Recently, I decided to conduct a Google experiment and write down what the search engines suggests for the phrase "why are" followed by all kinds of nationalities, races, and localities (alright, "recently" seems to be last March, as evident from the Google theme, but I only decided to post this now).

I did this just for fun and found most of the results funny, some hilarious, and some offensive and controversial.

However, all of them have a reason for being there – statistics. It's what people search for. The cream of the crop. Stereotypes, hilarities, it's all here.

If you can, please don't take them too close to heart. In fact, if you're a righteous conservative thinking of lecturing me, …

It's always important to know for developers what browsers they are developing for, who dominates the market, and what the current trends are.

I have gotten my hands on the Plaxo.com visitors' browser stats for December of 2009.

This information is valuable because Plaxo has a relatively general demographics, as it's not a site only geeks or only moms visit, and the statistics tends to not be skewed. Therefore, as you can see, Firefox doesn't occupy the same share as you might see on a techy site (on this site, more than 50% of users visit in Firefox).

Also, since Plaxo has a couple million monthly visitors and therefore a couple million data points, statistically speaking these numbers are relatively …

Updated: January 16th, 2010

Introduction

I love Delicious. It allows me to store my bookmarks, tag and search them, and, best of all, have access to them from anywhere on the web.

Searching bookmarks by keyword is easy – just enter a bunch of keywords into the search page and off you go but what if you want to confine your results to a certain domain? The main reason I wanted to do it personally is so that I could see all pages of my site bookmarked by Delicious users and the corresponding number of bookmarks. However, the only url based search Delicious offered was a full url lookup:

This search is very limited – it accepts only a full url to …

Updated: September 27th, 2009

Introduction

Welcome to part 2 of the Essential Firefox Extensions And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide series. In this article I’m going to describe a number of time saving pragmatic extensions that make me a better, faster, more efficient browser user (browserer?).

Pragmatic Extensions

All-in-One Gestures

All-in-One Gestures introduces customizable gestures for all kinds of actions. To perform a gesture, hold the right (by default) button and move the mouse in the specified direction, drawing the needed shape.

I use it mostly for 3 things: history back/forward and close tab (see below). Once you start using gestures, there is no …

The Problem

If you use VNC to remotely connect to your machines and are having problems with certain applications not showing changes (redrawing), this will, hopefully, solve the problem for you.

The symptoms are simple: you load a program but only the program outline and maybe the first frame would show up. After that, nothing would update, even though the user in front of the remote computer can see everything updating fine. For me, it is happening with all Java based programs (SmartSVN, Charles – amazing program btw!, etc). Here's what's happening to my Charles application – it never even sent the first frame, simply showing the desktop and not updating:

The problem may be confined to RealVNC …

Updated: July 1st, 2010

From time to time my, still curious, mind accumulates a variety of questions and concerns which it has to spill onto the pages of this blog. How random are these? Pretty damn random, and I need to see some answers, quick. Oh, and I’m deliberately not searching Google, as I want to facilitate discussion. What fun would it be if I just looked up all these?

Password Protected Garage Door Remotes

As a paranoid person and a recent homeowner, I started to wonder how safe I actually am in my house. Consider this likely scenario that nobody seems to be concerned with:

I park my car outside for one night and don’t take out my portable garage door remote, the

…

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Updated: January 18th, 2010

After I graduated and got a job in downtown San Francisco, I spent the first 2 weeks trying to figure out where I could park cheaper. At $300-400 for a monthly spot or $15-30 daily, the fees started adding up really quickly. In fact, I am fully convinced that 80% of the people who can afford to park in downtown expense it in full.

I do not know why I haven’t thought of public transportation sooner. Maybe because I used to [so wrongly] associate it only with people who cannot afford a car and considered myself superior to the group, or because I thought it was too ghetto (though, very true in some cases). However, as soon as I started …

Everyone and their mother are throwing out their predictions for 2009 nowadays, it’s a new fad. It’s like you’re not cool anymore if you don’t have twitter, a Mac, and a set of random predictions for the next 12 joyous months.

