web font browser

A really cool web based font browser that shows you all the fonts currently installed on your system.

So much better than xfontsel on Linux.

evolving clocks

sfx

Realtime effects processors for Linux.

real decimals

ECMASCRIPT 4 is getting real decimals.

light

Writing on the city with light. Very neat idea.

nethack ttyrecord

How to record and play Nethack games with ttyrec and ttyplay.

prototype

They've changed the way they do class inheritance in Prototype.

monome

A video about the monome. So cool!

ning

ning is not the new facebook, but it sure is interesting.

inner shirt

decenturl

decenturl is a neat new website that takes an ugly URL, like those YouTube URLs and makes it into a pretty URL, which it then hosts on it's site.

Kind of like tinyurl.com, but with more added semantics for your users. a good idea, i think, i could never remember those tinyurls.

nethack

why every programmer should play nethack. so true.

i love nethack, waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much.

i watch video game podcasts quite often, all about the latest games, and i'm interested in how those games are made, and about the culture, but the only computer game i really play is nethack.

shoes at lulu

The shoes book is now available at lulu for just $8.72.

btw, shoes is a crossplatform gui toolkit by why the lucky stiff.

btw**2, i know what whytheluckystiff's real name is. that makes me part of a secret cabal that i probably shouldn't be telling the whole world about.

lftp

I totally love LFTP, it's such an awesome FTP program, and does sweet recursive mirroring.

I was having a problem with a client site where lftp would freeze at:

I found a page where they said the answer was to add the following line to my ~/.lftprc

set ftp:ssl-allow 0

gmail spam video

A simply awesome video about how Google fights spam. Actually, the spam filtering was why I switched to gmail in the first place, and it has only got better. I get about 6700 spams a month right now, and I only see a couple spam messages a day that I need to "Report Spam".

agro-housing

agro-housing. This is so totally what I want to do when I build my little complex of buildings on my farm. I don't want one huge house, I want a whole bunch of little compact living spaces and work spaces all nestled into the natural landscape, with gardens and treehouses.

lissajous orbit

Lissajous orbit

jwz mixtapes

some good tunes on the jwz mixtapes.

ahh, i miss mixtapes, those were the days, it's not the same with a CD, or with individual tracks, but I'm really into these mixes nowadays, that's mostly what I listen to all day, is the amazing hbr1, dreamfactory, a nice mellow techno mix.

pumpkin carving

safran

A beautiful Australian gal told me about John Safran, a guerillia filmmaker from Australia.

lolcode

Senior LOLCode Developer

eth

Choose Your Own Ethnography: In Search of (Un)Mediated Life.

welwitschia

Weltwitschia, a really wacky cool plant that has only two leaves that just keep growing and growing. Lives for up to 2000 years.

GenerallyUseful

GenerallyUseful has some useful rake tasks for Ruby on Rails projects.

I should write more of my own Rake tasks, and this is a good package is a good to learn how to put your own Rake tasks into a plugin.

turing machine

The simplest Turing machine using cellular automata has been found.

fence

iss

Space Shuttle and Space Station flyover times

stomp

Stomp - The new song by the Subverticons, recorded live here last night in two takes, just rocking out.

frugal

A great article on living below your means. I learned these the hard way, and I think I do almost all of those already.

more on test data

dump_to_file is the second half of the process below.

date

test fixtures

I was in a real bind, I had all this great data in my test database, and wanted to get at it for some testing on my development system.

preloading-fixtures helped me to load all the data into memory

saturn ring scan

back

Creating back links in Rails

Redirect back to a previous action

controllerism

I'm into controllerism. I never really liked those turntabls.

mod controller

Wow, neato, modding a controller with arcade buttons. sweet.

apple i

From the bootiful corememoryproject by Mark Richards. SOme amazing photography of old computers. I just had to link to this picture of an Apple I, what a beautiful thing.

oscillation

The Briggs-Raucher reaction is the most popular example of oscillating chemical reactions.

csv in ruby

A nice little CSV in Ruby. I had rolled my own simple CSV parser, but when I ran into some more tricky situations, I switched to this CSV Library and handled the edge cases.

