Ben's House of Pancakes

Wednesday Nov 05, 2008

Beware of Phishing Attempt circulating

A phishing e-mail has been circulating campus, read more for details.

[Read More]

Thursday Sep 18, 2008

Bad ideas by computer scientists

Yes, I'm a computer scientist, here's why they don't let us come up with certain ideas...[Read More]

Tuesday Jan 22, 2008

Dilbert - In color

Tuesday Oct 30, 2007

Blog Hit Count

As I logged in today, I wanted to check to see if anyone had posted any comments on my entries. I have been getting some spam lately, from Italy of all places. So expecting something new, I looked to try to find my blog listed in the "Bot Blogs" section. Checking in its usual position (about 2/3 the way down, with about 25 hits) I cannot find it. Surprise to me when I see it at the top with 380 hits! Wow, have I also beat Jesse? Well, no. I come to find that the numbers on the "Hot Blogs" list are a bit out of whack. I checked my actual hits today using the blog status tools, and found that I am at a solid 100 hits. That's not too bad. How I ended up in the top place for at least a little while is beyond me, but I might as well jump at the opportunity to write a post about it.

A friendly note: I really don't expect my blog to be the "Greatest blog on USD Blogs" but I enjoy the fact that I have some content that is at least interesting to people posted on here. Quality, not quantity (AKA I'm lazy). Also, I'm not out to beat Jesse, especially since we are on the same programming contest team this year (with Abby too!). Maybe I will post an entry about that when it's finished.

Friday Sep 21, 2007

CSC Construction Tour

I went on a tour of the CSC construction with a group of fellow USD students, faculty, and staff. Thanks to Kraus Anderson Construction for letting us tour the site and take pictures!

[Read More]

Thursday Sep 06, 2007

That was easy

So here I am walking through the local Wal*mart, and I happen to find my way down the office supply aisle. Now I've been down this aisle many times before, not thinking much of it, in fact I was just shopping for sticky tack last week (Once again, they only had the icky yellow kind). Now I happen upon this aisle again, only this time in a total state of awe as I find the shelves look like they have been rampaged by office supply obsessed college students. I should know about office supply obsessed college students, I am one. The aisle had obviously been ransacked for every last pencil holder it had, and it was sitting empty. Oh well, off to the fish section to see if they have more of the precious white gravel in stock.

Wednesday Aug 29, 2007

Hackers vs. Crackers

A hacker hacked the iPhone. For once, the media got it right. How so? Find out here.

[Read More]

Tuesday Aug 07, 2007

Dump your MySQL database

mysqldump --databases [dbname] -u [username] -p > [destfilename.ext]

Ahh, backups. Time for some modifications!

Friday Jun 29, 2007

Hey, Apple, forget about someone?

That's right, there is this little state called South Dakota. Now I know that we got left out of the Rand McNally atlas one year, but if you think that the 781,919 people who live here are insignificant, I've got news for you.

A good percent of these 781,919 people just might want one of your iPhones. But oh, no, you'd never dream of having an apple store in SD, much less selecting a carrier for your silly little phone that actually works in our insignificant state.

Or maybe we should thank AT&T for this. AT&T, you provided us with service through land lines in the past, but we're mobile now. We don't drive tractors to work, like you may have thought. We have cars, computers, and oh yes, cellular phones too. The difference between our phones and your phones -- ours actually work. "More bars in more places" huh? You've sure barred us from your service, and from our handheld multimedia dreams. If those are the only bars we get from you, I think I'll pass.

We will enjoy laughing at people who visit us with your phone, we might even loan them one of our phones so they can actually call someone.

When your phone works with my carrier and supports a Linux installation, call me.

Monday Jun 11, 2007

Beware, cross platform programmers

In Java, there is a handy little feature that goes something like this:

System.getProperty("file.separator");

While this feature is good, some care is required to make sure that other instances of hard-coded back and forward slashes aren't still lingering in the code.

Happened to me.

Saturday Jun 09, 2007

onblur events in Firefox

Firefox seems to have a problem with onblur events. The onblur handler is not called when the componant is clicked out of, only when tabbed out. Here is a simple solution to the problem.

var action = function(){
//whatever action you want to happen onblur
}

if (document.addEventListener) {
document.addEventListener('click', action, false);
} else if (document.attachEvent) {
document.attachEvent('onclick', action, false);
}

The down side:
It is called on _any_ blur, so literally anytime a click happens on the document, but it works for simple things like hiding auto-complete drop downs.

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