The Ro Factor

Concours 14

2012-01-08T06:49:00.008-05:00

PitStop over at Orlando Yamaha Kawasaki allowed me to try out his personal Kawasaki Concourse 14. While it is a big bike with saddle bags, it sure handles pretty amazing.

The power delivery is a little less snappy than I would like, but I'm used to riding a high strung 750cc bike, so its not surprising. This is not to say that the bike is slow, as that 1400 cc warms up like a jet engine.

I could see taking some very long trips on this bike. Excellent features such as a button actuated multi height windscreen and comfortable riding position have me thinking of just how far I could go without worrying about rider fatigue.

Concours 14 on Wikipedia

Ramdom thoughts episode 166 is amazing

2011-09-18T20:38:00.002-04:00

Ramdom Thoughts Show 166 is available. I have to say this is some of Scotty's best work.

My favorite bit is the DJ's from mars mix at the end.

Great programming music.

GRR - segfault type day

2011-09-18T20:08:00.001-04:00

It seems like today is all segfaults all the time.

I'm going to have to spend a little bit of time relearning how to use GDB.

Bram playing soccer

2011-06-03T12:38:00.001-04:00

Normal life is a lot of work

2011-04-12T21:54:00.002-04:00

I became single for the first time in nine years.

It never ceases to amaze me how much of my life Kelli took care of. Every day I find something new that I forgot to deal with, a bill, taxes, etc.

This is going to be a lot of work.

Configuring pvscsi module for centos

2011-03-19T17:21:00.002-04:00

If you want to get some serious performance out of a virtual machine, using the paravirtualized disk controller in VMWare ESX server is the way to go.

configure pvscsi as initrd module

For me what it really came down to was this.

1) getting the VM running using a simple IDE controller.
2)Adding a second disk SCSI/Paravirtual controller.
3)Installing VMWare tools
4)I then used a liveCD to copy the first disk
5)Disable the original IDE disk.
6)Profit!

nautilus open terminal here

2010-08-10T12:46:00.003-04:00

Similar in functionality to the Windows XP PowerToy "Open Command Window Here", is the nautilus terminal open addon.

This addon will let you right click anywhere in gnome and choose "Open Terminal Here" to launch a shell at that exact location. This lets you use the nautilus file manager to browse deep in a directory tree and launch a terminal, saving you lots of tedious typing.

Nautilus Open Terminal Here

svn-clean

2010-08-05T16:55:00.002-04:00

handy script to clean all unversioned files from a source tree. Thankfully it also ignores svn:ignore settings.

svn-clean

Controlling windows services via pythong

2010-07-14T13:40:00.004-04:00

I am going to be setting up a bunch of buildbot master processes to run on a windows host. To make restarting them easy I am going to script the service restart using python, perhaps with a web frontend.

Initial googling revealed this page describing a python script which can restart windows services.

Python Recipe for controlling windows services

colordiff to colorize svn diff output

2010-07-14T13:01:00.003-04:00

I came across this awesome program the other day called colordiff.

You can pipe diff output to this program to get nice in-terminal diff coloring.

Nice article on colordiff with pictures describing its output.

To install in ubuntu 10.04

sudo apt-get install colordiff

When I use it with subversion I do the following

svn diff | colordiff

apt-file to search for the package providing a file in ubuntu

2010-06-22T10:57:00.001-04:00

I found the tool apt-file on the ubuntu forums today.

sudo apt-get install apt-file
sudo apt-file update

Then you can use
apt-file search "GL/gl.h"

or something similar, and you will get a list of all the packages that provide that particular file. This is very useful.

Open command window here was your idea

2010-06-14T08:02:00.002-04:00

This is pretty cool. By holding down shift and right clicking anywhere in a folder on Windows 7, you get a popup dialog that says "Open Command Window Here".

This was one of my favorite powertoy addons for XP. Really excited to have it in windows 7.

Link to source

Track day!

2010-05-22T15:15:00.003-04:00

I'm very excited. This weekend I am heading up to Jennings GP, a 14 turn track on the florida/georgia border.

Check it out:

Jennings GP

Useful hack for running scheduled tasks at a higher frequency than daily in windows xp

2009-04-30T14:56:00.001-04:00

http://www.randomtree.org/eric/techblog/archives/2004/09/the_windows_task_scheduler_is_not_a_secondclass_citizen.html

uni2ascii

2009-04-29T11:25:00.002-04:00

If you are ever having issues with g++ compiling code cut and pasted from a website, specifically stuff like "stray \200 on line" or other similar errors, then uni2ascii is for you.

Just take the problem file, and do the following

cat problem.cpp | uni2ascii -B > problem_clean.cpp

The uni2ascii program will do it's very best to convert unicode to ascii where possible.

