Category Archives: Nerdery

Items of interest to fellow computer nerds.

I cannot fix your Windows computer

A friend asked me to help fix her computer. It’s a Dell laptop running Windows XP Home and it became infected with a virus. She was able to partially remove the virus, and I helped her remove the rest of it, but now the infamous Blue Screen of Death appears about a minute after booting …

June 16, 2009 – 2:19 pm | By Benjamin | Posted in Nerdery, Personal | Comments (4)

mkbuild, an iPhone project build script

When I wrote “Good Practices: iPhone Development“, I promised to share the script I wrote to create numbered builds of iPhone applications. I am certain that I am not the only programmer who feels uncomfortable sharing source code until it is ready (i.e., Perfect), but we must not forget that Real Artists Ship. This is a …

February 27, 2009 – 9:39 pm | By Benjamin | Posted in Nerdery | Comments (1)

Which RSA key goes with which?

I had a set of keys in my Mac OS X Keychain and no clue which public key and private key belonged together. This is how I figured out if a specific public key A paired with a private key B. Export public key A to file A.pem, then find its modulus: cat A.pem | …

December 26, 2008 – 1:31 am | By Benjamin | Posted in Nerdery | Tagged , , | Comments Off

How I organize feeds in Google Reader

I follow a lot of blogs using Google Reader, which lets you group subscriptions into folders. At first I grouped subscriptions by topic (e.g., politics, friends, etc.) but that was pretty much useless. Eventually I developed the following system, which I recommend for anybody. First, group everything into three folders: Everything, Everything-Feed, and More. Everything is for subscriptions …

December 25, 2008 – 6:52 pm | By Benjamin | Posted in Nerdery | Tagged | Comments (2)