Someone's collection of links to online CS courses.
I don't remember exactly where I found it, I think Hacker News
Someone's collection of links to online CS courses.
I don't remember exactly where I found it, I think Hacker News
[21:31] | [/web] | Comp Sci links
I went to Brussels at the weekend!
I'm too lazy to write it up properly, but you can Look at the Photos.
[17:05] | [/web] | My Trip To Brussels
After thinking about doing it for ages, webmail on etla.org should be working again.
The CPAN mirror at cpan.etla.org is temporarily broken, as it's having trouble rsyncing updates. I'm investigating as much as I have time for.
[21:39] | [] | CPAN broke
The Underground History of American Education - looks like it could be interesting reading, although I don't have time to actually read it at the moment.
[19:10] | [/web] | More Distraction
[19:09] | [/web] | Distraction
I've been using my mac mini as a backup server for ages. Over the weekend it died. I'm almost certain it's the hard drive.
I'm going to attempt to replace the hard drive, and I should even get some extra space if it works, but I'm thinking it may be time to upgrade my storageness.
At the moment I'm tempted by the ReadyNAS Duo. Lots more storage, RAID, hopefully less to manage, and I'm told it probably does the rsync things I use at the moment for backups.
[21:36] | [] | Time to buy a NAS?
Been trying gnus for email a bit.
Seems better than I remember it. IMAP support works nicely, although I didn't try SSL, which I remember being the tricky bit. Spent a while with it mysteriously showing mail in folders where I know I'd deleted it. I don't know what the actual cause was, but disabling the "agent" seems to have fixed it.
Got bbdb installed and integrated nicely, need to have a look at one of the nicer quoting packages.
Low cost laptop cheat sheet. Personally I like the look of the Asus 901, although it's a bit expensive. And not actually available yet.
(Sourced from Roger)
[22:19] | [/web] | Low cost laptop cheat sheet
Put a contract out on yourself!
I found stickK in the Economist this week. It seems like an excellent idea - motivate yourself by contracting to pay out if you don't meet personal goals.
[15:45] | [/web] | Put a contract out on yourself!
[14:19] | [/web] | Thunderbird leaving mozilla
[16:57] | [/web] | GCSE Physics destroyed
[11:56] | [/web] | Javascript vi
I've created a separate running blog at A Story of Doom.
[11:54] | [/web] | Running blog
[17:22] | [/web] | Any Damn Fool
Lately I've been liking findbugs for finding all sorts of dodgy things in java source. I applied it to JCS and it reported a bunch of inconsistent synchronization bugs.
I've filed JCS-21 in the JCS issue tracking system to document my proposed fixes for these. The problem (as I see it) is that if you're accessing data in Java shared between multiple threads, you always need to do it inside the scope of an appropriate synchronized block. This appears to be not as widely known as it should be, although it's documented in a lot of places (Synchronization is not the enemy from the IBM site is a good starting place for reading about it).
[22:13] | [/code] | JCS Threading
After further tarting up, my twitter posting client is now up for download. It now has an install script, a license, and can be used without editing the source.
The currently rather dull looking darcs repository is at twitterpost darcs repository.
[20:21] | [/code] | Twitter client
So lately I've been playing with twitter. It seems like a fun toy, but all that visiting the website was getting tedious.
I took the obvious action, and wrote a small python script to let you post from the command line, much in the way of /usr/bin/mail. To use, download to a machine with python, and edit the username and password in the script.
It may even work for people who aren't me. One day I might tart it up enough for a formal release.
[21:20] | [/code] | Twitter Client
[21:20] | [/web] | Links of the day
[21:19] | [/web] | Retro Phones
The Atom feed but I reported in pyblosxom got fixed here
[21:19] | [] | Atom bugs in pyblosxom
Updated the blog with my FSF membership icon. If 3 people join via the link, I get an answering machine message from Richard Stallman :)
[12:41] | [] | FSF membership
Sign this petition to promote the use of Open Document Format within the UK government.
