Sam’s Blog

• Alternate Pitfall maps This blog entry is my final look at Pitfall’s map generator. In this ... [Read more] (June 17, 2013)
• More on Pitfall’s polynomial In this blog, I continue looking at Pitfall's random number generator. ... [Read more] (June 16, 2013)
• Pitfall’s polynomial In this blog, I continue looking at Pitfall's random number generator. ... [Read more] (June 12, 2013)
• Pitfall redux In this blog, I discuss Pitfall's random number generator by looking at 8-... [Read more] (June 08, 2013)
• A 4096-byte jungle In 1982, the video game to have was Activision’s Pitfall, which featured ... [Read more] (June 06, 2013)
• Microblogs May 2013 In this batch of microblogs, I have spolier-free reviews of the new Star ... [Read more] (June 04, 2013)

• Microblogs April-May 2013 Here are the Microblogs I posted between April 15, 2013 and May 5, 2013. ... [Read more] (May 05, 2013)

• Microblogs April 2013 week 2 In my microblogs for the second week of April, I discuss living in Mexico, ... [Read more] (April 15, 2013)
• Microblogs April 2013 week 1 This is an archive of my microblog postings for the first week of April, ... [Read more] (April 07, 2013)

• March 2013 Microblogs Here are all of the microblog postings I made in March 2013. I discuss ... [Read more] (March 30, 2013)
• Tweets March 2013 I am moving away from Twitter and to using my own code for microblogs. ... [Read more] (March 29, 2013)
• Why I need Masculism This is my explanation for feminists who get upset whenever I use the #... [Read more] (March 16, 2013)
• Creeper cards In today's blog, I discuss those creeper cards which have recently been ... [Read more] (March 07, 2013)
• Twitter wrap-up In today's blog, I go over tweets from my Twitter feed posted in February. ... [Read more] (March 01, 2013)

• Netbooks in 2013 In today's blog, I discuss netbooks in 2013. Netbooks are not dead While ... [Read more] (February 17, 2013)
• Applebee's and God Recently, there was a pastor who went to Applebee's. While there, she ... [Read more] (February 05, 2013)
• Web font rendering In today's blog, I will discuss web font rendering on Chrome, and the work ... [Read more] (February 03, 2013)

• Thank you, Virginia This is an email I sent out earlier today Mark Obenshain, Ralph Smith, ... [Read more] (January 31, 2013)
• BuyVM: All is now good Just a brief note that all is now well with BuyVM at Fiberhub. Everything ... [Read more] (January 24, 2013)
• samiam.org on IPv6 With the inevitable transition to IPv6 looming, and with IPv6 support on ... [Read more] (January 06, 2013)
• Minor Civ4 update I have been starting to play Civilization 4 again and have made a minor ... [Read more] (January 05, 2013)
• Finally, I have BuyVM Last year, I complained that it was impossible to get a BuyVM node. ... [Read more] (January 01, 2013)

• 2012 wrap-up 2012 has been a good year. While I only devote one day a month to MaraDNS, ... [Read more] (December 31, 2012)
• How many squares? There's a puzzle making the rounds on social networks where one needs to ... [Read more] (December 19, 2012)
• Blog meta-index Today's blog is an index of previous blog entries. Every now and then, I ... [Read more] (December 01, 2012)

• Adios, Gopher A few months ago, I put up a Gopher server. Today, I have shut down the ... [Read more] (November 30, 2012)
• Let's not secede I agree with fundamental conservative principles: I agree that if we do ... [Read more] (November 14, 2012)
• Obama: Looking forward As an Obama supporter, the last thing I want to do is gloat right now. I ... [Read more] (November 07, 2012)
• Post-election thoughts As I write this, Romney is making his concession speech; I will discuss ... [Read more] (November 06, 2012)
• Final election prediction Since Nate's numbers are looking better and better for Obama every day, ... [Read more] (November 04, 2012)
• Saturday election prediction With only three days until the election, here's my prediction, again based ... [Read more] (November 03, 2012)
• Keccak: The best choice In today's blog, I discuss the Keccak hash, and why it was the best choice ... [Read more] (November 01, 2012)

• Saturday election prediction In today's prediction, I am using Nate Silver's numbers from yesterday ... [Read more] (October 27, 2012)
• Friday election prediction In tonight's prediction, I am using Nate Silver's numbers from yesterday ... [Read more] (October 26, 2012)
• Saturday election prediction In tonight's prediction, I am using Nate Silver's numbers from yesterday ... [Read more] (October 20, 2012)
• Thursday election prediction In tonight's prediction, I am using NerdWallet's numbers from today. This ... [Read more] (October 18, 2012)
• Wednesday election prediction In tonight's prediction, I am using Nate Silver's numbers from yesterday (... [Read more] (October 17, 2012)
• Tonight's election prediction I am using Huffpost's numbers for today (pre-debate) for tonight's ... [Read more] (October 16, 2012)
• Predicting the election I am discussing politics again. As per my previous promise, I will not ... [Read more] (October 15, 2012)
• Why is Git still using SHA-1 Back in 2008, Dancho Danchev praised MaraDNS, my DNS implementation, for ... [Read more] (October 04, 2012)

