Brian Pane

This blog now allows readers to post comments if they authenticate via OpenID.

As described earlier, I tried the OpenID plugin for WordPress, but that plugin required a PHP extension not supported by my web hosting provider.

I subsequently found the WordPress RPX plugin that supports OpenID. RPX is an outsourced authentication service run by a [...]

I wanted to add OpenID support to my blog so that people could authenticate using their credentials from other sites (Yahoo and Google, for example) to post comments.

There is a plugin for WordPress that adds OpenID support. I downloaded it, installed it, and was soon up and running with a non-working OpenID implementation.

When I [...]

For a couple of years, I’ve used an HP all-in-one printer/scanner device. Up through OS X 10.5, HP provided a scanning application that made it reasonably easy to scan paper documents into multi-page PDFs. That application, however, stopped working under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

The good news

The printer support in 10.6 already includes [...]

I updated my computer to Mac OS 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) last week. It worked well. This afternoon, though, I tried to compile a C program for the first time in a long time.

-bash: gcc: command not found

Hmmm….that’s not good. I found gcc living under /Developer/usr/bin, but problems remained:

$ /Developer/usr/bin/gcc -O -o ~/stream [...]

Recent ReCaptcha texts I’ve encountered:

Nixon’s vowels
indie rock so post-ironic that they wear their trucker hats backwards

10 Moors
the hottest new boy band on the Iberian Peninsula

graven krill
they play both kinds of music: gothic and industrial

I’ve just finished version 1.0-alpha2 of Assetbarista, my Greasemonkey script for Firefox that attempts to improve the discussion forum of the Achewood cartoon.

New in this version is the ability to preview one’s comments before posting. Assetbar, the system that powers the Achewood forum, supports the BBcode markup language. In the absence of a [...]

A long time ago, in grad school, my advisor taught me to use gprof, a tool that produced a report showing where all the CPU time was spent in one’s program. Gprof required recompiling the program with special instrumentation, and its instrumentation granularity wasn’t great, but it provided invaluable data about performance bottlenecks.  Ever [...]

My old place of employment wanted to promote a new “been there, done that” feature. They apparently wrote some code that picks a random question from their database and displays it to the visitor with a call to action:

Note the middle option: “Want to.” Huh?

Update, October 2, 2009: For OS X 10.6, please see the instructions here: http://www.wdream.com/2009/09/install-open-mq-4-4-on-mac-os-x-10-6-snow-leopard/. Thanks to Espen Schulstad for the tip.

I just installed Open MQ on Mac OS X.  The process required a few modifications to the out-of-the-box installation mechanism.  Starting with the generic OpenMQ 4.3 Unix binary download from java.net, I had to [...]

Dear search engines,

When I search for “<name of some ORM package> shard” I am looking for information on database partitioning.  While I appreciate the extra work you’ve done to include matches on “<name of some ORM package> shared” automatically, that wasn’t really what I was looking for.