I wanted to just parse a single line of CSV, so I use:

    CSV::Reader.parse(line)
    s = CSV.parse_line(line)
    self.upc_code = s[0]
    self.code = s[1]
    self.brand_name = s[2]

hide like a vending machine

If you are afraid, just dress like a Coke machine:

sku

SKU - a Stock Keeping Unit. I ran across this in my work with the Sunshine Organics website.

multiple apps in rails

Multiple Apps One Domain - With Ruby on Rails. Interesting approach.

Another approach I heard about on the Ruby on Rails Podcast was to use JRuby, compile the code into Java bytecode, and run multiple sites within one JVM. Now, that is pretty crazy, but just might be the future of Rails, unless they can get the core Ruby interpreter running quite a bit faster than it runs now.

gneve

Edit video inside Emacs. Wow, how sweet is that!

webcast

Making the Most of Distributed Work

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

1:00 P.M. ET | 10:00 A.M. PT | 18:00 GMT

ps3 memory

A while back i talked about using the PS3 in a linux supercomputer.

The wikipedia article today talked about it:

While graphics processing is handled by the NVIDIA RSX, which can output resolutions from 480i/576i SD up to 1080i/1080p full HD, the PlayStation 3 has 256 MB of main memory and 256 MB of video memory for the RSX.

nethack tigers

The sleep ray hits the tiger.  The sleep ray bounces!
What do you want to zap? [uzHW or ?*] 
The wand of sleep suddenly explodes!  Practice is caught in the magical blast!
The tiger is caught in the magical blast!  You kill the tiger!  Fortune is caught in the magical blast!
You are caught in the magical blast!  The sleep ray hits you!  You wake up.

undular bores

undular bores.

ec2

I've been a user and huge fan of EC2 for quite some time now, and am really happy to hear about ec2 getting an upgrade, with large (4 processor) and extra-large (8 processor) machines available. the 8 processor ones have access to 15GB of RAM... Mmmm...

ror and flickr

Ruby on Rails and Flickr
Getting Started With Flickr on Rails

sending HTML emails

Tips for sending HTML emails

gmail skins

gmail skins is a firefox plugin to let you manipulate the html of a message, good for sending HTML attachments.

importing gmail contacts

How to import contacts into Gmail.

nethack basilisk

I just had a basilisk attack me in Slashem (a Nethack derviative), and I didn't have a lizard corpse yet in the game. Luckily, I had a potion of acid with me:

The basilisk bites!  You hear the basilisk's hissing!  The dwarf throws a runed dagger!
You are almost hit by a runed dagger.  The dwarf throws a dagger!  You are almost hit by a dagger.
The fiery blade burns the basilisk!  You are slowing down.
What do you want to drink? [B or ?*] 
B - a potion called acid.
This burns like acid!  You feel limber!

You could also eat a lizard corpse (the norm), an acid blob corpse, a yellow dragon, and anything else acidic.

samba and fedora core 7

If your samba server stops working after you upgrade to fedora core 7, you need to start the nmb service as well:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb start
/etc/rc.d/init.d/nmb start

web survey results

The results of a huge survey of web developers. Very cool.

ps3 supercomputer

A story about building a supercomputer with 8 PS3 computers that has the performance of about 200 nodes of a traditional supercomputer.

I did some work on this with the PS2, and while this is definitely possible, it sure takes a long time to code, there are lots of little ins and outs, so I would recommend you get your code running on a normal supercomputer, and then port it to the PS3, like this guy did.