• Slashdot: A final look In today's blog, I wrap my series on Slashdot which I have written about ... [Read more] (September 29, 2012)
• Web typography In today's blog, I discuss the current state of web typography, and some ... [Read more] (September 18, 2012)
• Remembering September 11 For people like my stepmother and my friend Trillamar who have a birthday ... [Read more] (September 11, 2012)
• Multi Master fonts In today's blog, I discuss a new open-source Multi Master font, as well as ... [Read more] (September 08, 2012)
• Slashdot and more In today's blog, I discuss changing fonts on my webpage, my SSD hard disk ... [Read more] (September 07, 2012)
• Slashdot Slashdot has been a guilty pleasure of mine ever since it came out. Indeed,... [Read more] (September 03, 2012)
• No more politics I have made a decision to no longer post or comment publicly about my ... [Read more] (September 01, 2012)

• The great recession If I were to blame the housing bubble and subsequent recession on any ... [Read more] (August 18, 2012)
• Objective truth is going away Geroge Orwell lamented, in his essay "Looking back on the Spanish War", ... [Read more] (August 14, 2012)
• Adding Facebook comments Comments are difficult to deal with. I had to turn off comments on the old ... [Read more] (August 06, 2012)
• George Orwell and the truth One thing I find very disgusting about today's politics is how easily ... [Read more] (August 02, 2012)

• Finally, a CVE-2012-1911 patch After nearly five months, there is a patch for CVE-2012-1911. The patch ... [Read more] (July 11, 2012)

• Legends of Ancient Arabia In today's blog entry, I review the Legends of Ancient Arabia (LoAA) ... [Read more] (June 11, 2012)

• On Civilization IV I have begun work on Totestra, which is my modifications to a Civilization ... [Read more] (May 10, 2012)
• Inspiron 14z sound problem I had a bizarre problem on a Dell Inspiron 14z with a Conexant SmartAudio ... [Read more] (May 08, 2012)

• Groundhog Day Groundhog Day, a 1993 movie starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, is ... [Read more] (April 08, 2012)
• Humility Humility is not thinking less of myself; it is thinking of myself less. To ... [Read more] (April 02, 2012)

• The mythical $15/year VPS In this blog, I briefly go over low-cost VMs, discuss the non-availability ... [Read more] (March 27, 2012)
• A thought I am responsible for every resentment I have. This doesn't mean I am at ... [Read more] (March 25, 2012)
• The ghost domain bug In today's blog entry, I look at the ghost domain bug, and how various DNS ... [Read more] (March 14, 2012)
• On Anne Frank In today's blog, I discuss Anne Frank's fate in the world of a ... [Read more] (March 07, 2012)
• Remembering 1992 In today's blog, I share a Bible verse, and reminisce about the ... [Read more] (March 06, 2012)
• Geomyidae is stable In an earlier blog entry, I implied that Geomyidae, the gopher daemon I am ... [Read more] (March 05, 2012)
• On fundamentalist reasoning This blog entry looks at an event in the Bible which is widely regarded as ... [Read more] (March 04, 2012)

• Fundamentalism & Christianity Everyone has a soapbox The advantage of the internet is that it lets ... [Read more] (February 25, 2012)
• Bulk polyhedral dice Buying dice After a 20-year hiatus, I am starting to play role playing ... [Read more] (February 18, 2012)
• Classic X11 fonts for Windows For people, like myself, who are fans of the classic X11 font misc-fixed, ... [Read more] (February 16, 2012)
• RedHat extended support I just found out today that RedHat has added three years to the support ... [Read more] (February 15, 2012)
• Happy Valentine's Day Happy Valentine's day everyone. For people happily in relationships, today ... [Read more] (February 14, 2012)
• My Gopher server As a geek, I sometimes have an interest in technologies and forms of ... [Read more] (February 06, 2012)
• A brief review of my VPS hosts I will briefly review the four VPS hosts I have used. A VPS, or virtual ... [Read more] (February 05, 2012)
• Adios cripperz.sg One of the three nodes I have used for hosting my domains (samiam.org, ... [Read more] (February 03, 2012)

• Having a spiritual experience I did not write this entry. This entry was written by Abhinabha Tangerman ... [Read more] (January 30, 2012)
• I oppose SOPA On the right, you can see a picture of me in San Jose protesting the DMCA ... [Read more] (January 19, 2012)

• I miss killfiles Usenet and killfiles Once upon a time, before the world wide web, the ... [Read more] (December 22, 2011)
• Looking at Celery In today's blog entry, I describe how to have cloud (distributed) ... [Read more] (December 20, 2011)
• Round Up In today's blog entry, I discuss SOPA, a bug in MaraDNS, revising my web ... [Read more] (December 17, 2011)
• Round-up Today's blog discusses giving modern CSS to IE8, my site's browser usage ... [Read more] (December 16, 2011)
• Web page design update As I have mentioned before, I am not completely satisfied with how this ... [Read more] (December 09, 2011)

• The Galileo 7 There is a classic episode from the original Star Trek named The Galileo ... [Read more] (November 05, 2011)
• Logic riddles There is a classic logic puzzle out there which is often not worded ... [Read more] (November 04, 2011)

