I wanted to update my home server — what I really wanted was something that could stream or play video whilst also doing all the other various and sundry tasks. My requirements were being able to play video without problems and either USB 3.0 or eSata connectors. I noticed that Fry’s had a sale on [...]

This took me a while to figure out, so in the hopes that I can save someone some time, here’s how to use markdown with Mutt: Step 1: Install msmtp (or any other program) On OS X you can do this with “brew install msmtp”. (You can use sendmail or whatever, but msmtp was easy [...]

Super quick, just thrown out in the hopes it may save some Googlers some time: I was getting really slow wireless connections on my Buffalo WLI-UC-G300HP adapter with intermittent disconnects. This link had the clearest directions, although: usb_buffer_free and usb_buffer_alloc had changed in the most recent kernel needed to add a device code for my [...]

I’ve written before on editing WordPress locally, but recent circumstances (moving my blog to another server) made me take another look at it. I had written a utility previously that was based on git, but on reflection git is unnecessary. So, stripped out most of the code and moved it into wordpress-shuffle, that allow you [...]

Google has started offering two-factor authentication for Google logins, using Google Authenticator. They have applications available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry that give time-based passwords based on the proposed TOTP (Time-based One Time Password) draft standard. The Google code provides a command line program that can generate secret keys as well as a PAM module, [...]

I’ve been working with Hadoop a lot lately in order to do some exploratory data analysis on traffic logs. Hadoop is great; it makes things that were taking 30 minutes run 10x faster, which means that I can iterate a lot faster and experiment with more ways to slice the data. I wanted an easy [...]

Horrible name, isn’t it? Beautiful Soup is a really nice Python library for extracting content from possibly-sloppy HTML, and I wanted some reasonably close Clojure equivalent. Unfortunately, the standard classes don’t work well with malformed HTML; as an example: [code lang='clojure'] => (require '(clojure [xml :as xml])) => (xml/parse "http://www.google.com") org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The markup in the [...]

Ended up getting the iPhone 4G — I had a 3G previously, and it really was starting to show its age — and it really is a nice phone. The highlights: Display is ridiculously nice It’s fast — subjectively, as fast as the iPad — and the extra CPU power really makes the web browsing [...]

Okay, Lein really does make stuff pretty easy. Rather than wrestling with eleventybillion classpaths, just install Lein. Create a new project directory with lein new mydirectory Change the project.clj file that is autogenerated with: [code lang='clojure'] (defproject mydirectory "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT" :description "FIXME: write" :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.1.0-alpha-SNAPSHOT"] [org.clojure/clojure-contrib "1.0-SNAPSHOT"] [mysql/mysql-connector-java "5.1.6"] [incanter/incanter "1.0-master-SNAPSHOT"]]) [/code] (that is, add [...]

I don’t need to tether through my iPhone — I always seem to be near a hotspot — but nonetheless I thought that spending 10 minutes to set it up was worth it, because when you need tethering, you really need tethering. If you’re willing to drop $10 bucks there are a couple of apps [...]

I’ve had an Asus EEE 1000h ever since they came out, but it was getting to be time to upgrade it — it was not a bad little machine, but the Atom processor was a bit underpowered, and that damnable right shift key always did bug me. I picked up an Acer Aspire 1410 with [...]

Warning: a very rambling article; less a solid proposal than me just exploring an idea that may lead to a dead end in a week or two after I’ve thought about it. I really enjoy Clojure. Everything seems so well thought out and well designed; in a lot of ways it reminds me of Python, [...]

The proxy function makes it easy for Clojure to interface with the Java layer, but I was dealing with an interface (the AIM Java API) that had an punitive number of things that needed to be overridden… [code lang="java"] public void OnIdleStateChange(AccSession arg0, int arg1) { } public void OnInstanceChange(AccSession arg0, AccInstance arg1, AccInstance arg2, [...]

Updated: Note that this is available as a clojars module. Clojure code density seems to be pretty good. There are a fair number of convenient shortforms in the language; for example, associative datatypes all act as a function — so given a hash map you can reference it with (my-hashmap :key). The base language itself [...]

Clojure isn’t the fastest functional lanuage — that title seems to go to Haskell these days, at least for the stuff that I do — but it nonetheless is usually fast enough. It’s a dynamic language, so is perhaps cursed to be somewhat slower always, but nonetheless for the things that I do, it seems [...]

I’ve been playing with Tokyo Cabinet and Clojure for a bit, and while I will go on about both of them in another blog post (or not), I have to mention that Clojure is such a well designed language that it’s a pleasure to play with. It has much of the same intrinsic power as [...]

I’ve found WordPress to be pretty decent, aside from the security updates every other week, but for me writing is a very spur of the moment thing; I prefer to be able to go into Emacs and just immediately type anything without having to log into my blog, create a new post, and then suffer [...]

(This is almost too stupid to post, but on the off chance that someone actually needs something like this…) I needed to interface with a bunch of data that had PHP wrapper classes, and needed a quick way of being able to interface with PHP from Python. (At this point, you might find it hard [...]

I was switching between git repositories the other day, and managed to do a “git reset –hard HEAD^” in the wrong repository. Which wasn’t bad, since I had most of the files already open in Emacs… but then Emacs calmly told me that it was re-reading the files from disk. But, git had everything still [...]

Let’s say that you really, really want some notion of objected oriented programming. So let’s make a class that represents a name, and some simple method calls on it: [code lang="haskell"] data S = S { name :: String } deriving (Show) firstname s = (words (name s))!!0 lastname s = (words (name s))!!1 [/code] [...]