CS Graduate Falsehoods
What should be the #1 entry on this list of CS Graduate Falsehoods is missing: Agile is valid Software Engineering Otherwise that list of computer science graduate falsehoods is rather…
Our Recent Blog
Yet Another Reason to Ditch Facebook
I will never understand why people join Facebook or why they don’t ditch Facebook. You should never post that much about yourself online. “Oh no, I have private pages” is…
Why Every Company No Matter How Small Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan
No, you can’t just “host it in the cloud” and call that your Disaster Recovery plan. That’s the start of your disaster. Featured image by Akela999 from Pixabay Fly-by-night AGILE…
Need an UpVote at Icons8
Ah, my loyal blog readers, I need an upvote on a request at Icons8. Actually need about a dozen so hopefully there are at least one dozen of the 22,205…
A Fedora 33 Virus?
Several weeks ago Google started popping up their “we’ve noticed suspicious activity” screen and making me respond to a Captcha any time I used them to search something. I try…
How to install Jed on Arch Linux
Most Linux distros have Jed in their repos. You should install Jed whenever you set up a new Linux system. Many Linux utilities that launch a terminal based editor will…
How to Set Up an Arch Linux VM
Arch Linux is the Linux distro most people are talking about when you hear things like “expert friendly” and “unwelcoming.” When you go to sign up for their forum you…
Lousy Software Policies of Microsoft Windows 10
Been a long time since I had Windows as a primary OS on any machine I cared about. I had forgotten Microsoft’s lousy software policies. Nobody could really forget the…
Linux Distros That Suck at Multiple Hard Drives
Some Linux distros really suck at dealing with multiple hard drives. Too many “maintainers” only have a laptop. Background You need a wee bit of background before we jump in….
Hackers Aren’t Your Biggest Danger – It’s the Low Wages You Pay Your Cleaning Crew and the Power Plug
Everybody thinks the power plug story is an Urban Legend or IT myth. When I answered this question about the strangest “computer bug” I had ever encountered, one of the…
Fedora 33 Black Screen Again
Fedora and Nvidia. We can one day hope Fedora actually tests with Nvidia at some point in the future. For RPM based distros I just don’t hold out hope. Few…
How to Find Your Range Extender’s IP Address
“How to find your range extender’s IP address?” is a sad question to have to ask. It’s a result of a network change. Not an automated, flawless change, but a…
How to install PostgreSQL on Fedora 33
XpsnQt uses PostgreSQL as its database so “How to install PostgreSQL on Fedora 33” became a question worth answering. Once again, most of the stuff you find online is horribly…
How to Install PostgreSQL on Manjaro
How to install PostgreSQL on Manjaro (really any Arch distro) is not straight forward. Worse yet, most of the information you find online about how to do it is outdated…
How to Install Jed from AUR on Manjaro Linux
One of the things most new (and even seasoned) users of Linux find frustrating is the organization of repositories. Linux is supposed to be the same yet when you want…
Manjaro KDE and NAS
You know, I really hate updates. What I really hate is how the Linux world thinks a major (&)(&*ing change should go in a minor update. Not long ago I…
A Faster Hard Drive Makes Your Computer Slower
It sounds like the most counter intuitive statement one could make. A faster hard drive makes your computer slower. If you understand how and why you will understand it is…
ERROR: resume: hibernation device not found
You gotta love a cryptic error message during boot like: “ERROR: resume: hibernation device ‘UUID=long number here’ not found.” Love even more the fact you need roughly ten minutes of…
How to Make Manjaro 20.2 work with NAS
You installed Manjaro because you wanted a modern Linux without Ubuntu bloat. Now you can’t find your NAS.
Boinc on Majaro
Historically, Boinc on Majaro has been a trail of tears for most users. Most other distros do a fine job of packaging Boinc for their flavor of Linux, but Majaro,…
Where Did My QDebug Output Go?
You start at a new place or on a new Linux distro coding away on your Qt project and suddenly find yourself asking; “Where did my qDebug() output go?” Lots…
So You Can’t Get Your Qt Models to Work With QML?
This particular rant was started by my looking to divert my mind by answering a question on StackOverflow. Never ever ever go to StackOverflow. Kids today just don’t know squat…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 18 – The Pull Request
It has been a very long time coming, life kept getting in the way here, but my Diamond editor changes are ready for pull. For those who don’t give a…
Who Do You Trust?
