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For some time now, many of us around MIT have noticed just how awesome sshfs is. It gives a totally lightweight way to access the remote filesystem of any machine you have ssh to, without requiring any extra setup on the host. I’ve been running for at least a year now with my /data RAID on my server sshfs-mounted on my laptop, and it works totally great. Recently, I came across two awesome things that make sshfs even neater.
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For some time now, many of us around MIT have noticed just how awesome sshfs is. It gives a totally lightweight way to access the remote filesystem of any machine you have ssh to, without requiring any extra setup on the host. I’ve been running for at least a year now with my /data RAID on my server sshfs-mounted on my laptop, and it works totally great. Recently, I came across two awesome things that make sshfs even neater.
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Recently I ran the St. Pat's 10 Miler in Atlantic City, Nj. It was my first official running event ever and I enjoyed it lot. Shortly after the race the official results have been posted on the Internet. The data did not only include the number and times of the participants but also gender and age. Looking at the finisher time distribution it shows that most runners finished at around 90 minutes:
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I have always found this an extremely interesting computer science problem, and have written various polygon scanline conversion routines in my life. In January 2002 while at my parents waiting for the work year to start again, I decided to write a new one, this time in Java. (The source code is available on request to anyone who’s interested.) These days, no doubt, many polygon fill routines are available open source, and the descripti..
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On my project, we use Maven to build our software and FitNesse to write functional specifications. However, it was obvious that FitNesse wasn’t designed by Maven-fans. When I use Maven, I already have control over my classpath, and specifying it in every FitNesse test gets to be old really fast. Why can’t I just inherit the project class path, and start FitNesse using maven-antrun-plugin or just from my IDE? I found a neat way to implement ..
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Looking around my hard disk, I found a program I wrote in December 1997 to demonstrate the capabilities of IFS (Iterated Function Series) using Affine maps. Description A shape, an IFS fractal (Iterated Function Series), is defined by a number of transforms. Each one of these transforms map from the whole shape to a smaller self-similar part of it. In an affine IFS fractal, each one of these transforms is affin..
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Imperial College are currently implementing changes so that you need to access either POP3 or IMAP with SSL enabled, I figured since they didn’t list Fetchmail in their new site, then I’d post my configuration (.fetchmailrc) here in case anyone else uses it:
poll icex.imperial.ac.uk
proto pop3
user "USERNAME"
password "PASSWORD"
is "LOCALADDRESS" here
ssl
sslfingerprint "7D:E8:74:1F:E8:B1:E6:15:A6:0C:02:2B:BA:89:BE:4D"
En..
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Imperial College are currently implementing changes so that you need to access either POP3 or IMAP with SSL enabled, I figured since they didn’t list Fetchmail in their new site, then I’d post my configuration (.fetchmailrc) here in case anyone else uses it:
poll icex.imperial.ac.uk
proto pop3
user "USERNAME"
password "PASSWORD"
is "LOCALADDRESS" here
ssl
sslfingerprint "7D:E8:74:1F:E8:B1:E6:15:A6:0C:02:2B:BA:89:BE:4D"
En..
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Anders Nordås wrote a blog post where he talks a little about how he uses his beautiful moleskin notebook. I will pick up his challenge and write about my favorite tool, Post It notes. As many who know me are aware, I always have a pad of Post-It notes and a pen in my left pants pocket. I use the sticky notes for todo-lists, note taking in meetings, planning talks and doing brain dumps.
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A number of great sins have been committed under the guise of making software more maintainable. And 60% of software cost is during maintainance, according to Robert Glass. So what goal could be more laudable to pursue? The only problem is that we call things maintainable which are not. Putting remote interfaces in your application is done to “make it more maintainable”, creating frameworks is done to “make it more maintainable”, using EJBs..
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I’ve recently switched to Conkeror as my primary browser. It started life as a Firefox extension, but nowadays it’s a standalone app built on top of Mozilla’s xulrunner, so it uses the Gecko rendering engine. What it is, is an emacs implemented in Javascript, for the web. This means on the one hand that it acts like emacs. Most of the basic emacs keybindings are supported – you open URLs with C-x C-f, and have buffers you can switch between..