One thing to realize is that the PS3 running Linux is going to be really slow because it has very limited memory, but for calculation intensive stuff like this, it's an excellent fit.

undo

add an undo button to your web applications. difficult but important.

web css forms

styling web forms with css.

writing jack audio apps

writing JACK audio apps - A beginners guide

jack mixer

jackmixer - A graphical audio mixer for JACK.

netjack

netjack - Jack over TCP/IP networks. Sweet.

ontogeny

on?tog?e?ny
[on-toj-uh-nee] ? noun
Biology The process of an individual organism growing organically; a purely biological unfolding of events involved in an organism changing gradually from a simple to a more complex level.

omfg

wow, japan, you rock:

uniqlo.jp/uniqlock

favicon.cc

Humanized.com weighs in on favicon.cc.

sexy charts in rails

sexy charts in less than 5 minutes in Rails.

The only problem is that it uses Flash, but I'm starting to get over my dislike of Flash, and this might be the thing that does it for me. Those charts sure are sexy:

iss computer failure

I followed the story about the computer failure aboard the ISS quite closely, they've finally figured out what went wrong.

storm worm

More background about the Storm Worm.

storm botnet ready to split

The storm botnet is getting ready to split, probably to be sold in chunks to spammers.

One wild bit of information in this article is that the storm botnet has between 1 and 10 million computers, putting it somewhere in the top 10 of fastest supercomputers in the world. That's out of control!

olive tree girl

Girl dances to look like olive trees






beautiful! I think I've found my new passtime!

overcoming shyness

A really great article about overcoming shyness.

I didn't used to be very shy, but after some bad experiences in the past few years, I've got more shy. One point in this article that really speaks to me is that you are hurting other people by not contributing your ideas.

I'm going to have to practice on this. Wish me luck.

jardin

the garden of forking paths - a hypertext by Borges. very cool.

testing

A movie about How Gregg learned to love testing.

ror facebook app

Anatomy of Facebook App
profile.setFBML
FBML - Fb:profile-action
Facebook Developers Wiki
Building Facebook aps
Facebook SetFBML in ASP.net
rfacebook quickstart
rfacebook - facebook API

simple stretches

Some great simple stretches you can do at your computer.

Not just at the computer, I do quite a few of these at the gym. I love stretching between sets when I'm doing weight training, it feels good and keeps me occupied during those resting moments.

ladspa

LADSPA plugins, from the CCRMA project.

SWH LADSPA plugins

CMT LADSPA plugins

If you have CCRMA, you can install these just by going:

yum install swh-plugins cmt -y

ardour

A Linux Journal article about Ardour.

The ardour homepage.

Jack - Audio Connection Kit

Jack design docs

The .asoundrc file.

Another link about using multiple sound cards under Linux.

Patchage is a graphical patch bay for Jack.

vkeybd is a virtual MIDI keyboard for Linux.

homerecording.com and prorec.com are two good discussion board websites about digital audio.

Finally, the massively awesome: El-Cheapo HOWTO to connect multiple sound cards together with Jack.

ardour

A tutorial for Ardour. I just got Ardour running on my computer, I upgraded to Fedora 7 and CCRMA. With Jack, I was able to get all three of my soundcards functioning as one card with two outputs and *six* inputs. So sweet!

I tested it out, and recording seems to be working fine, the different clocks on the three cards seem to be working together. I'll have to do some more testing, but it's looking pretty sweet.

fc7 + firefox + hosts

I was having problems with Firefox on FC7 not finding entries in my /etc/hosts. I found the following at mozillazine.org.

IPv6

The problem may be with IPv6 ("Internet Protocol version 6"). To disable IPv6, change the preference network.dns.disableIPv6 from "false" to "true" . Here are the steps:
Type about:config in the address bar, press Enter.
Find network.dns.disableIPv6 in the list.
Right-click -> Toggle.
Restart Firefox/Mozilla Suite and try again.

If this doesn't work, re-enable IPv6 by resetting the preference to "false".

el-cheapo multiple input sound card

Hook up multiple sound cards together to get a whole bunch of inputs in Linux. Unfortunately, I have different cards, so the multiple crystal trick won't work for me, I'll see how bad the synchronization issues are first.

rails 2.0

The Rails 2.0 preview release.

marching cubes

A great description of the Marching Cubes algorithm.

pow

POW embeds a webserver into your Firefox browser. Sweet idea.

free

A free Ruby on Rails book.