Poking around this morning I stumbled into this post talking about what your email address says about you. The “Who do you trust?” question hits everyone with an email address,…
Interesting PostgreSQL Oddity
I was working on a tiny database to send out some emails with varying subjects. Decided to use PostgreSQL so I could have a real database as the back end….
How to Show the Day in Ubuntu
Trapped inside during COVID-19. Spending days on your computer either working or looking for work or just searching for something interesting to keep your mind off the four walls it…
Making the GigaWare 2600460 Keyboard Work With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
There was a time when RadioShack was cool and when it had some great cheap products. The GigaWare 2600460 keyboard was one such product. This is sometimes listed as 26-460…
Fixing Ubuntu Duplicate Printers
Duplicate printers are annoying. Many times I feel Canonical long ago abandoned the “Just Works” slogan for “Just Ship It!” What makes it worse is the duplicate entries don’t work….
OS/2 Back From the Grave!
There were too many banks and too many ATMs still running OS/2. Honest to God I thought IBM officially dumped it in the late 1990s. Then I read this 2007…
The Bottom for Technical Recruiting Just Keeps Getting Lower
Ordinarily I wouldn’t drag something this specific onto my geek blog, but every time I try to reply to the pimps email it bounces. I had never heard of gandi.net….
Neither Flakon nor Epiphany browsers will play videos
This is really annoying. As more and more people and companies attempt to monetize OpenSource we are going to see more and more of this shit. It all has to…
Github is trashed this morning
Gotta love it when you are greeted with an image like that! I tried from multiple computers and multiple browsers. Other websites look and work fine. Github is just trashed….
The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of AGILE
At long last it is finally out! “A journey through IT history explaining why SDLC Waterfall Model is Software Engineering and AGILE will never be.” As distribution updates trickle out…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 17
I’m putting this here because I discovered it while trying to fix a rather horrible “busy” dialog in the Advanced Search portion of Diamond. I had to create a GUI…
Sometimes Cheap Stuff Can Really Amaze You
Back in 2019 I bought some of these things on eBay. I don’t know why, but my small cheap USB wifi adapters seem to walk off. Normally I hard wire…
The Closed Question
I get a lot of shit for saying that Stack Overflow is the land of 12 year old boys, but it is the gospel truth. I don’t care how old…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 16
Now we must create a minimal GUI “Hello World” to use testing out the theory. It will also be needed as a bug report test case if this turns out…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 15
I do apologize for the burstiness of these posts and sometimes skipping around. I don’t have much free time so I write these posts when something tends to piss me…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 14
Why EDT? The short answer is “Because I wanted it.” The slightly longer answer is “I needed something of value to do while kicking the tires on CopperSpice. Adding themes…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 13
Why Themes? From time to time people ask that question. Why did I want to add themes to the Diamond text editor? There are many reasons. Some of the reasons…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt 12
Let’s be honest. If you are a long time Ubuntu/Mint/YABU user you want a Debian package that fully installs. When it is a text editor you want to be able…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 11
If you have been following the saga you have a pretty good idea of the new features added to Diamond. These have not been turned over to the parent project…
A Ubuntu Compatible AC Wifi Card
In the land of Ubuntu and Linux in general one thing that has really sucked is Wifi support. Oh, it has it, just generally lags 2-8 years behind when it…
Fedora 32 – Black Screen After Login
I set the feature image for this piece to one of my holding my SystemRescueCD. When it comes to Fedora “you gonna need it a lot!“ While I will say…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 10
Introducing OpenSuSE into this process was a whim. Bad whim! Bad whim! Don’t listen to that whim! The real problem with not creating The Four Holy Documents up front is…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 9
Diamond text editor now has many new features, including backups. Here is a run-down. Yeah, it’s been a while. Life keeps getting in the way of actually writing something here….