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I’ve recently switched to Conkeror as my primary browser. It started life as a Firefox extension, but nowadays it’s a standalone app built on top of Mozilla’s xulrunner, so it uses the Gecko rendering engine. What it is, is an emacs implemented in Javascript, for the web. This means on the one hand that it acts like emacs. Most of the basic emacs keybindings are supported – you open URLs with C-x C-f, and have buffers you can switch between..
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If you are ultra-Mac, you prefer to use an aesthetic computer that “just works” - as a result, you are usually sexy, artistic and cool. If you are ultra-PC, you prefer to use a clunky un-aesthetic computer that is difficult to use, crashes often, is a virus hell, yet is guaranteed to work with any piece of hardware with a software driver written by a 10-year-old boy in a barn in China - as a result, you are nerdy, cheap and non-cool.
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If you are ultra-Mac, you prefer to use an aesthetic computer that “just works” - as a result, you are usually sexy, artistic and cool. If you are ultra-PC, you prefer to use a clunky un-aesthetic computer that is difficult to use, crashes often, is a virus hell, yet is guaranteed to work with any piece of hardware with a software driver written by a 10-year-old boy in a barn in China - as a result, you are nerdy, cheap and non-cool.
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Grand Master Kim Jeong Seong of the United World Haedong Kumdo Federation visited Helsinki last weekend to hold a seminar on Korean traditional swordmanship . The weekend was a very interesting combination of various sword forms, two sword sparring and cutting and control exercises. We also held examinations for various belt levels, where I attained 1st keub (red-black). Our instructors Jose and Mika reached the 2nd dan ..
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Grand Master Kim Jeong Seong of the United World Haedong Kumdo Federation visited Helsinki last weekend to hold a seminar on Korean traditional swordmanship . The weekend was a very interesting combination of various sword forms, two sword sparring and cutting and control exercises. We also held examinations for various belt levels, where I attained 1st keub (red-black). Our instructors Jose and Mika reached the 2nd dan ..
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My Pinnacle Mean Streak 2.0 was stolen today from outside my flat (Pigott Street, E14). It’s a black, rigid mountain bike. The wheels are 26", WTB rims, Shimano hubs. The groupset is Deore, and it’s got mechanical disc brakes. I locked it to a lamp post with a steel D-lock whilst I went upstairs, since my bike was greasy, and needed cleaning. It was nicked in the hour between 19:30 and 20:30. The frame number is 1K26102739 . If any..
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My Pinnacle Mean Streak 2.0 was stolen today from outside my flat (Pigott Street, E14). It’s a black, rigid mountain bike. The wheels are 26", WTB rims, Shimano hubs. The groupset is Deore, and it’s got mechanical disc brakes. I locked it to a lamp post with a steel D-lock whilst I went upstairs, since my bike was greasy, and needed cleaning. It was nicked in the hour between 19:30 and 20:30. The frame number is 1K26102739 . If any..
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Two great comments from people about their experiences with Windows. I can really sympathize with these people! From http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/132891.asp#102626 Yesterday, it started an update I didn’t even want to initiate on shut-down so I had to walk to my car & drive off with this stupid laptop running in my hand to get to work. Is MS trying to get me fired? From http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.co..
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Tal Ben-Shahar writes the following in “Happier”, his introductory book into the field of positive psychology: “The proper role of goals is to liberate us, so we can focus on the here and now.” In order to help us have a fulfilling life, our activities should both be meaningful and pleasurable. In this sense, meaning means to have a long term goal, pleasurable means to have a short term goal.
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The code I write in Ruby is higher quality than the code I write in Java. Why? Because the language supports better abstractions. It lets me express a problem once, and reuse it many places. The strength of an environment comes from the quality of the libraries, and the qualities of the libraries comes from the features of the language. In this post, I will review a proposal to make Java a better language: First-Class Methods.
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As I do a lot of programming using open source databases, I couldn’t help but notice that inclusion of XML in the database seems to be a hot topic. Postgres 8.1 (just released) and MySQL 5.1 (not released yet) will allow XML documents to be stored as the value of cells, and allow those documents to be manipulated and inspected. (Oracle has had this feature since 2001) I generally don’t like XML (as Robin put it: most formats are designed ..
