tiling the infinite plane

in the 17^th minute of the 8^th hour ante meridium FYI, ASP.NET sets HttpRequest.UserAgent to null when the browser supplies an empty or no User-Agent header, not "the raw user agent string" (which would be the String.Empty for the former case, and null for the latter) as the documentation claims.

in the 56^th minute of the 7^th hour ante meridium

Reasons you should not embed base64 images within documents

• Incompatible with bad browsers
  • No compatibility with MSIE 6/7
  • 32k limit in MSIE 8
  • Modernizr can mitigate these issues, but adds to the total script load of the page.
• base64 encoding increases file size by 33%
  • Increased bandwidth requirement for clients
  • Increased CPU requirement when serving gzip
• Embedded resources cannot be cached independently of their host page
• Overall, it is not worth it to save a couple HTTP requests

via Virginia Beach Website Development

in the 42^nd minute of the 5^th hour post meridium

So, turns out you have to add 'md5' as a local socket authentication method to your pg_hba.conf if you want phpBB3 to run on a local PostgreSQL instance.

in the 9^th minute of the 8^th hour ante meridium

Wrangling with installing Ubuntu on an Acer AcpireOne netbook, and had no end of troubles with it. To start with, my school uses SafeConnect NAC which is an absolute crap-for-crap insecure system, but has the decided disadvantage of being impossible to get running with the console mode netinstaller. Since I needed encrypted LVM, I had to get the Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex alternate install on a flash drive. Here's what I found:

• None of the recommended methods work. isotostick.sh has undefined problems before even building the drive image. UNetBootIn takes perfectly good ISOs and crufts them into netinstalls. The manual syslinux install fails to fool the installer into believing in the fake cdrom0.
• Luckily, some intrepid soul has described how to create a minimal USB stick that will try to mount and install any ISO placed on its root. This works like a charm.
• Just one thing: it'll call your LVM volume group sdb. This won't cause any problems when the drive becomes sda at reboot, though, because everything's referenced by UUID.