematics calculator science.