Category Archives: Uncategorized

Time Machine and a Linux server

Getting Time Machine to work with my Linux server was annoyingly hard–the default Debian server doesn’t support Leopard out of the box and Time Machine itself doesn’t support non-apple file shares. Continue reading

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Leopard Permissions Going Crazy

So a couple days ago I noticed I had no permission to access one of my directories… Continue reading

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Selling out: How a Free Software advocate ended up releasing a shareware program

I write computer programs for a living though quite often I end up writing code for myself at home… When I quit my job and started consulting I lost the security that comes from a steady paycheck… So when I needed to write a piece of software to scratch my own itch I started thinking about selling it instead of releasing it as free software. Continue reading

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Polling is always wrong

I read this article on reddit and while I thought the author was correct that RSS is really a bad design, I think he missed the real underlying reason why. That reason is that polling is always wrong. Always. Really!
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The iPhone is not expensive

Every review I read about the iPhone whines that the price is high. So let’s see how high it really is. Continue reading

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Tivo Desktop on Linux

I tried out TiVo Desktop on my Mac and it was kind of cool… I found some articles and discovered the TiVo Desktop is just a http daemon plus some mdns stuff. Sounds easy enough! Continue reading

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Efficient JavaScript or Inefficient Browser?

I caught “this article”:http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/48/ on “Reddit”:http://reddit.com this weekend and had definite mixed feelings about it. Many of their suggestions were obviously good ideas. But some of what was masquerading as optimization “advice” seemed more like work-arounds for a substandard javascript implementation. Continue reading

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Calling Applescript from Perl

I needed to call some Applescript from perl and was quite proud of my end result.

In the end, I like that it fits on one line and that it lets the Applescript sit in the program in its native form. Continue reading

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Darwin Ports Pextlib Problem

I deleted all the Tcl-ish things in /usr/local/bin (and didn’t find anything anywhere else, oddly enough), reinstalled Darwin Ports, and it worked! Yay. Continue reading

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“Commit Patch”: Managing your mess

If I’m working on a bug or a new feature I end up making other random enhancements or fixes that aren’t at all related. With commit-patch, I now can precisely specify the patch I want to commit and leave the rest behind as uncommitted changes in my working directory. Continue reading

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Closures In Straight C

Turns out, I’ve been using the concept of closures forever. I would say almost since I first learned C on my Macintosh back in high school. Continue reading

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3 big problems with Javascript

I really love javascript, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its faults. I can make a number of little nitpicks but I want to focus on three major deficiencies of the language. Continue reading

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Hardware friendly C structures

What I really want is a language that has really good structures. That is, they can represent hardware/fixed layouts effectively. Continue reading

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Coming out of the chute

I finally got some sleep. But we got up at around 6:30, breaking my personal commitment to never wake up before 7. We went to the speedway and… I don’t even remember. Dead battery. Rechard went and bought a new … Continue reading

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Hassled by “The Man”

I woke up late today after being awake all night yesterday. I stopped by Indigita and borrowed some boards from to use as backups in case we needed to redo any of the controllers. We probably wont need them though. … Continue reading

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