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Tag Archives: computers
Tools of The Trade: The Laptop in My Pocket
Last Monday, the night before I was due to cover a big conference, my nearly brand-new MacBook Air died: suddenly, completely, and unrecoverably. After hurling a stream of expletives in the general direction of Cupertino, I paid a visit to … Continue reading
The NEC-4 Security Scam
A few decades ago, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California developed a computer program called the Numerical Electromagnetic Code, or NEC. This set of algorithms allowed researchers to build computer models of radio antennas so they could … Continue reading
Wolfram Alpha Gets Its Emotion Chip Installed
When Wolfram Alpha launched, I plugged a few questions into it and was fairly impressed with its abilities. Then I tried to stump it. It didn’t take long: the question “how do you feel?” generated an error. I told a … Continue reading
Simple Hack: Magnetic Mac
There are powerful magnets hidden inside the screens of recent-model iMacs*; mine has them all around the edges. I don’t know why Apple put them there, but here’s my favorite use: holding documents while I transcribe them. The picture shows … Continue reading
Displaying a Complete Archive on One Page in WordPress
Today, I tried to solve a seemingly simple problem on the Walter and Ina site. Of course, a seemingly simple computer problem can quickly turn into a huge time-suck, and that’s exactly what happened. I’m betting there’s at least one … Continue reading
Health IT Discovers the Obvious
Computer scientists at UCL Medical School and Warwick University in the UK report that open source medical records software is more secure than proprietary software. In an accompanying press release, the researchers explain: Critics of Open Source often argue that, … Continue reading
Oh My God, That Actually Worked
I just upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress. Normally, this takes about 15 minutes of careful work, involving a download to my desktop, some FTP monkey business, checking of config files, and so forth. This time, after … Continue reading
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Tagged computers, server administration, software, web development, wordpress
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Medication Alerts in, Medication Alerts out
A new report in the Archives of Internal Medicine brings up an interesting problem with electronic prescribing systems. As the authors explain in an accompanying press release: The researchers reviewed the electronic prescriptions and associated medication safety alerts generated by … Continue reading
If The Shoe Fits…
Try visiting Typealyzer and entering the address of a blog. You’ll get a Myers-Briggs personality type indicator for that blog’s content. Yes, this is silly, but anyone who maintains a blog is obviously narcissistic enough to try it. Here’s the … Continue reading
Saving My iLife With Applescript and rsync
With a little bit of spare time this week, I finally got myself synchronized – my MacBook now has the same versions of all of my important files as my desktop machine, even down to mirrored libraries in iTunes and … Continue reading