Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun

I Miss Iraq. I Miss My Gun. I Miss My War. (2007)

It is very easy for people to forget that those they disagree with may be good and rational people, people whos goals actually align with thiers but whos idea of the path is different. I have a lot of difficulty even agreeing with myself on what I think regarding these subjects.

These two links are well worth your time, I don’t want to encourage or disagree with either just yet, but we all must see that people are not one dimentional cartoons.

Ciao

Well after that bout of rationality in the last post here some supreme stupidity

http://publicintelligence.net/do-you-like-online-privacy-you-may-be-a-terrorist/

Read the flier and give yourself a score, I rated fairly radical!

One thing that I feel very deficient on is fluency in maths. Even though a lot of what I do when programming has a mathematical edge to it I always feel like I’ve turned up in France and I only know how to ask for a baguette. I’m been trying to squeeze in sessions on khan academy when I can but despite their awesome award badge system it can still feel like a slog. Today however I read this which really perked me up and has really renewed my drive and I’ll definitely be taking some of his advice.

Steve Yegge’s Post on Math for Programmers

Another thing that has really been feeding my math hunger is the book Cryptonomicon which is wonderful and I will definitely be writing a post about when I’ve finished it.

Well that’s all for now, Ta ta

This isnt a post with any point but to enjoy the sheer awesome scale of these machines.

Well I’m on this slippery slope now so I may as well enjoy it…

It seems that emacs is a virus which slowly overwrites all keyboard shortcuts in your brain with it own and then make sure your grumpy whenever you hit one of these combos in Firefox and it prints-the-page saves-an-image and-shuts-down.

Rather than deal with this issue the rational way (stop using emacs) I have been brain-damaged and thus my solution is obvious…I need an Emacs browser.

Now I know that W3 exists and is well integrated to emacs but this is a text only browser and I really need a full featured web browser. Enter Conkeror

Conkeror is quite simply a browser based on Mozilla and XULRunner where all the control can be done through the shortcuts you have had branded onto your soul by Emacs. Those who have used the Vimperator plugin for firefox will be familiar with the mouse free browsing style and those who often have to search on various sites will love the webjumps feature which allows you to define a way to quickly search a huge variety of sites from the minibuffer.

Well thats enough rabbiting for now, if your not into Emacs this browser will be of no interest to you but if you are chasing this particular dragon then go on, you know you want to.

Seeya around, Baggers

Link to Conkeror

…the short version of this story is dont do it.

The long version is doooooooooon’t dooooooooooo iiiiiiiiiiiiiiit

p.s. Oh and read this too..I should have http://www.sqlite.org/lockingv3.html#how_to_corrupt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

Turns out that both linux mint and ubuntu 11.10 don’t have xscreensaver anymore as default. This seems fine in Ubuntu as there is a simple fade to black when needed. Unfortunately in Linux Mint it has a butt ugly colour flashing reminiscent of monitor test patterns.

To fix this you need to remove gnome-screensaver and install xscreensaver. The details can be found in the linux mint forums, here.

I was incredibly lucky to get this beautiful variable temperature soldering iron this christmas and so I’m finally putting it (and me) through it’s paces. These are parts of the reprap I’m currently building.

Goodnight all!

A good while back I got hold of an Adam tablet in order to try and forfill a desire. You see I’m a geek but I love being outdoors and I want technology to progress to where it doesn’t limit where I can do what activity. The Adam seemed to fit the bill nicely; it uses a PixelQi screen which is perfectly readable in direct sunlight and, being a tablet, runs on an Arm processor which means the battery life is good. The only thing that was missing was the OS. The tablet came with a really bad skin over android which was quickly removed in favour of a decent build of android, and it was OK for a time. But for me I need to be able to create on my machines, I want to code, I want Ubuntu on the tablet.

I, sadly, haven’t got the knowledge to put an image together for the tablet but it has been done by a bunch of fantastic people online.

Their ROM got me a working build of Ubuntu 11.04, which I’ve since upgraded to 12.04 to fix the massive slowdown issues I was having. I have also identified an issue where ttyS0 is being respawned constantly, if your not worried about serial then simply remove ttys0.conf from /etc/init.

While this is fantastic it still is a little slow for heavy use but this is likely down to the fact that I haven’t currently got the graphics drivers installed. I’ll post back my findings when I’ve done this (again an awesome person on the forums has this sussed)

If you would like to follow along or have an Adam Tablet gathering dust the forum is here.

Once these last little issues are licked I’ll be having a play around with writing tablet apps for Ubuntu, so drop by if thats your thing! Ciao