The new file should compile okay. Remember the -B, if you forget it, you will have lots of random unicode escapes in your output.

cifs mount in centos

2009-02-18T09:05:00.002-05:00

Trying to follow the "Better Method" steps in this guide http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/WindowsShares

Not going so well. The mount completes properly, but the directory is always empty when I do an ls.

Not quite sure what could cause this.

Update: This was an artifact of an incorrectly configured DFS setup. The instructions work perfectly.

SSH Login times taking forever

2008-12-18T02:10:00.003-05:00

this article saved me a lot of hastle.

I log into a lot of hosts by IP with SSH for embedded linux development, and for some reason it seems like my SSH login times had become unbelievably slow. It could take around 60 seconds to get a password prompt, which I find unbearable.

The article above details how to use ssh -v to watch what is going on during a login, and indicates that if you are getting GSSAPI errors, you should consider disabling it or fixing the root cause of such errors.

Disabling it sped my logins right back up.

Thanks again random internet person.

Gamestop has xbox 1's for $39, it's xbox media center time!

2008-11-28T18:46:00.002-05:00

With Xbox 1's now at rock bottom prices, it's time to grab an xbox 1, man up, and softmod that xbox into an ass kicking media center.

All you need is a simple PC, a cd burner, and an extra IDE cable.

Read this excellent guide carefully, and get going!

XBMC - Xbox Media Center on Mac OSX Rules!

2008-11-01T19:22:00.002-04:00

XBMC is such a perfect fit for the Mac Mini. It's completely incredible.

The mac mini's remote can do quite a bit under XBMC, especially once you get used to it. It will feel very natural after only a short time.

I'm currently watching 28 days later on the mac mini's vga output to my LCD TV. It looks great and it's easy to control.

The iTunes integration with the iTunes library on the Mac Mini is pretty decent. I havent quite figured out if I can use library mode or not, but at the very least I can play back music without issue.

Great news as well, it works on Linux and Windows too.

Download XBox Media Center Here - It's not just for the xbox anymore!

Laptops as Development Workstations

2008-10-06T18:47:00.002-04:00

I've tried off and on over the years to maintain a laptop with a copy of my development tools, but time and time again I am disappointed by the horrific I/O performance. Hopefully down the road solid state disks will help, but at the current time i'm just a little bit depressed about how long my installation of FC8 updates is taking.

And if you are wondering why I'm running this now outdated distro, it's because it matches up well with a particular compiler kit I'm using at the moment.

Soon I will finish rebuilding my development network, which generally includes a WIndows XP Professional PC, an FC8 Tower Workstation, a file server (terrastation) and a laptop. The laptop is ONLY used to remote desktop into the other two systems when I'm working remotely.

I miss Zimbra

2008-10-06T18:40:00.001-04:00

Exchange is overly complicated. It's a system designed by committee. It's not that bad, and it has tons of great features, and when it works it's amazing. But when it goes wrong, it goes very VERY wrong.

I miss Zimbra and it's ability to run from a single box and support hundreds of users with zero issue.

If it hadn't been for the crazy timezone issues that were affecting every major calendaring system at the time, we probably would have stayed with it.

I'd definitely use Zimbra again though, and encourage anyone setting up a new startup to give it a shot.

Another tivo updated

2008-08-11T11:43:00.002-04:00

I was really bored on Sunday, so I decided to upgrade one of the Tivo units to make it that much easier to record ALL of the Olympics.

Added a 320GB drive to the existing 120GB. Now rolling with approx 512 estimated hours of recording capacity.

I had done this once before with mixed results. I now think that my new bracket system is going to be better, as it offsets the placement of the second hard drive above the first, so that they are not completely flush, hopefully providing some additional room for air to get between them for cooling.

The last time I did this I had problems with stability when both drives were really spinning. Way too much heat. We'll see how the new setup proceeds.

MFSTools is an awesome package, and so easy to use.

New Otherton

2008-07-21T08:53:00.002-04:00

Cool pic of "New Otherton" the village of the "Others" in the Lost TV show.

http://flickr.com/photos/69398923@N00/2511420523/

Prevent nautilus from opening a new window

2008-07-19T23:57:00.001-04:00

It often becomes irritating on some gnome installs that nautilus will open a new window for every folder. My desktop quickly becomes cluttered.

The following post describes how to disable this "feature"

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-361989.html

For the impatient, the following commands will probably do the trick for you.

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser true

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry true

so true, linux reliability and Ubuntu.

2008-07-19T23:06:00.002-04:00

http://www.linux.com/feature/141546

Our computers really can be reliable, i promise! Thanks Ubuntu!

And PS, when XP just starts to suck a bit less, we switch to vista.

XP was the suck we can live with.