Rubber shrinks when heated.

Metal expands when heated.

Computerists are aware of the Open Source, and Free Software engineering and political tendencies. They may also be aware of the resistance to patents on algorithms and software. However, I and others were unaware of the long legacy of historical skepticism toward patents.

I got into a discussion about fertilizing with human manure, and defended the practice, mainly because my grandmother did it.

Lodge has a pretty good page about caring for their pans, but I respectfully disagree with them about almost everything.

Here's an awesome tip from WikiPedia's page about Aluminium foil:

This is a javascript calculator that will estimate if taking a bus will cost less than what you pay in gasoline. Surprisingly, for short commutes, commuting by car is cheaper than getting a bus pass. (Calculator is on the full article.)

This is just a note to be found by search engines.

I had a weird problem with a configuration of phpmyadmin on top of lighttpd on top of Gentoo Linux.

The symptom was that phpmyadmin said "cookies must be enabled". Cookies were enabled in my browser.

A test of the setcookie() function in PHP (and the header() function as well) seemed to indicate that no header lines were being sent.

Turns out that this is related to the versions of PHP being installed.

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/php/php-upgrading.xml

My problem was that I wasn't compiling the CGI version of PHP. I probably had the CLI version installed.

To force the CGI version, add 'cgi' to your USE. (This is in /etc/make.config.)

Rebuild it (emerge php) and wait.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/179196/Historical-statistics-support-a-hypothe...

OMFG. This is wrong. It seemed the "in" thing for audio geeks, circa 2001, was to start using XLR connectors to wire together their stereos... to get balanced signals. Or "balanced", because those heavy duty cords and connectors are supposed to deliver mono audio signals.

This styrofoam coaster was made by cutting up a bit of packaging foam, and shaping it with a sharp blade.

Welcome to the new site. It's just a meta-blog, where you can sign up and get your own blog. Blog entries get manually promoted to the front page by the moderator(s). (To sign up, click on the register link, above.)

The site uses the Drupal content management software.

The theme of the site is pretty much the same it's been for the past several years: tech tips, links to left/liberal political articles, some art, and random info.

I hope to add a few plug-ins to allow for easier file uploads, anonymous posts, and a calendar. Also, I will try to copy selected articles from the old archives into this system. So far, I'm impressed with Drupal, and think it's worth it to copy stuff over.

This site has been managed by different CMSs: Frontier, miscellaneous Perl scripts, PHP scripts, a hacked up WikiWiki, and now, Drupal. So far, Drupal's been the most impressive, and the first to inspire me to repurpose old content into new formats.