Daley Ponderings

There have been a number of things we wanted to work better on the Flying Junior, but mostly because it is hard to find a sailboat store in Pittsburgh, we hadn't gotten around to it.The wind spinner is fairly old, and after the capsize, didn't spin as well as it used to, and in the process of... (More)

On Monday, Jonathan said what sounded like "van-fan" so I tried to figure out what he meant. He pointed to the shelf and said it again, maybe differently. I looked up, and there were the bits - works of Rembrandt! I said, "Rembrandt?" And he said, "yes, Rembrandt!" (or a close approximation.)... (More)

It is a new month, and therefore, a new point on my email graph . A couple interesting things this month: one, you can tell I went on vacation, and probably also that I knew Heather was gone the week before, so I wasn't emailing her as much either. Two, spam has now hit the 30% mark (note: the... (More)

I think this is the worst code I have ever seen, except where people were trying to make code hard to read. This code is in a video driver, written by Silicon Motion.This is the function at the top level, supposedly easy to read, since it is using these lovely macros.... (More)

Since I always need to go back to my email to find out the instructions of how to set up the server, here are the settings we need at DynaVox to make Tracker work properly.We no longer need to install Oracle locally (yay!) Simply run tracker setup (can be over the network). You only need... (More)

Jonathan is saying new words so quickly now that it is impossible to keep track of them. Here are a few highlights from the past week. I once overheard a neighbor boy across the street complain to his aunt, "That baby is so annoying, he just keeps saying 'hi.' " But the other day, Jonathan did... (More)

Jonathan has been very happy with his bits recently, asking for them a lot. He is never bored with the picture bits, but I have had to scale down on the math and reading cards. However, the other day I discovered a way to show the math dots that keeps him riveted. I say the number several... (More)

Today's comic in Jon's Dilbert page-a-day calendar has Dogbert saying "Hello, this is Dogbert's All-Natural and Holistic Tech Support. . .Try stuffing tree bark in the CD drive and meditating. . . No, of course it won't damage anything, it's all natural!" As anyone who knows us knows, we're quite... (More)

We are on our way to Vermont to spend a weekend with my family, and I printed out our boarding passes earlier today, and the web page asked me if I wanted to change my seat assignment. There were two choices that looked better, though one pair of seats was all the way in the front, which... (More)

I wrote this script a while back to upload (via HTTP) a zip file full of .pbm files, convert all the pictures to bitmaps, put the bitmaps in a zip file, and then send it back to the user.I don't know how secure it is, so I wouldn't leave it around published somewhere on a server, but... (More)

I just realized that I haven't ever mentioned my Windows HTTP proxy server that I use. Web Washer is very useful. It turns out that yesterday was the two year anniversary of my using it on this computer. In that time, it has filtered: 227,646 images, 30,746 popups, 53,413 scripts, and... (More)

I decided to write a post to describe the features of the plugins that I wrote, and upgrades that I made to existing plugins to others can benefit from their use as well. You can see the actual source code, or else read my feeble descriptions. User Comments by Jon Daley : Description:... (More)

A Comcast guy came to the door yesterday.Cable Guy: "4565 Carroll - you don't have cable." Me: "Nope. We don't watch TV." CG: "You don't?" Me: "No." CG: "Do you have a TV?" Me: "Yes, but we only use it to watch movies." CG: "Oh. So you don't watch any TV at all?" Me: "Only the five... (More)

For those of you who have successfully installed Mercury's Test Director , and have it die suddenly, you need to check the IIS/NTFS permissions. ( Note, for those of you asking questions, you should read all four pages of comments - there are various questions and answers given throughout the... (More)

I just discovered another nifty feature of the Google search engine. You can paste in UPS and USPS tracking numbers, and will automatically provide you a link to the appropriate site, so you can track your package. For those who are curious, the reason why I happened to see that is I just... (More)