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 8
This post is actually what pushed the other two posts out the door. I wanted to write this one, but unless you understood how I got here, it would make…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 7
Arrival of Overlord. What started out as “a few tweaks” has ended up becoming something of a gut and redevelop. I’m not saying there was anything wrong with the code,…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 6
Sorry I haven’t written in a while. Life has been busy and I’ve been hacking away at Diamond in my “spare” time. I guess I need to catch this post…
How to Make Ubuntu 20.04 Work with Buffalo NAS
We’ve all been there. You install a new Ubuntu release and sh*t doesn’t work. It’s really frustrating when it is sh*t that has worked for years. Well, here is how…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 5
Sometimes trying to avoid creating a Debian package is more work than actually creating the package. Before I got deep into coding modifications of Diamond I wanted to get a…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 4
Keep in mind I have a minimal Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on this system and will be building PostgreSQL support into CopperSpice. The Building for Unix instructions assume a full installation…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 3
The base system First off I need to tell you the system I will be using. This system has a recent minimal install of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with all updates…
CopperSpice Experiments – Pt. 2
Diamond is cross platform. It runs on Linux and other platforms supported by CopperSpice. There are some things I would like to try adding and donating back to the community….
CopperSpice Experiments Pt. 1
CopperSpice is a fork of Qt 4.8 sans the icky nasty bug infested (and infesting) QML. Lots of bad things have been cleaned up, like replacing UTF-8 under the hood…
How We Get a Fake President
See the pattern?
Experiments with IUP Pt. 1
It seems rainy days and rabbit holes go hand in hand. I keep trying to get back to writing my GnuCOBOL book (having finished the first draft of the Emacs…
Compiling Qt 5.14 Under Msys2
I went down this road because I wanted to compile one simple test program so I could file a bug with GnuEmacs about how they don’t catch NumLock. This is…
What surprised you the most in your career as a software engineer?
The race to the bottom. I started in the early 1980s. Employers championed tight code that worked well. During the late 1980s till today there has been a constant dumbing…
The Upside of Coronavirus
Like most of you, I get a lot of spam. It sucks. Just cleaning out the junk mail folder can be time consuming because the auto-detection sometimes auto-detects the wrong…
Most Text Editors Get Tabs Wrong
Why do PC based text editors get tabs wrong? I’ve been getting back into COBOL and writing a book on GnuCOBOL. This lead me to writing a book on Emacs….
The Best Part of Low End
As I get closer and closer to the cranky old man stage of life I get pickier and picker about my monitors and office lighting. I also find supposed high…
Making Sublime Text 3 Do COBOL
It’s a long way from an IDE like the script kiddie generation is used to. It’s also a long way from EDT on VMS, less of a distance from LSE…
“Priced Right” Developers Will Put You Out of Business
It seems the world is devolving into Keller MBAs and fake-reality television stars. Bottom feeding Keller MBAs have infiltrated every company it seems. They have the following main mantras Any…
Why did the Intel Itanium microprocessors fail?
I really hate Quora making me join and follow 10 things I don’t care about just to answer this question. What a truly pathetic business model! You are probably too…
Why is network-byte-order defined to be big-endian?
The big-endian question comes up on those Internet chat places young techies like to hang out in. To us old-timers it falls under the heading of “Kids these days!” Here…
Iowa Caucus 2020 – AGILE’s Third Mega-Failure
Because AGILE allows companies to commit SOX accounting fraud companies are adopting it in droves. Because it is yet another name for hacking on the fly without a plan kids,…
Some LibreOffice and OpenOffice Differences
Regular readers of this blog will note I posted about the ham fisted decision of the Ubuntu world to force in the “O” versions of Linux Libertine fonts instead of…
OpenSUSE Leap 15.1
At some point I will learn to not get into conversations with people who are either new to programming or have done only one thing all of their lives. One…
Secret to Fixing Virtualbox VM ISO
If you haven’t done it yet, you will. Setting up many VMs for testing or development will make you happy click past the ISO choice when you click start. Then…
Thank You For Your Future Abandonware
Few things honk me off quite as much as abandonware, especially when something good is abandoned. Microsoft could abandon everything they make and I would not care, none of it…
KDE Neon – Ubuntu – Will Not Boot Properly After Kernel 5.3.0 Upgrade
So, late on Friday you are typing away and see the little blue dot from the Software Updater built into KDE Neon. Maybe you are running Ubuntu and saw a…
The GDPR and Linux Distros
If you use a general purpose Linux distro which pulls from somewhere else (and they all pull from somewhere else) then you’ve experienced it when you tried to file a…
Secret to G fonts in LibreOffice on KDE Neon
The list of people who have been burned by this grows daily and still it won’t get fixed in Ubuntu based distros. Work with Linux Libertine in LibreOffice because that…
When Competition Isn’t a Good Thing
Competition. Culturally we’ve all been told it’s a good thing. It drives down prices and makes life more affordable for consumers. The dirty little secret is it always drives down…
Qt – Printing – Taxes – Pt. 5
The knee-jerk response many developers will have is to just hack their own QTextDocument derived class. After all, it wouldn’t take much to add a document name to the class,…
Qt – Printing – Taxes – Pt. 4
Before I get into more coding on this topic, I need to cover some remedial information. The first is how we center a heading. Even when we had printer spacing…
Qt – Printing – Taxes – Pt. 3
Before I get too far with this post let me tell you the source which uses the lp command is now up on Sourceforge. It is in the xpnsqt_v3-o directory….
