Older blog entries for robhudson (starting at number 27)

Unix-based Wireless Access Point
    I'm doing research this morning into how to set one of these things up. I just ordered 2 prism based wireless PCMCIA cards for about 30 USD each. I've got an ISA to PCMCIA adaptor. So I'm building my own WAP soon. I've got an old 486 I'm thinking of using and will probably go for FreeBSD as the OS, as I think the prism2 support there is a little better. This should be a fun little project and hopefully not too frustrating. Found lots of docs this morning on these, so it looks like I'm in good hands.

Note to self:

    in Perl: (.*?)
    in Vim:  \(.\{-}\)

Finishing up The Fellowship of the Ring and ordered Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier. Applied Cryptography would have been way over my head, and I enjoy reading about cryptography so I thought this would be a good holiday reader. Last year I read The Code Book by Simon Singh (after Cryptonomicon) about the same time of year. That was a fun book too.

Been playing with Tastybrew.com lately. I've finally got most of a working site for homebrewers. I recently added a diary entry similar to here. We'll see if homebrewers will use it as much as programmers. If they're any homebrewers here, check it out. Feedback is always welcome. :)

Wrote linux.com a while ago after finding this quote on their site (here):

    Code powering the Linux.com site is available under the GNU Public License. Please email dev at linux.com for more information.
I'll have to try again as I never got a response. It would be cool to see some of the tricks they use there, since I'm mostly coding websites in PHP and MySQL these days.

Grabbed Galeon 0.12.3 a bit ago after hearing lots of good things about it. I compiled it and ran with it about a day before 1.0 came out. It's pretty rock solid and blazingly fast.

Mulad: About the web/database interface to mp3s. Take a look at Andromeda. I haven't used it but did play with it a bit. It's an all in one php file (including the images, which are inlined arrays). Pretty cool stuff, and it looks really sharp with themes. I'd be interested in how it goes b/c I'm thinking of doing the same thing on my network.
Bad Joke

A friend and I were talking about compilers and such and I came up with this bad joke. I still tell it to people, though...

Q: What did the compiler say when it ran out of stack space?
A: I haven't got a char in the world.

Open Source in the classroom

sej I would love to see a class like you mentioned. I've recently had privy to see a closed-source package that is being sold commercially that was originally written by a newly graduated CS student. That software (C++) is horrible and uses things like a custom built string class, a home grown binary database library, etc. Some of the elements are probably pieces of code he had to write for a class, no doubt. While I don't question his skills as a programmer, I do think that using the string class that comes with C++ would have been a much better choice.

I'm sure if students had to take a class like this, they would 1) no more about the open source world and what's out there, and 2) understand that code re-use can save lots of time and headaches. I wish that curriculum was around when I was taking classes!

Cloudy Sunday

Sitting at the keyboard, sipping a Rogue Dead Guy Ale on a cloudy, lazy Sunday afternoon. A kernel compile scrolls by in the window behind my browser as I hope that the nvidia 1541 drivers will work with the ac8 patch. Things have been pretty normal in the world of magnetic ones and zeroes. Meatspace has been more exciting lately. Recently bought a house, am planning a wedding in Peru in January. It will be a great time to spend Christmas, New Years, Wedding, Honeymoon, and birthday in another country. Off to pop some popcorn and watch a movie...

Work, er, uh...

Discovered xgalaga. Ditched work.

Trance Enhanced

Been feeling a little sluggish when it comes to coding lately. Yesterday I put on my headphones and tuned into XTC Radio. I think I got the most coding done since a long time. I got a lot accomplished. It's a nice feeling.

Telecommuting

The building that our offices are in are scheduled to be torn down to make room for a parking lot. A few months ago, I moved my workstation home and built an office for myself. It's been a great couple months of telecommuting. Waking up, grabbing coffee on the way to the desk and waking up mid-code is great. Sometimes you shower early, sometimes you stay in your pijamas until, well, until the next day. This has the strange side effect of causing you to doubt yourself when you go outdoors. Today, on the way to the mailbox I had to look down at myself to make sure I was clothed appropriately.

I've secured a desk at the offices of a local fiber wholesaler and will be moving there in a few weeks. Working at home was really nice, but it will also be nice to be around lots of tech and people to talk geek to. It will also be nice to know that when I'm at home, I'm on my own time. The line between working and having a personal life seems to get blurred when the 'office' is only a few steps away.

7,874,560 pixels

I took a series of screenshots today. I run enlightenment here with dual head display. I have 3 virtual desktops, 2 displays wide. I took a shot of all 3 virtuals, joined them together to make one huge screenshot that is a pretty good view of how my desktop looks in full swing (trance enhanced). The final result is a 2560x3076 jpeg, which can be seen here: Screenshot

Just a little side note... I can't multiply numbers like that in my head. And since I'm typing this in Vim and will transfer it in a bit, I typed this at the Vim command prompt:

    :r! perl -e 'print 2560*3076;'

I don't know. It's the little things. :)

IAC

fxn: MyAdvogato is way cool. I installed it. Very nice. I think advogato should adopt that view. It packs a lot of info in a small space.

Perlscript?

Wasn't there once mention of a perlscript? Some sort of browser embedded script based on Perl that runs client side, installable as a browser plugin?

I think that would rock to be able to write perlscript instead of javascript. And if there was a popup window like "Your browser doesn't have Perlscript installed. Click here to install it", it would spread fast enough.

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