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Since I’ve got a few moments, and I’ve decided to actually write down some rants rather than deciding that I can’t be bothered to - I’m going to use some space to single the praises of Django . I’ve been using Django for a couple of years now - since around the autumn of 2005, and as such, feel that I’ve got a pretty good grasp of how the framework works. I haven’t really hacked around that much with the innards of Django (although I..
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Since I’ve got a few moments, and I’ve decided to actually write down some rants rather than deciding that I can’t be bothered to - I’m going to use some space to single the praises of Django . I’ve been using Django for a couple of years now - since around the autumn of 2005, and as such, feel that I’ve got a pretty good grasp of how the framework works. I haven’t really hacked around that much with the innards of Django (although I..
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In the past several months (and year), it seems that Linux is really making its way into the desktop market (up until now, it has ruled the server market). Every time I pick up a magazine at Chapters or read Google news, there is some new Linux device or technology. Here are a few that have caught my eye in the past short while: The rapid development of Compiz (formerly Beryl), which puts shame to all other desktop effects and is extrem..
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In the past several months (and year), it seems that Linux is really making its way into the desktop market (up until now, it has ruled the server market). Every time I pick up a magazine at Chapters or read Google news, there is some new Linux device or technology. Here are a few that have caught my eye in the past short while: The rapid development of Compiz (formerly Beryl), which puts shame to all other desktop effects and is extrem..
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It’s been a year since my project replaced IBM WebSphere Application Server with a Java SE solution embedding Jetty. Looking back on the last year, I only have one regret: That it took us so long to make the switch. The difference takes a bit of perception: Our software no longer eats away our time, killing us with a thousand pinpricks. But WebSphere is just the most blatant example of software that gives you nothing, gets in the way of a l..
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30 23 28-31 * * [ "`date +%m`" != "`date +%m --date=tomorrow`" ] && /Users/rjs/bin/monthEnd.py 2>&1 >/dev/null Pretty handy for running on the last day of the month - and should work on Linux.
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30 23 28-31 * * [ "`date +%m`" != "`date +%m --date=tomorrow`" ] && /Users/rjs/bin/monthEnd.py 2>&1 >/dev/null Pretty handy for running on the last day of the month - and should work on Linux.
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I am probably one of the rare type of Mac owners who did neither of the following: Bought Mac OS X 10.5 (including Safari 3) Upgraded to Safari 3 by downloading it for free from Apple’s website Therefore I was still using Safari 2 on my Mac. A few nights ago, Apple’s software-update program pushed Safari 3 to my computer. Although I could have deselected that download, I assume that the sort of people who would deselect an update th..
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Monitors, as with everything else, need rebooting sometimes
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www.databasesandlife.com
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18 years ago
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eng
The monitor I am using at work suddenly went white. I.e. every pixel went white; not black, and not blue. A white screen of death, as it were. I was in the middle of programming an algorithm requiring some degree of thought, so I wasn’t really up for being interrupted by unreliable technology. The monitor a 22" wide-screen flat monitor. My initial suspicion obviously lay with Windows. For some reason, some instinct told me to turn the..
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Well today while pondering things at lunch I was looking into the performance of SQL queries one stood out. That being the performance of getting random rows out of a database. Most people who have a basic understanding of MySQL (the database I use at home because its easy to set up, though I am looking at Posgresql) would say oh, to get random rows you do this, SELECT * FROM ` table ` ORDER BY rand() LIMIT 0 , 5 ..
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If you though getting started with Rails seemed easy from my first post, you haven’t tried out Heroku yet. Heroku is a hosted solution for Rails that comes with a browser based IDE. There’s nothing to install. It is so easy that it’s almost ridiculous. To me, this is the future of application hosting. One of the remarkable things about Rails is that it lets you get up and running very quickly.
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This is the fourth article in my introduction to Rails. In the previous articles, we created a web application that let us edit articles, added support for comments to our articles, and added some nice AJAX effects. But a real blog needs feeds, a decent front page and some article formatting. In this article we will add all these. The article contains no groundbreaking features, but mostly dots a few i’s and crosses a few t’s both when it c..
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So, at the moment, I’m writing a presentation about the operation and the security implications of RFID. During the course of the random searches around the internet, I’ve found that there’s a lot of really, really cool work going with respect to RFID. Even more great than the output on the subject is who is studying it. Lots of really cool observations are coming out of the open source friendly community - some of the best presentations on....
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