When I write for public consumption (book, magazine article, blog post....), I try to be a bit careful with how I present myself. I have the most difficult time with misspellings because they could bite me on the nose and I still wouldn't sense them. I tend to be okay with grammar, and I pick up most typos because usually I read and reread many times before publishing. Some often sneak through anyway.

Part of this carefulness is evident in the first example I give in my book on regular expressions. On the first page (First edition, Chapter 1, Page [...]

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When a digital camera produces a standard JPG image file, it does so after internally processing its sensor's raw data. This processing includes the mathematical application of various settings for exposure, white balance, sharpness, color saturation, and other algorithms that massage the image data in an attempt to achieve a particular look.

Many cameras offer "scene" settings that can impact how this processing is done. For example, a "portrait" setting may reduce the amount of sharpening applied.

Raw

When shooting in a raw format, this processing is taken out of the camera, and left to your image-processing software. I [...]

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One of the tenets in designing large multiuser systems like Yahoo! Messenger is that one user should not be able to overly disrupt another, or force another to take some action. Yahoo! Messenger generally does a good job with this, but has long had one failing that really bothers me.

For whatever reason, I seem to be a popular target for random people wanting to add me to their "friends list." I wake up in the morning to find a Yahoo! Messenger dialog on my screen that looks like this:

99% of the time, I have no idea who the [...]

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I finally solved a problem I was having with Japanese input into emacs, and thought I'd report it for the benefit of others that might be searching for a solution.

A month or so ago, emacs stopped accepting kanji in Japanese input, and stopped displaying kanji in files. Hiragana and katakana continued to input/display fine, but kanji no longer worked at all.

I spent a month testing all kinds of things (including some printf-debugging of the emacs source code!), but to make a long story short, it seems that all I needed to do was to add

to my .emacs [...]
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I just realized that with Vista™, there are now enough major releases of Microsoft® Windows® for the desktop (as opposed to PDAs and servers) to put out a "Top 10" list, so without further ado....

The Top 10 Worst Major Releases of Microsoft® Windows® for the Desktop:

10.Microsoft® Windows® 1.0 10.Microsoft® Windows® 2.0 9.Microsoft® Windows® 3.0 8.Microsoft® Windows NT® 7.Microsoft® Windows® 95 5.Microsoft® Windows® 98 4.Microsoft® Windows® 2000 3.Microsoft® Windows® ME 2.Microsoft® Windows® XP 1.Microsoft® Windows Vista™

As one would expect in a "top worst" list for Windows®, it includes all the major desktop releases.

The list is in [...]
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