Archive for the ‘Hacker’ Category

linux gmail notifier

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006

A friend of mine recently released a gmail notify applet for Linux. gmnotify from what I can tell it is pretty sweet compared to some of the alternatives. Go ahead and check it out. That is if you use gmail and want little windows popping up telling you that you got an email.

Requesting good naming for the impatient (MySQL)

Monday, January 9th, 2006

I guess I am impatient, and I don’t want to read everything, and therefore I demand of people that effect my life choose good names for stuff. The current complaint is about MySQL’s privilege system. Apparently USAGE privilege is a synonym for “no privileges.â€?

Any reason, why this can’t simply be NONE, or “TOO FEW PRIVILEGES TO BOTHER MENTIOING” or anything besides a word that makes it look like something?

Yes I get the low level irony of me claiming to be impatient and taking the time to write this rant. But if you think about it, I have now seared this into my memory with this 5 minute interlude.

Scrounging Hardware

Friday, December 9th, 2005

Anyone out there have a mini-ITX board, or any generally associated things like like a DC-DC ATX converter or and old 60 or 80 Watt laptop AC adapter, or some old low wattage ATX power supply that I could at least use for some prototyping or testing with said board?

Anyway, I obviously have a little project in mind. I plan to mess around with Asterisk on one of these. I’d like to get the lowest TCO home PBX system running that I can. I may even consider a Soekris. If I can get my hands on one relatively inexpensively.

A worthwhile Sunday

Sunday, November 27th, 2005

So far so good today. I finally isolated the bad part on my laptop. (Allison spilled a large cup of water on it a couple months ago). I tried booting with a linux CD and noticed that the resulting kernel panic mentioned some errors relating to the VM system. So I decided to use memtest on the Knoppix disc. And stopped it at around 13,000 errors at just above 128 MB. So I pulled out the soDIMM in slot 2 and it booted. My new memory should be here Wednesday. :) It gives me an excuse to squeeze a little more life out of this laptop, by bumping the memory to 512, from 256.

And I have two worthwhile 1PM NFL games to watch for the first time in a million years. Probably because the Jets play tonight, god I hate watching Jets games.

Perpetually getting organized

Monday, November 7th, 2005

I have been trying to “get organized” since sometime in high-school when I was probably told to “buckle down.” Nothing seems to have taken very well, however.

The problem that I seem to have is two-fold. First, every time I see a neat discussion or article or book on how to help you do stuff, I read it and get all fired up and start thinking about how to implement that philosphy. Second I am letting the best destroy the good. And I think this is the bigger of the two problems.

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bit rot

Monday, September 26th, 2005

Amazing how some technology left out Friday after confirming it works, heck it had been working the same way since July. Seems to grow fungus or mold, or simply atrophy and no longer work after the weekend is over.

Like making JBoss talk to MySQL luckily trial and error correction is made nearly impossible because it takes a good 10 minutes for each round trip on the cycle. :-(

Javascript reference

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

A while back I noted that devedge was dead. Well googling for some javascript stuff led me to the Mozilla Developer Center, Javascript page. The references link gives you the good stuff.

Thank you for getting this together finally. Because it gives me a definitive source for this type of info.

geeky self help

Friday, September 9th, 2005

This attempt at defining how human conciousness works is worth a read: The Multiple Self. It would be interesting to find other thoughts along these lines.

The Zen of Deleting

Thursday, September 1st, 2005

If you use a computer as much as I do there is something very refreshing about deleting old crap and clutter. If you are a programmer and are responsible for thousands of lines of code, there is something great about deleting old, unused code. It makes you feel so much more in control of the environment. Very theraputic.

Today, I am taking nearly a whole day to delete old broken down code. Gotta board up the windows and wall off the slums from the shiny code that actually does good work.

Fedora and Windows XP dual boot problems

Thursday, September 1st, 2005

This post is to give a shout of thanks to the guys who figured out why installing XP and Fedora on a single machine sometimes causes the first OS installed to be inexplicably lost somewhere on the disk with no hope of recovery. Well there is hope. If you set up dual boot with XP and Fedora Core 2 or later, and you are sure you lost all of your data from one of your installs, read on for more info.

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