The Unix ecosystem, in many ways, constitutes a person’s toolbox for hacking away at all sorts of problems, including programming or email or browsing. Topics about the toolbox and about sharpening the saw.
The Unix ecosystem, in many ways, constitutes a person’s toolbox for hacking away at all sorts of problems, including programming or email or browsing. Topics about the toolbox and about sharpening the saw.
An “easy”, two-step process: Apply this patch for i686. (Why they haven't fixed this in the trunk, I have no idea.) Configure with CFLAGS="-U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -fno-stack-protector -O2" (this disables fortify source and stack protection which Ubuntu enables by default but interferes with glibc. You need to keep optimizations on, because glibc won't build without it.) You’ll [...]
Things I should be working on: graduate school personal statements. What I actually spent the last five hours working on: transparent xmobar. It uses the horrible “grab Pixmap from root X window” hack. You can grab the patch here but I haven’t put in enough effort to actually make this a configurable option; if you [...]
I upgraded from Ubuntu Natty Narwhal to Oneiric Ocelot (11.10) today. Lots of things broke. In order: “Could not calculate the upgrade.” No indication of what the error might be; in my case, the error ended up being old orphan OpenAFS kernel modules (for whom no kernel modules existed). I also took the opportunity to [...]
I use Mendeley because it lets me easily search for papers I care about. Unfortunately, that seems to be all Mendeley has been doing for me... and that’s a damn shame. Maybe it’s because I’m an undergraduate, still dipping my toe into an ocean of academic research. Mendeley was aimed at practicing researchers, but not [...]
This post describes how to change which monitor xmobar shows up on in a multi-monitor setup. This had always been an annoyance for me, since on an initial switch to multi-monitor, xmobar would be living on the correct monitor, but if I ever restarted XMonad thereafter, it would migrate to my other monitor, much to [...]
What is the Mailbox? It's a selection of interesting email conversations from my mailbox, which I can use in place of writing original content when I’m feeling lazy. I got the idea from Matt Might, who has a set of wonderful suggestions for low-cost academic blogging. From: Brent Yorgey I see you are a contributor [...]
OpenIntents has a nifty application called SensorSimulator which allows you feed an Android application accelerometer, orientation and temperature sensor data. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well on the newer Android 2.x series of devices. In particular: The mocked API presented to the user is different from the true API. This is due in part to the [...]
To: John Wellesz First off, I'd like to thank you for authoring the php.vim indentation plugin. Recent experiences with some other indentation plugins made me realize how annoying editing can be without a good indentation plugin, and php.vim mostly has served me well over the years. However, I do have a suggestion for the default [...]
This post is not meant as a rag on Darcs, just a observation of the difference between two philosophies of version control. Also, I’m a bit new to Darcs, so there might be some factual inaccuracies. Please let me know about them! At some point, I would like to write a Darcs for Git users [...]
Some things come round full circle. As a high schooler, I was a real Windows enthusiast. A budding programmer, I accumulated a complete development environment out of necessity, a mix of Cygwin, handwritten batch scripts, PuTTY, LogMeIn, a homegrown set of PHP build scripts and Notepad++. I was so devoted to the cause I even [...]