Why You Should Disable the Popup Login Box

Long, long ago, there was only one way to authenticate users on a website: HTTP Basic Authentication (oh sure, there was later Digest Authentication, but few people used it). And then Cookies were invented, and the web was yummy. Only it wasn’t, because cookies had privacy concerns along for the ride; and still do. But, cookie-based [...]

Obtuse error messages: git

The error message:

To ssh://user@host/path/to/repository    c441eb7..a5705cd  master -> master error: failed to push some refs to ‘ssh://user@host/path/to/repository’

The error condition:

A hook script that does nothing. Either the script is empty or contains only comments.

Apparently git does not like useless hook scripts. Took me a good 10-15 minutes to deduce that was the [...]

Attracting the Spam

Five years ago, I wrote a post entitled “Combating Comment Spam” It amuses me that this post attracts the most comment spam than any other post on this site. The spam ratio is easily 100:1

Unlocking the OS X screen saver from the command line

My OS X Desktop system has a problem. When the screensaver activates, there is a small window, one or two seconds in length, wherein if I depress a keyboard key or move the mouse, the screensaver does not fully activate. However, it does not de-activate, leaving me with an unusable desktop.

The system does not [...]

Twittergation needed

Twitter went from being “why would I use this?” to “hmmm, look how many of my friends are using it” to “why doesn’t this integrate easily with anything I use?”

The closest is via SMS, but that can be costly for how often updates happen. What I would like to see:

1. Better integration with [...]