September 2010
1 post
November 2009
77 posts
Mumbai attacks
A brutal and detailed report on 2008’s Mumbia terror attacks:
“Reports would later surface that the gunmen, in preparation for the attack, had injected a mix of steroids, cocaine, and LSD to keep them awake and deaden their senses to the carnage they were poised to inflict…” source.
SNCF Ringtone
We (me and my fiancée) recently traveled to France. It was a fantastic vacation. One of the cool things we experienced is the high speed train, the TGV. We took it from Paris to Marseilles, and from Nice back to Paris. It’s a marvel of modern technology, fast, efficient and comfortable. We also rode the local trains in the south and the famous Metro in Paris. All of these services are run by...
Baked beans
For the record, baked beans don’t work very well with ground meat. The meat needs to be in (largeish?) chunks. Better recipe forthcoming, pending some more experimentation.
AppStore Ratings
Stuff like this makes you wonder. How accurate are the ratings in the AppStore?
Clearly this is a positive review, but the reviewer only assigned one star! So the rating paradigm is not as clear or intuitive as I would have though.
It’s a mystery.
Starting strength%2C starting running
As a prelude to the my actual post here’s the foreword to
Intelligence Squared
Fascinating podcast from NPR, Intelligence Squared US. A panel of experts is chosen and these experts argue for or against a certain proposition. The ones I’ve listened so far were Is Bush (43) the worst president of the last 50 years? and the ever popular Who’s to blame for the financial crisis?. This is apparently an Oxford-style debate (I haven’t found much info on the...
Open Source %22process%22
I’ve read
Sales tracking in the appstore
Apple doesn’t provide a great interface for tracking your appstore sales. All you get is a plaintext file detailing your sales for the day, and month. Not bad to get the basic stats, but not great if you want to spot trends or get an overview for a certain period of time. Other people have stepped in to fill this niche.
appsales-mobile is an open source iphone app that provides a nice set...
Vancouver%27s gangs
Fascinating history of Vancouver’s gangs in the 20th century.
Fuel economy
There’s a new vehicle in our future and I’m currently trying to decide which way to go. Small SUV (like a RAV4)? Large (RAM 1500) or medium (Tacoma) sized truck? Sensible choice like a Forester? One of the biggest factors is running costs, which primarily means fuel economy. Two useful sites are US Government’s Fuel Economy site which lists vehicle’s EPA stats (such as...
Paratroopers is out in the AppStore%21
Paratroopers is finally in the AppStore!
Get it
Paratroopers%21
Paratroopers v1 has been submitted to the AppStore! I’m incredibly excited. I’ll update soon with more info.
Paratroopers
Paratroopers is a high-energy arcade/action game for iPhone or iPod Touch. It is now available in Apple’s AppStore
Reading a font from file and making it available...
This is another programming related post.
Say you have a true type font that’s not part of the OS font set in a file. You’ve read the contents of the file into memory and now want to make it available to Cocoa. How?
Turns out that ATSUI comes to the rescue:
ATSFontContainerRef container;
OSStatus status = ATSFontActivateFromMemory((LogicalAddress)[fontData bytes], ...
Cocoa Text System Sample
Cocoa is pretty amazing. Here’s a quick sample that does a simple text layout (with styles!) inside a NSTextView. This is an AwakeFromNib method that was instantiated inside Interface Builder and connected to Main Window’s Content area.
-(void) awakeFromNib{
// create the Text
NSMutableAttributedString *text = [[NSMutableAttributedString alloc]
initWithString:@"Lorem ipsum...
Dan John teaches olympic lifts
Coach Dan John teaches olympic lifts (squat, overhead squat and deadlift). This is by far the best way to teach squats that I’ve seen. I’m sure this is something I’m going to refer to in the future.
%22Steroids are as American as apple pie%22.
I was on vacation in London, Ontario last week so I watched a pretty cool documentary about anabolic steroids, “Bigger, stronger, faster*”. The film maker is the middle of three brothers. He shows some old footage of them growing up pudgy and weak (something I can definitely empathize with). Then they all buy into “the american dream” which involves working out a lot and...