• Dennis Ritchie RIP Just a few short days after Steve Jobs' sad passing, the great Dennis ... [Read more] (October 13, 2011)
• Web site plans Looking ahead While smartphone views are currently only a small percentage ... [Read more] (October 12, 2011)
• On web site design CNet's new design I must say, I really like the new web site design that ... [Read more] (October 10, 2011)
• RIP Steve Jobs Yesterday's passing of Steve Jobs has greatly saddened me. When he left ... [Read more] (October 06, 2011)
• Cloak of Darkness Interactive fiction Once upon a time, long long ago, the preferred method ... [Read more] (October 02, 2011)

• Open-source IMAP clients For my work, I had to find a good open-source IMAP client that runs in ... [Read more] (September 10, 2011)
• Random map templates I have made two RMG templates suitable for the recent patches to make ... [Read more] (September 01, 2011)

• Global warming denial Everyone is welcome to have an opinion. And, indeed, there are a number of ... [Read more] (August 27, 2011)
• On Apple products First and foremost, now that Steve Jobs is leaving Apple, my prayers are ... [Read more] (August 26, 2011)
• Keeping CentOS secure One annoyance CentOS has is that, whenever Red Hat makes a new upstream ... [Read more] (August 09, 2011)

• Web typography As I have noted in an earlier blog entry, is is now possible to put just ... [Read more] (July 19, 2011)
• GOG HOMM3 Multiplayer It is really nice that gog.com has made a legal DRM-free version of Heroes ... [Read more] (July 10, 2011)
• Updating the ads After running ads on Samiam.org for a week, I have enough data to get a ... [Read more] (July 03, 2011)
• Tuning nginx + php-fastcgi This article talks about the dark art of making a webpage with a lot of ... [Read more] (July 02, 2011)

• Samiam.org now has ads In order to have samiam.org no longer be an expense but instead be a self-... [Read more] (June 28, 2011)
• IE8 @font-face bug Since @font-face is a relatively new tag, there are a few bugs with its ... [Read more] (June 19, 2011)
• Webkit @font-face bug As I was testing the printing of my web page this morning, I discovered ... [Read more] (June 06, 2011)

• Embedding web fonts For years, web designers have been forced to select from a very limited ... [Read more] (May 28, 2011)
• Beware: O'Reilly reviews Update (May 28): O'Reilly can not contact Power Reviews about this issue ... [Read more] (May 26, 2011)
• App Inventor By David Wolber, Hal Abelson, Ellen Spertus, and Liz Looney App Inventor: ... [Read more] (May 25, 2011)
• The Rapture Despite Harold Camping's predictions, the Rapture did not happen today. ... [Read more] (May 21, 2011)
• Web page redesign I am wrapping up the 2011 redesign of the web page and blog. I started by ... [Read more] (May 17, 2011)
• Facebook viruses One of my friends in Facebook recently got stung by a virus; I was able to ... [Read more] (May 15, 2011)
• Mobile browsers When I originally designed the HTML and CSS for this webpage, cell phone ... [Read more] (May 14, 2011)
• Poor man's Widelux One of Jeff Bridges' favorite cameras is the "Widelux". The Widelux is a ... [Read more] (May 03, 2011)
• Firefox and Javascript Since my current gig is having me do a lot of heavy Javascript programming,... [Read more] (May 01, 2011)

• On NXDOMAIN Some feel that NXDOMAIN should not only mean "this host name does not ... [Read more] (April 23, 2011)
• IE6 end of life Now that Microsoft has a site telling people to no longer use Internet ... [Read more] (April 17, 2011)
• du for Windows One thing that has always annoyed me is that the version of MSYS I use (... [Read more] (April 10, 2011)
• On Xonotic Once upon a time, there was a real cool open-source first-person-shooter ... [Read more] (April 09, 2011)

• Bitcoin Bitcoin may be illegal. Bitcoin is an attempt to create an alternative ... [Read more] (March 23, 2011)
• On nuclear power For society to continue to function, we need to continue to have power. ... [Read more] (March 15, 2011)
• Automating the blog I am in the process of updating the blog. I am still keeping the files as ... [Read more] (March 06, 2011)

• Public domain Bibles Poking around on the internet, I have found a few copyright-free (or, in ... [Read more] (February 10, 2011)

• On the US Constitution Going through my old blogs, I found a blog which is very interesting, in ... [Read more] (January 30, 2011)
• Goodbye MySpace I haven't used my myspace account in a while; in April of 2010, I posted ... [Read more] (January 26, 2011)
• Usenet A year and a half ago, I posted that Usenet is dead. I was only partially ... [Read more] (January 11, 2011)
• djbdns 1.05: False security I would like to start off this blog posting by pointing out that djbdns' ... [Read more] (January 03, 2011)

• Final 2010 post; NIV update This will be my last blog posting for 2010, so a quick recap of the major ... [Read more] (December 25, 2010)
• Windows on ARM chips Every couple of decades, Microsoft ports Windows to some non-x86 chip. The ... [Read more] (December 24, 2010)