Qt – Printing – Taxes — Pt. 2
Apple Screws The Known Universe For whatever reason Apple (AAPL) has been allowed to maintain the CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) software for Linux and other platforms. Despite what people…
Qt – Printing – Taxes — Pt. 1
Unlike many of my “journey” post series, I actually have to complete most of this. It’s not experimenting for the sake of experimenting. It’s a need which keeps coming around…
This is why I like working on medical devices
People always ask why don’t write apps for idiot phones. The simple answer is I don’t like killing people, I like helping save them. At some point your app is…
Manually Adding a Disk to Linux
We all have to do it from time to time. I’m creating this post so I can stop looking for a trusted source. I don’t add a second or third…
Microsoft Finally Admits to the World It Never Could Make a Web Browser
Anyone who ever really wrote software knew Microsoft couldn’t develop a Web browser to save its ass. It took a long time but Microsoft has finally admitted to the world…
That Annoying Seagate Clunking
If you own a Seagate Backup Plus Hub you know what I’m talking about. That continuous and annoying clicking clunking sound while idle. This is really annoying. If you have…
Breaching TLS/SSL
In some large part this essay is a follow-on to the You Are the Security Breach essay. It’s a result of a knock-down drag-out I got into on a technology…
You Are the Security Breach
If you are using XML, JSON, or the other trendy free text data transmission formats loved by script kiddies, you are the security breach. It’s possible your company doesn’t know…
This Labor Day We Can Thank United Steelworkers
Congress has been too busy taking bribes to do anything about the H-1B loop hole or the mass replacement of U.S. IT workers with much lower paid H-1B visa workers….
Submission Rules
This is an updated version of a post I made on Interesting Authors blog also called Submission Rules. There is a limit to how geeky I can get when writing posts…
Best Linux Word Processor in 2019
Now that The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of AGILE is out for another round of editing, I have a bit of time to experiment with word…
Qt 6 – Remove Console from JavaScript and QML
I originally sent this to the qt-interest mailing list but haven’t seen it bubble out to the world so re-posting here and, hopefully many other places. === This is becoming…
Did AGILE make the 737 Max fall from the sky?
AGILE. The new corporate buzz phrase for hacking on the fly. Keller MBAs in a room sounding like a yard full of chickens chanting “cut costs, cut costs, cut costs”…
Second Worst Case of Food Poisoning Ever
Food poisoning is one of those illnesses you never forget. Humans could have a million colds over their lifetime and at best will remember one. Food poisoning though, that shivering…
Speeding Up Libre Office 6
I’ll never understand what goes through the minds of those who plan LibreOffice. I guess they wish to size it to run on an idiot phone instead of a real…
Qt and USB – Pt. 8
The line of significant import in the code of the previous port: init_and_set_protocol( handle, 19200, 8, 0, 1); By and large, USB devices aren’t just a piece of wire you…
Qt and USB – Pt. 7
It took quite a bit of poking around to get as far as I am. Doing a whole bunch of training at a new client site and coming home with…
Qt and USB – Pt. 6
Been a long time since I last touched this. I did quite a bit of work before packing up and heading out to a shiny new client out of state….
How Much Liability Insurance?
This question has been rattling around in the back of my mind given the qt-interest on and off-list conversations I’ve been having about QML and “lone wolf” development of idiot…
SeaTools
Some months ago I was working at a client in Chicago and needed an external hard drive to transfer some files. There was a Staples I could walk to over…
That Weird SQLite Error from Qt configure
A YABU is a YABU is a YABU. That’w what you keep telling yourself. Some day it “might” even be true, but, I wouldn’t hold my breath. So, you’ve been…
The 142 Biggest Product Failures of All Time
I don’t care if I’m promoting a site which pushes ads at you . . . this time. I haven’t even made it to the end of the list, but…