Posted by hank, Tue Sep 09 21:56:00 UTC 2008
So, today I spent around $400 on my annual dues, initiation fee, and flight logbook. I am going to get my private pilot’s license over the next year or so. It’s going to be awesome.
Displaying articles with tag life
Posted by hank, Fri Jul 25 09:44:00 UTC 2008
Oh man, what a day.
I attended quite a few talks, grabbed a lot of swag, and entered a few contests. I ended up buying the Arduino Starter Kit from MAKE so I can do some awesome embedded Ruby like I saw at FOSCON. It looks really fun - I can’t wait to try it out.
The talks I attended were half-way decent, but I learned a lot more on the first day.
Hadoop and EC2
A good overview of how one can use Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services to cheaply process and store data on a pretty large scale. The New York Times digitized hundreds of years of articles in a single day using these services and some awesome C++ code.
Open standards in cloud computing
This ended up being a marketing talk. I don’t know what it had to do with cloud computing, and I didn’t stick around to find out.
Ruby 1.9: What to Expect
An awesome overview of all the new stuff in Ruby 1.9 given by Sam Ruby. I had no idea they were changing so much, and this was a good dive with code examples into that. There was some discussion among everyone in the middle on whether for loops should work like .each blocks with regards to scope. I happen to disagree with what ended up being the popular thought on this subject. Most were advocating that a for loop constitutes a block, and that scope variables and iterators should be localized inside of it. This is contrary to almost every language, which I brought up using the example of C. Yet, when you iterate with .each, you immediately define a block and a scoped iterator, which, if it has a conflicting name with the outside world, it doesn’t matter since that’s out of scope. The only thing this changes is the value of a variable outside after the loop finishes. I think leaving the ability to modify a variable external to the loop is very convenient - in summary, leave it how you’ve done it in Ruby 1.9 already.
Ubuntu on the Go: Subnotebook and MID technologies
This was an interesting session on where Canonical is taking mobile technology, and what the community can do to help. They seem to have a pretty neat subnotebook coming out soon.
Python, C++, and SWIG
This could have been one of the best talks, but the speed at which it was given and the lack of enthusiasm in the presentation left most of us either bored or unfulfilled at the end of the talk. He spent the first half explaining what Python and C++ were, then he got to what SWIG is. The end was a quick dive into an extremely complicated bunch of files that didn’t help very much. In the future, it would be helpful to go to a SWIG talk that details how to make a simple Python extension with SWIG. I may have to throw that one together myself…
I also attended the tail end of Designing Political Web Apps for MoveOn.org, but I didn’t take any notes.
We ended up going to dinner at Widmer Brothers, which was pretty awesome. I had the Pork Schnitzel, a very tender piece of meat if I do say so myself, along with 2 Full Nelson IPAs. Afterwards, we caught the bus from the convention center to BeerForge and the SourceForge Community Choice Awards party. Beerforge was a blast. I ended up talking to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the developers of VLC, for hours - a truly great guy. I learned a lot about France and the French people, but also about VLC. Apparently, you can use VLC from the command line much like mplayer, which I did not know. Yet, he explained that they removed Directshow support from VLC in Linux in favor of open source alternatives, which in part I can understand. Yet, the only codec available that is able to smoothly play 1080p h264 video is closed source (CoreAVC), and until the ffmpeg avc codec catches up, I’ll have to continue using mplayer. When I can play everything back smoothly with VLC, I may consider switching.
The beer at BeerForge was pretty good - I had the IPA. SourceForge had some sort of mixed drink which wasn’t too great. All in all, a good day, but now I’m dehydrated…
Posted by hank, Tue May 27 17:30:00 UTC 2008
My left hand is currently incapacitated due to the wonders of modern science. I had an enchondroma, which is a cartilage tumor, in my left index finger. They cut it out today, and now I have a large blue brick attached to me. I think I will be spending my days at home high on oxycontin for the next week or so, which means more internet play time, but I won’t be coding much since it took me almost 5 minutes to type this post.
Posted by hank, Wed May 14 21:57:00 UTC 2008
You know what would be awesome - forcing the UK to commit copyright infringement by simply watching a copyrighted movie in public in London. You’d have to watch out for some things, but if you did it you could legally request a copy of the footage under the Data Protection Act, putting them in a tricky position with the MPAA. As they recorded it in the first place, they are already in violation of copyright law. It would rock. Someone needs to do it.
Posted by hank, Thu Apr 24 21:26:00 UTC 2008
I was listening to “Ends” by Everlast on the radio today on my way to work. It was going alright, but I noticed that there are quite a few things you can’t say on the radio that are surprising.
Things you can’t say
- whore
- drugs
- Colt 45
- balls
- green
Now, I realize that much of this has to do with context, but come on… You can’t say smoked the finest green? What’s wrong with the word whore anyway? Concubine is in the Bible, and that’s a synonym, so… Would it be OK to say that on the radio? Do we need to censor Christian radio when they say concubine?
So, I looked into it, and found this. Interesting…
Posted by hank, Wed Jan 02 00:13:00 UTC 2008
I finally found where Angband saves are stored in Ubuntu thanks to the helpful file listing it provides. It’s all in /var/games/angband, and the save directory looks like this:
root@rofl:/var/games/angband/save# ls -al
total 60
d---rwx--- 2 root games 4096 2008-01-01 23:57 .
drwxr-sr-x 9 root games 4096 2007-12-31 16:18 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 hank games 45651 2008-01-01 23:57 1000.Hank
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root games 47 2006-11-13 01:20 delete.me
The inside of 1000.Hank is complete binary gibberish, but at least I can back it up now and move it between computers. This is so encouraging me to cheat. To find out more about angband, read this article.
Posted by hank, Fri Dec 14 01:30:00 UTC 2007
So, I keep seeing people posting comments around that say Ron Paul is a racist, and most of them refer to a 1992 mailing list post he allegedly wrote. This posting was controversial because it portrayed inner city Blacks in a bad light. It was protesting against the lack of police action against rioting, the Rodney King scandal, and inner city crime committed by Blacks. Now, I don’t think he was inferring that only Black people commit crime, or are predisposed to it by their race; quite the contrary in fact.
Posted by hank, Sun Nov 25 17:55:00 UTC 2007
I took this test to see which current presidential candidates my views align with, and got some pretty surprising results:
It’s based on this table of the candidates views on popular issues, and how strong your feelings are on each one. A good tool indeed, and it should be publicized as a guideline for voters by our caring media since we all want voters to make informed decisions…
The graph led to this:
I have no explanation for this picture.
Posted by hank, Wed Oct 31 23:33:00 UTC 2007
It’s time to raise the taxes on the rich in this country. I can’t believe that Warren Buffett only pays 17.7% on his $46 million. Why am I stuck paying 20-30%? That’s stupid. I hope the next president realizes this and fights to lower taxes drastically for anyone making sub-upper-level-executive salaries.
I started trading options about a week ago, and made a little profit on Boeing. Redhat started taking off today, and I might buy a call on that. Watch Redhat!
About Me
I'm a computer programmer from Ellicott City, MD.
I go to OSCON every year, write random code, and blag about it here.
I enjoy cooking,
reviewing beer, hiking, kayaking, and watching movies and television shows.
Email me: ralree@gmail.com
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