[14:02] | [/web] | OpenDocument Petition
Thought I'd try out gnash at the weekend (it's a free-software flash implementation). It seems to be really pretty bad - it hasn't crashed Firefox or anything, but the best I got was some bits of a flash movie barely working. I have high hopes for the project though, and it is still alpha.
I fixed a reported bug in my atom feed that meant none of the links worked. This may have meant you saw all the articles again, as the content will have changed.
Update: Now reported as a bug to pyblosxom at sourceforge
[18:00] | [] | Feed bug fixed
[11:32] | [/web] | Parallel Processing Barbie
saigo.etla.org is now doing greylisting, based on the Greylisting with pf tutorial. Let me know if this causes you problems.
[15:47] | [/unix] | Now greylisting
[19:58] | [/code] | Zile updates
[22:40] | [/code] | Zile port updated to 2.2.25
Why the new Microsoft OOXML standard is bad
How to Hire Guillaume Ports or, why the new Microsoft Open Office XML standard is impossible for anyone but Microsoft to implement.
via slashdot
[11:20] | [/web] | Why the new Microsoft OOXML standard is bad
[19:21] | [/code] | Zile update to 2.2.24
Lately I've been fiddling with the emacs clone zile on Mac OS X
The version in macports is 2.0.7. This works fine, and in particular, C-h works for help, and Backspace works for deleting text.
The current release is 2.2.22. Unpatched on OS X C-h deletes text, as does backspace - it's not picking up the difference correctly. From a peer at the source, the difference is that the earlier release uses a termcap based terminal, where the later one uses ncurses.
I had a fiddle around looking at which keycodes are returned, and found 2.2.22 does actually see a difference between C-h and backspace, but it ignores it. So I wrote the following patch:
diff -ur zile-2.2.22/src/term_ncurses.c macports-trunk/dports/editors/zile/work/zile-2.2.22/src/term_ncurses.c
--- zile-2.2.22/src/term_ncurses.c 2006-09-13 20:54:39.000000000 +0100
+++ macports-trunk/dports/editors/zile/work/zile-2.2.22/src/term_ncurses.c 2006-09-21 22:02:01.000000000 +0100
@@ -155,6 +155,7 @@
case KEY_DC: /* DEL */
return KBD_DEL;
case KEY_BACKSPACE: /* BS */
+ return KBD_CTRL | 'h';
case 0177: /* BS */
return KBD_BS;
case KEY_IC: /* INSERT */
This appears to work exactly right on OS X, and also worked on a quick test of a ssh into a FreeBSD system. I've submitted the patch to the zile people via the Sourceforge patch tracker, and will see what they think. It looks a bit too magical to be portable, but it works on the only machines I've got handy.
I don't actually understand ncurses.
[21:19] | [/code] | Zile on OS X
I just found out about the amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. If I read it right, it's essentially rentable virtual machines, similar to the Sun Grid service.
At the moment, it's a beta, which appears to be full. If and when I get an account, I'll be trying it out, and possibly moving etla.org related stuff onto it.
[21:18] | [/web] | Amazon EC2
The Vista Shutdown Button Development Process
[08:57] | [/web] | The Vista Shutdown Button Development Process
Probably coming rather late to the party, I just found bileblog, which appears to be nothing but complaints about various bits of java this guy disapproves of.
I think it's wonderful.
For a while I've been trying to use UTF-8 in my desktop locale on debian. I've fought with various setup issues, like the stable version of zsh not supporting multibyte locales at all, and thought I had it more or less working.
Only, today, I discovered that the weird font problems I've been having for a while on my debian testing machine are traceable to the UTF-8 thing - it seems that, for some reason, on my setup, fonts would just be entirely missing in a number of apps. Going back to ISO-8859-1 fixed it. So I've given up on the UTF-8 experiment - unix just isn't ready.