Category: Uncategorized

When people talk about having standards, it’s with the shared assumption that standards are a “good thing.”  When we talk about minimum standard for something, we’re talking about a baseline, below which is considered unacceptable.  When we use the phrase  “a standard of excellence” we associate the word standard with an ideal that we should…

In the 6th Essex race the Salem News editorialized: “… Parisella has certainly earned another two-year term…”  Apparently the editors have not been reading the excellent reporting of Paul Leighton who detailed the conflict of interest complaint filed against Parisella and his subsequent quitting of his job. And though that weighs on my mind, I’m…

This is a public request for Charlie Baker or Martha Coakley to show real leadership by stepping up and demanding that

I’m proud of Massachusetts today. Last night on the debate on WBZ all 5 candidates for governor were featured, including 3 in depende

I’ve used the login name “fishdan” since 1996 — I own it about everywhere it’s worth having.  Because I’m old, my primary usage is via yahoo, but I’m also fishdan@gmail, It’s my primary interface to all things google, including my google+ account and the account I sync my android phone with. Because I’m a good…

Just upgraded to windows 8, and I’m not happy about a lot of it, but I kept digging to see if the answers I wanted are perhaps in there somewhere. Most particularly I was very frustrated that I could not see the progress of windows update as it ran from the app.  It took me…

We’ve all encountered the diehards on the web.  They’re never wrong, they will post link upon upon link

We have changed ourselves as a country and as a people when we think that the social safety net MUST come from government. When my grandparents came to Lynn in 1904 they came to a community that took them in and shared responsibility for them. If a kid was misbehaving, the first adult in the…

After the Command-S startup, type the following on the command prompts, allowing time for each to do its thing:  /sbin/fsck -y<return> /sbin/mount -uw /<return> /sbin/autodiskmount -va<return>  launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd.plist /usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions / 

I have a series of 6 machines that I need to occasionally deploy the same file to in exactly the same place.  I got tired of it being such a pain so I wrote this little script I call mcp.sh  It’s certainly easy enough for a shell script master to do this, but for me?…

So we got a new Mac Book Pro in the house, and it came without an installation disk.  That’s weird, but so be it.  So then I wanted to install bootcamp on the mac.  When you run through Bootcamp Assistant it gives you a chance to download the drivers you’ll need for windows if your…

I’ve been working with Google’s chart tools — specifically their Image Chart tools.  My problem — I’m using BIRT as my PDF report engine, but I have a web interface.  I want the report to look the same on the web as it does in BIRT (which has it’s own excellent native charting library).  I…

My good friend Greg mentioned that I should use bitwise operators to perform a toggle, as opposed to my earlier method of using integer math to manipulate the state.  I had not done that because the bitwise implementation is imho not comprehensible by a developer who does not have a CS degree. As an example it is not…

We were talking about a way to use an integer to indicate teh state of a series of switches.  e.g. if there were 5 switches and the first 3 were on we would say think of that as 11100, or 28 Not a bad method — you can very quickly toggle switches on and off…

The corporation was initially a construct of government to enable efficiency in business.  Now government is a construct of corporations to enable efficiency in business.

The problem with power is that… well… it’s POWERFUL.  It can be used for both good and ill, but regardless of it’s usage, the more power there is behind a command, the harder it is for the individual to resist.  That’s pretty close to the definition of power. It’s become clear that throughout history there…

I’ve been using BIRT a bit and in our project we generate alot of PDFs and have found BIRT to be the beswt product there is for that.  One thing BIRT does NOT allow you to do is to combine reports.  The below is my Servlet based solution for that which correctly renumbers the pages …

My co ex-MGH Institute of Health Professions colleague and generally good guy Calvin R. Hill is running for School Committee in Worcester MA. Calvin and I worked together for a year, and that was enough for me to form a pretty good impression of the guy. Calvin’s a person who get’s things done, but he…

Oil goes to $200/barrel — an almost certainty in the next 20 years. You don’t think that cost constraint will affect the nations that can’t afford oil like we can? Maybe they’ll be the ones who engineer their way out of this. This may end up being a cell phone type situation. Because the US…

I just installed ubuntu on my asus 900a. If your flash drive isn’t being recognized, try a different usb slot. Third time was the charm for me.  The front right slot was the one that worked.  Others have reported left only works for install, so try them ALL Sent from my Samsung Captivate(tm) on AT&T