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Recent Articles
- Spam is not an effective e-marketing strategy!
- Homosexuals granted right to apply for asylum
- Alpha Course poll says there is no god
- Extortionate immigration fees & gratuitous hurdles
- Should I use a physical or virtual memory model?
- Atheism and morality
- Identifying installed floppy drives
- Russian Knights of Spamalot!
- Migrating my web presence to this site
- The importance of experimental observation
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Broken gcalctool bit shift in OpenSolaris 2009.06
Posted on August 31, 2009 | No CommentsWhile working on some low-level OS code, I needed to juggle with some bit fields and it’s often useful to use the logical operations on OpenSolaris’ bundled calculator accessory. However, I thought I was going mad when I tried to shift left or right! Check... -
Windows ftp getting “425 Unable to build data connection”
Posted on August 31, 2009 | No CommentsIf you are using the command line ftp client within Windows and getting errors like these… 500 Illegal PORT command 425 Unable to build data connection: Connection refused Well, don’t worry – you’re in good company. This is probably one of the most commonly encountered... -
Detecting when a floppy disk is changed or missing
Posted on August 30, 2009 | No CommentsIn a floppy disk controller device driver, we can check if a floppy disk has been changed or is missing by telling the controller to select the drive and switch it’s motor on, then checking if the DISK CHANGE bit is asserted in the Digital... -
Enabling paging vs. the GDT “wrap around” trick
Posted on August 29, 2009 | 1 CommentWhen writing our standalone code for the OS nucleus or kernel, one of the first problems we have to deal with is the difference between our linked addresses (i.e. the load addresses defined by the linker) versus the actual address we are loaded at by... -
Creating VirtualBox (VDI) hard disk images on OpenSolaris
Posted on August 29, 2009 | No CommentsWhile testing my hobby OS nucleus (kernel) code, it is sometimes useful to be able to create disk images containing a file system and any files I need that I can then load into a virtual machine. One of the virtual hosts I like to... -
Freeing hidden space in the “System Volume Information” folder
Posted on August 29, 2009 | 3 CommentsI was cleaning up an external USB drive that had a bunch of old data that I didn’t need any more. The drive was fine but had been used between a number of systems so I thought to do a quick “chkdsk” (this is an... -
The LGBT dilemma: sexuality vs. dysphoria
Posted on June 15, 2009 | No CommentsOne of the biggest challenges faced by the transgender community is the almost universal misunderstanding among the majority cisgendered population that the dysphoria between the anatomical and psychological gender identities is a sexual orientation issue. Even Amnesty International refers to transgenderism in the context of... -
Transgender vs. Transsexual
Posted on June 5, 2009 | No CommentsWhat is the difference between being a transgendered person or a transsexual person? This is a highly contentious point. Sharon Gaughan, Co-Founder, VP, and Executive Director of TS-Si, Inc., wrote an article in 2006 which asserts that one is only truly a transsexual if one... -
What is Gender Dysphoria?
Posted on June 5, 2009 | No CommentsPut simply, gender dysphoria is a condition where a person feels that they are trapped in a physical body of the wrong gender. A person with gender dysphoria experiences anxiety, uncertainty or persistently uncomfortable feelings about the gender they were born with. They believe their... -
The futility of the “brain in the jar” argument
Posted on September 23, 2008 | No CommentsThere is a particular metaphysical argument which asserts that materialism cannot explain consciousness because it’s impossible to prove that even matter exists. If it’s impossible to prove that matter exists, how can one provide a material explanation of consciousness? Proponents of this argument say that...