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I had a little hack attack over the weekend, and wrote a simple Python script to convert the output of the /list command at irc.freenode.net into something more useful. |
See a previous post for more information on this.
As it's reading the raw input on stdin, it should be easy to adjust to generate pretty output for other IRC sites.
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The folks at UPtoDOWN.com have just let me know that they've reviewed the latest version of gcalctool and it's all ready for your voting. |
They've even included a description of the calculator. It's in Portuguese, but I've spared no expense and had it translated into English for you:
It is no coincidence that gcalctool sea by the tool for calculating defect in the vicinity of Gnome desktop.This calculator is designed both to users who only need to perform basic operations such as advanced users. That versatility it achieved due to the existence of different configurations of calculation, called in the application forms.
Gcalctool possesses four different ways: basic, advanced, the financial science. The basic mode is intended for users who perform the needed operations of certain complexity. The advanced mode added some more advanced controls as regards the handling of the fractional numbers of square roots.
The event offers some financial controls so that the most advanced, usually related to financial operations. The scientific method is oriented al calculation advanced, offering all sorts of controls, working in different units of calculation and numeración systems and advanced operations.
I know how I'm voting.
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Regular readers of this blog will remember that I had some problems when I initially tried to do a network upgrade to Intrepid. |
Things had got busy recently, so I only returned to this problem last night. I booted up the machine with a wired network connection, and when I got to the login screen (where I couldn't type anything into the User Name field), I entered Control-Alt-F1 to get to a virtual terminal and a text-based login prompt.
After logging in, I did the:
$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
again, and let it chug away at downloading, unpacking and installing all the new packages. I then rebooted.
The reboot successfully bought me to the gdm login screen and I can now login via the graphical User Name field and get to my desktop. Yippee! Yet another problem solved by just waiting a while and letting things happen.
I don't like the new login music that comes with Intrepid. I'll have to see if I can work out how to put the "old" Hardy jingle back.
I also don't seem to be able to get wireless working, using the previous instructions for the madwifi package that I had. It looks like I'll have to google around again and see what's changed there.
Then I'll need to check out the battery management, web camera and microphone again. Who knows, maybe they are all working nicely now.
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Robert Ancell, who is now the chief maintainer for gcalctool, the default calculator for the GNOME desktop, has just setup a mailing list for this application. |
If you are interested, then details on how to subscribe are here.
Coincidentally this has just started up about the same time I closed down the old mailing for calctool (the predecessor to gcalctool), because all that comes over that nowadays is spam, and, for some reason, it got really busy last week.
There was an interesting post on the MAKE Blog back in August, on how to turn your favorite digital photos into kaleidoscope images. Here's the actual webpage that does this. I gave it a pointer to my favourite dog and generated the images on the right. The "three eyed, four eared" variant is great.
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I spent some time today upgrading my Eee PC 8G from Ubuntu Hardy to Intrepid. Over 700MB's of updates that seemed to go flawlessly apart from a couple dependencies for k3b which I quickly sorted out. 2 hours later, after the reboot I get to the login screen but it doesn't recognize as I type on the native keyboard. It didn't recognize me typing on a USB keyboard either. |
I did a bit of googling around but I haven't seen a problem reported on this. I wonder what I did wrong...
The latest kernel is 2.6.24-19. I then tried booting that in recovery mode. It complained about:
mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist
but I think that's just that the external USB disk wasn't turned on. It seemed to "hang" at the "Configuring network interfaces" line for a long time, but that might be because it's still setup for the wireless network at work. Once I can get in, I can hopefully easily change that.
Eventually I got to a pretty red and blue text based menu asking me what I wanted to do. As the keyboard was working at this point, I just told it to resume the boot. I then got to the graphical login prompt and the keyboard was fubar again.
If anybody has any suggestions on how to find/fix this problem, I'm all ears.
(I also tried booting from the 2.6.24-18 kernel in the GRUB menu -- the one that goes with the Ubuntu Hardy release -- and that didn't work either).
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For the version of Thunderbird I'm running under OpenSolaris 2008.05, when you receive an email with images in it, I get a little "banner" at the top of the email where I have to click the "Load Images" button in order to see the images in that email. |
Well today it got to the point where it had annoyed me enough that I wanted to adjust this, so that images where automatically loaded. Seems simple right?
After spending about five minutes looking at all the Preferences options and Account Settings options and not finding it, I decided to google for it.
The solution is to bring up Edit->Preferences, click on the Advanced panel, go to the General tab and click on the "Config Editor..." button. Then look for the "mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image" setting and click on the "true" word to turn it to "false".
Why is this so hard? Why couldn't there be some way of doing it directly from the little banner with the "Load Images" button is? Maybe a little "Change this..." link.
Anyway, hopefully this post will save somebody else a few minutes if they are struggling with the same problem.
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This is cool. A way to see which blogs.sun.com posts made it to Digg and then see a timeline of them. |
I'm chuffed to see there's one of mine there too.
I'm not sure how they are determining these events. Some of them seem to be coming from other sites than blogs.sun.com.
Finally got around to trying out Wordle.
Wordle is a toy for generating ?word clouds? from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
I of course gave it my blog as input. I let it just pick the colors, layout etc. I was rather surprised at some of the words. I don't think I've even written "Titarenko's" before. Let alone enough to make it appear on the cloud.
Hmmmn.
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An email from 2003 from Chairman Bill on the problems he had installing Moviemaker on his Windows system. |
My favorite bit is:
"Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?"
Ahh! Windows.
(thanks Maya).
Earlier in the week, I downloaded the Big Buck Bunny movie onto my wife's new MacBook. We wanted to try the new mini-DVI to DVI adapter cable that we'd bought (via the online Apple store), to hook it up to our TV and watch it on the "big screen".