So I decided to throw in a few ideas of my own to be part of the cool crowd again (how much cooler can I be already, you might think, and I wouldn’t blame you).

Disclaimer (read it, tough guy)

What this post is:

• about the future of technology and the Internet, 2009 and beyond.
• my ideas on what is going to happen or should happen. If they happen to match someone else’s ideas – it doesn’t mean

…

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For quite a while now I wanted a tool to maintain a list of my domains and monitor them for expirations and registration state changes. Having a spreadsheet didn’t cut it anymore but thanks to Joel’s question on stackoverflow, I found DomainTools monitor.

The monitor is free, can track up to 1000 domains and send email (and RSS) alerts when it detects any status changes. Here are the advertised features:

• Domain Status like "registrar-lock", "redemption-period", and "pending-delete" changes will be sent to you so you can take action when your favorite domains are about to be released.
• Domain Registar changes are a sign of domain transfers which are detected by Domain Monitor.
• Expiration dates are monitored so

…

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Updated: October 24th, 2012

  I’m now convinced that insurance companies exist in this world for the sole purpose of making our lives a living hell any time we need to deal with them. The worse each experience, the less likely we are to file another claim. Of course, we’re also less likely to continue coverage with the same company, but at that point they’d already received our money and, if we accept a notion that most insurance companies have the same evil idea in mind, there’s little one can do to get satisfaction. Except for one thing – spread information about such especially heinous institutions.

Does my story have a happy ending? Maybe, or maybe not, it depends on whether you think the …

Everyone hates spam, right? Right, well maybe except for security researchers – it pays their bills. But the rest of the sane world does, and so do I, and while gmail has figured out a way to deal with the problem 99.9% of the time, nobody invented instant messenger anti-spam solutions yet [I think].

Lately I have been getting increasingly annoyed with a certain unexplainable, persistent, and surprisingly intelligent botnet on AIM. From time to time I would get messages from some sort of a fish variation. My list so far consists of the following IM names:  CroppedCoho, FortifiedTrout, FreshenedupTrout, FrozenSolidTrout, HandcuffedCoho, KissableCoho, PreferentialCoho, SmarterCoho, TentativeCoho, WantedCoho, and YoinkedTrout. Does it look annoying already? Well, it is.

Each of the …

Updated: July 30th, 2021

Crash is one of the new shows I’m into and Panic is one of the most likeable and original characters on the show. I really think he’s going to be back after this show – it’s his breakthrough performance.

So, in, I think, episode 4 Panic (Jocko’s character) goes to the studio and raps for the first time. What comes out is quite amazing, I recommend you watch that episode for a more complete experience. Otherwise, proceed to the MP3 that I got directly off Jocko’s myspace page.

You can play it right on this page (Edit: download link removed, per Jocko's request in the comments) or support Jocko by buying his album off Amazon for only $0.99 …

Updated: July 30th, 2021

The Idea

For the past month I have been exploring options and building a perfect Home Theater PC for my 50” Vizio plasma. Besides the obvious, it has to play movies, youtube videos, etc, I had a few concrete goals in mind. Here they are:

• it absolutely had to handle 1080P h264, specifically movies encoded using x264. An average movie size for this format is between 8.5 and 13 GB. There were 2 problems to overcome: the CPU had to be able to handle the decoding (my desktop dual core Conroe barely kept up) and the network had to be fast enough to stream in real time from my storage PC a floor away.
• I needed to have the easiest

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For the longest time I wanted to sort folders (aka directories) in Total Commander but it just wouldn’t. The sort rules only applied to files and I never took the time to figure it out. Well, I found the option now, which I want to share. I can finally see what movies, ahem, I mean presentations, I downloaded last.

The option is right there, in the middle, Sorting Directories. The default is Always by name. Change it to Like files (also by time) and you’re done.

…

Updated: October 15th, 2008

Worst thing I’ve ever seen…

Edit: Oh, and this just knocked the wind out of me: this is the rate of return in my 401K account this year:

Edit #2: nope, that wasn’t the worst. Today (Oct 15, 2008) beats them all:

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