Blog Index

In a previous post, I discussed some of my negative experiences with daily driving OpenBSD on an old thinkpad. Despite those drawbacks, however, I am still using the setup. In this article, I discuss some of the positive sides of the experience that keep me coming back.

Sometimes, esoteric terminal emulators will not be recognized by servers you connect to over SSH out of the box. This article discusses how to resolve this problem.

I have previously written an article about setting up Outlook/Exchange email on Linux, in which I discussed using davmail(1), a Java program that allows using a standard IMAP/SMTP interface to communicate with Outlook email. Unfortunately, not long after I wrote that article, Microsoft rolled out an update that broke it. This article discusses in detail how to resolve the problem.

Several months ago, I decided to have a bit of fun and purchase an old Thinkpad T420s on Ebay. I threw OpenBSD onto it, and have been using it as my daily driver ever since. In this article, I discuss some of the shortcomings of this particular setup.

Probability is a tricky subject, and sometimes our initial ideas about how probabilistic systems behave are not reflected in the mathematics. It is worth taking care to ensure that we properly understand probability distributions when we are modeling problems, as the results can sometimes be quite counter-intuitive.

One thing that I have noticed over years spent on the Internet is that there is a seemingly large, and very vocal, group of people who spend a lot of time and energy getting worked up about measurement systems. And, almost universally, their distaste is targeted in one direction: imperial units. Metric good, imperial bad, is the general refrain.

A common task that you will need to accomplish in programming is to represent a large array of states. For example, you may want to tag each element in a list with a "status" bit to indicate some information about that record. Perhaps whether it is deleted or not, or whether it has been loaded from disk or not, etc. The obvious approach to accomplish this would be to attach a boolean to each element within the array.

Employers and universities are fond of using Microsoft Exchange/Office 365/Outlook as an email provider. And, because Microsoft is Microsoft, these services do not support standard IMAP/POP/SMTP interfaces. This makes getting them set up on Linux a royal pain. That is not to say that it is impossible. There are several different ways to connect to your Microsoft email account using a Linux desktop email client. In this article, I discuss two of them: evolution-ews and DavMail.

A walkthrough of an iterative approach to solving simple programming problems, using the Newton-Pepys problem as a case study.

A look at how Windows processes keyboard input with a worked example of remapping Caps Lock to Escape.