Archive for computers

I have to deal with unreasonable KGS users all day long. They argue about totally insane things ad infinitum. I try to be patient and understanding, as far as it’s possible. I am even trying to be nice to people who complain about escapers.
I got used to KGS users being unreasonable, but I at least […]

“Tone mapping reduces global contrast in images while increasing local contrast and shadow/highlight detail.” or so Gimp Addict’s Tone Mapper tutorial says. Go and read his tutorial, I will add few comments to it:
4) “radius of 100-500 is good” — yes, it usually is, but since we don’t know the size of the image, I’d […]

As my Ubuntu Edgy (6.10) was not quite cutting edge anymore, I decided to get Hardy Heron.
Upgrade over two skipped releases would be suicidal, so I decided to do a fresh install. I also wanted to preserve my old Edgy… you know — just in case. That involved cutting off half of my system partition […]

Do you know what common sense is?
Common sense is:

NOT setting fixed height for elements whose actual height can change anytime, and especially not setting this particular height to three elements next to each other, to keep them with the same height (common sense solution is to wrap it all in another element)
NOT calling your database […]

This is not going to be only about the systems themselves, rather about general (desktop) working environment. As I had to spend substantial amount of time working with Windows recently, I feel qualified enough to share some insights:
What I like in Windows:

Total Commander: it really rocks, it remembers my ftp connections with passwords, it allows […]

As we all know, Flickr is the best photo sharing site (if you haven’t heard it yet, Microsoft is buying Yahoo, who own Flickr… so there’s a very real possibility that Microsoft will kill Flickr, which would make me hate them even more). Almost unbelievably, the flickr source is only 60k lines of php and […]

As I mentioned in the previous post, I needed a CAPTCHA algorithm. As I couldn’t find anything simple and usable that would do what I want (ie follow the basic principles of captcha creation (readibility for humans, and hopefully unreadibility for machines)), I decided to write my own. The purpose of this was just to […]

In wordpress database, column comment_status is of type enum(’open’, ‘closed’, ‘registered_only’). But for some reason, ‘registered_only’ is never used anywhere…
I use disable comments plugin, which is excellent because it is very simple. Here is the relevant part:

$wpdb->query(‘UPDATE wp_posts
SET comment_status = "closed", ping_status = "closed"
WHERE DATEDIFF(NOW(), post_date) > ‘ . $days);

And if you want it to […]

I didn’t plan it. I just woke up today and knew I’d have a new blog in the evening.
As for colours, a great deal of thinking went into that. Yesterday I read a lot about readability on the web. I think it’s something very important that many people completely miss. First, Verdana and Georgia, that’s […]

It all started about a year ago, at a go tournament in Blansko, where I played a game called “fujtajblíci”. I enjoyed it a lot, so I thought I could create online version. But as you might know, it is quite a huge leap from thinking about doing something to actually doing it.
Anyway, now I […]