I consider it fairly uncontroversial that, as a programming language, MATLAB is a terrible choice. However, I found out that to some people this isn't actually obvious at all - especially when their first exposure to programming was through MATLAB. Explaining why the MATLAB language is so bad isn't easy to do in a quick hallway conversation, so I wrote this blog post as a resource I can refer people to.

This post is inspired by Eevee's excellent PHP: A fractal …

I recently found myself in the situation of wanting to get out of a lease before its contractual maturity date. The most cost-effective way to do so is to transfer the lease to someone else. swapalease.com is one of the companies that promises to bring together people for such transactions.

I will say straightaway that I was very skeptical. Swapalease charges not just a provision when the lease is actually transferred, but you also have to pay to list …

A little while ago I blogged about SSD caching under Linux and promised to report back should I encounter any problems with the (rather complex) stack of btrfs on dm-crypt on lvm on bcache. I have now run this setup for several months and indeed encountered a few issues.

The first issue is that attempting to read from a freshly created file sometimes results in I/O errors that persist until the system is rebooted. With hindsight, I expect that …

Git has arguable become the most widely used version control system in the open-source and free software communities. However, if you can live without GitHub and don't need to manage a code base as large as e.g. the Linux kernel, you are much better of using Mercurial. Here is why.

I recently set up a fresh Windows 7 system. While the installation completed without hassles, I was worried that an attempt to run Windows Update seemed to freeze in the "Checking for Updates" state.