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Product development

Really poor web programming at AA.com

September 25, 2012 1 Comment
Really poor web programming at AA.com

I travel a fair amount on business, though it can really vary from year to year and even during a given year. As it happened, I traveled a lot last year, requalifying for Platinum status on American Airlines. My wife traveled with me a lot as well, and she actually ended up with Gold status, […]

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“Ground-truth documents”

September 12, 2012 2 Comments
“Ground-truth documents”

A great post by Eric S. Raymond[*] (yes, that esr) on what he terms ground-truth documents: Here is an example: AIVDM/AIVDO protocol decoding. It describes the behavior of Marine AIS radios; I wrote it as preparation for coding the GPSD project’s AIS driver. It isn’t exactly or completely a hardware-interface specification, and some of its […]

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Blast from the past (1985): 2 MB Macintosh upgrade!

February 22, 2012 1 Comment
Blast from the past (1985): 2 MB Macintosh upgrade!

I spent a little time over at Google Groups, searching the USENET archives for posts that I had made and found (among others) the following: ====================== From: crash!bwebs…@SDCSVAX.ARPA Date: Sun, 30 Jun 85 01:26:31 PDT Subject: 2MB Macintosh! Well, space cookies, I did it.  In a fit of passion, I went down to Levco Enterprises […]

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WHS 2003 issues — looking for suggestions

November 23, 2011 6 Comments
WHS 2003 issues — looking for suggestions

This is actually a problem I’ve been dealing with — or, more accurately, ignoring and working around — for a few months, at least, so I thought I’d put a post up here to see if anyone has come up with an actual fix. Back in July 2010, I bought an Acer Aspire easyStore Home […]

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Why Apple wins

October 27, 2011 1 Comment
Why Apple wins

Last spring, I bought an Apple TV device to go along with a new large-screen TV in our living room. Setup was simple, and I kept discovering new things that I could do with it. It gets used a lot more than either the Blu Ray player or the DirecTV satellite box also attached to […]

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