Wasn't I miffed to find that the female DVI plug on the end of the adapter cable wouldn't connect to the male DVI plug on the end of the cable coming out of the TV. From the blurred pictures above, you can just see that the male DVI cable (first picture) has some extra pins above and below the "bar" pin and the female plug (second picture) doesn't have matching holes for them to go into.
Luckily that cable out of the TV nicely works with the DVI external monitor plug (third picture) on my Powerbook, but we ended up watching a lower-res version of the movie (not that big a deal).
So I have a multiple choice question:
Question: So why didn't this work?
Answer:
So if the answer is 3 or 4, how can I easily remove those bogus pins? Or should I just go out and buy yet another new cable?
Correct answers very much appreciated.
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After deciding that the Amazon Kindle wasn't for me, and thinking that I could do the same thing with an Asus Eee PC, I've now had a chance to try it out. Apologies for the poor quality of the picture. My arms aren't long enough to take a better one. |
I install acroread, rather than use Evince as the latter still has problems with several PDF files I've tried. I put a sample book on my SD card, plugged it in and displayed the PDF file, rotating the document 90 degrees clockwise and putting it into full screen mode.
It works well. The Eee is only two pounds in weight (lighter than the hardback I'm currently reading). I can click on the left "mouse" button to get to the next page, so "reading' is not to unnatural. After a while you do start to hear the little fan but it's not that loud.
I'll also be able to do a similar thing with FBReader for some of my other eBooks that are not in PDF format.
I realize that I won't have quite the ease-of-download that the Kindle provides, but I'll sure be able to do a lot of other things with my Eee besides just reading eBooks.
If you are wondering what the book is, it's called 100 Simple Secrets of the Best Half of Life. The basic premise is "don't worry, be happy". It made a nice change from all the depressing AARP literature that's been filling up my mail box recently.
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What a difference 9 months and a system update makes. Last August, when I tried wirelessly connecting to the Internet using our Wii, it didn't work. Instead, I ended up buying a Nin Wii USB->LAN adapter and setting up a wired connection. |
Today Duncan wanted to try out a couple of the newer Wii channels, so we moved the Wii into the office again, setup the wired connection and he played around for quite a while.
While we were there, I did a Wii system update. I then tried the wireless connection again. Initially it failed, but I cleared out the settings, and got it to look for our access point again. I reinserted our WEP key and it found our wireless network!
The big test was to then take it back into the TV room, setup it all back up and try again. The TV room is quite a distance from the Linksys WRT54G. Amazingly, it's all working fine. I can only assume that Nintendo have found and fixed a bug when trying to connect to this type of router.
Duncan's happy. He's now lying on the couch trying to decide how to "spend" a 1000 Wii points.
After going through the various Hello World programs that are described in chapter one of the in the Making Things Talk book, I moved on to the first real project. The goal here is to take a small pink monkey called monski, attach (or implant) a couple of flex sensors to its arms, and use them to control the two paddles in a video pong game running on your computer. If you don't have a small pink monkey, any other small stuffed animal will do.
I'm hoping with the various projects in this book, that I can do a lot of them with just the components that came in the kit I bought at the Maker Faire, or with stuff that I've bought or scavenged since I first became interested in electronics.
The kit didn't include any flex sensors, but there were a couple of pressure ones. With no pressure, reading these sensors returns a value of zero. As you apply pressure, that number increases. The highest value I got out of them was 750. What's also nice about these sensors, is that you can just plug them directly into the breadboard, so no stuffed animals were harmed in the making of this project.
I didn't have two momentary switches either, but I did have a couple of simple ones. I used them instead. They are used by the game to reset the scores and serve the ball. I also had a nice breadboard, and a wire jumper kit.
After assembling the circuit, I used the Arduino development environment to download their simple code to read the two sensors and two switch values.
From there, you progress to getting the video pong game (running inside the Processing development environment), talking to the serial USB port, reading the sensor/switch data and responding accordingly.
Final step is to establish a proper handshake between the video pong game and the code running in the microcontroller. In other words, when a carriage return in sent to the Arduino, it returns the values of the two sensors and the two switches, rather than the Arduino continually sending out the data and causing the Processing application to occasionally lag.
All the code you need is available to download. The author might automatically have the Arduino on serial port 0, but it was on port 2 for my old Powerbook. Because the pressure sensors are returning different values that those that would have been returned from the flex sensors, I had to adjust the min/max values in the code. Also, because a value of zero (no pressure) positions the paddle at the top of the screen, to make it look nicer, I moved the position of the two score values in a bit.
It's all working nicely. Purists will no doubt knock off points for not using red and blue wiring, but I went with what I had got available. The next step, is to build the Proto Shield, stick the tiny breadboard on it, and adjust the circuit to work with that.
Then onto project #2.
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I spent some time today, starting to learn Ruby, something I've been meaning to do for a long time. There is an interesting online tutorial available. |
If you've heard of Ruby, but didn't know exactly what it is and you have limited time to find out, then this tutorial is a good starting place for you. It'll take about "15 minutes".
It helped that I knew Python, but there is nothing hard here. For me, it was a way of learning Ruby's syntax more than anything else.
The time estimate seems a little off. I also took a few notes as I was doing it, so I ending up spending way more than 15 minutes on it.
poem.delete didn't want to work for me (ArgumentError:
wrong number of arguments). I wasn't sure if I misunderstood it,
got it wrong or it was just plain broken.
File.open("/home/comics.txt", "a") do |f|. In fact
it took me 2-3 attempts to get to the next tutorial page.
/cadillac/i
in one place and /giraffe/i in another).
In short, this interactive tutorial, is a nice idea, but it needs a few more tweaks and a bit more bullet-proofing to make it easier for newbies like me. But at least it gave me a feel for the language (even though I know I'm just scratching the surface).