No stress
The clock in my car has failed. About two weeks ago, it flickered out and never came back. Now my commute to work is oddly relaxed. Am I late, am I early? Who knows..
Xcode tips and tricks
I’ve been developing on Mac OS X last few weeks. The tool of choice on this platform is Xcode. While it’s still possible to use Vim (all of the compilation tools are command line based) I’m trying to use the IDE — for general education. There’s still too much mouse interaction for my liking; I’d prefer an all keyboard approach. It’s been a while since...
Don%27t generalize...
Back in university we were taught a simple rule, “0, 1,
Slip of the day
…consluting.
Dark magick of firmware hacking
My job right now is to figure out whether I can change the firmware and load it onto the toaster. So I make a simple change to it: there’s a string which gets displayed when the system boots up. Using my hex editor, I change it to something noticeably different, being careful to keep it the same size as the original. Then I re-compress it at the same level as the original, re-roll it into the...
SDL GUI libraries mini review
I’m starting to play with SDL again so I’ve embarked on finding a nice GUI library that builds on top of SDL. This process is made somewhat more difficult by the fact that I’m living on OS X now. My environment consists of OS X 10.5 (that would be Leopard) and the standard development tools included therein. SDL is delivered by fink and is v. 1.2.13-1.
The interesting thing to...
%22The war tapes%22 %26 %22Are We Rome%3F%22
Filler
Rapid fire reviews, ‘cause my opinion matters.
“Deepness in the Sky”, Vernor Vinge. He won “Hugo” for this one in 2000. Loosely related to his other winer, “Fire upon the deep” from ‘93. He has an incredible ability to create gargantuan universes while steel focusing on the minute. This particular novel is about slower-than-light travel between the...
Books books books.
I don’t think I’ve read nearly enough this past year. The trend continued in that I’ve mostly read trashy sci-fi.. I did fit in a number of “good” books though. Rapid-fire impressions below, in reverse chronological order.
Seven Truths About Peer Reviews
I think I’m a fan of code reviews. “I think” because I’ve never actually been a part of one. In theory, they are good, right? A diverse group of your peers looking at your code and providing constructive criticisms. This is basically what open source community does.
Yesterday, I read a paper called “Seven Truths About Peer Reviews” by Karl E. Wiegers. I managed...
Bazaar vs Git
Skimmed through an interesting article on Bazaar vs Git. It claims bazaar is way more user friendly but doesn’t seem to challenge git on any technical merits. Git is fantastic in it’s own way; clearly it works well for Linus and the team but it’s terribly arcane. It looks like Bazaar offers some friendly features like Windows client and bug tracker integration, but I have a...
Naive view of the world
Windows is like a domestic minivan — ugly and slow. The trim is cheap and you can’t change the radio presets because the MinivanCo knows what’s best for you. But, it can carry the groceries and the kids can watch DVDs in the back.
Linux is like a custom race car that your crazy mechanic friend has built. Some of the body panels are unpainted and to get in you need to climb in...
Waiting for presents on xmas (or new year’s) day has been replaced by waiting for IMAP support on gmail. I know some people have it, so I keep refreshing the page every few minutes. Where is my access? Refresh. Nope.
..sad.
Podcast consumption
I’m years behind, but I just discovered the world of podcasts. I don’t know how I’ve managed to overlook it but there’s so much
good content out there. Basically instead of grinding my teeth in gridlocked traffic I’m now enjoying listening to something interesting on my iPhone. I’ve got a couple of software engineering related podcasts and a history one. They...
Removing HPA
I ran into a strange problem recently with my new 320gig HD. Nothing above 137 gigs was visible. Turns out that for some strange reason HPA was enabled on this drive. I tried (unsuccessfully) to remove it using setmax.c. Instead of removing it, setmax ended up decreasing visible space to 40 gigs or so. I then did some googling and found
Second Life
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I tried SL a year ago and didn’t get it, but I read about NOAA creating an island with all sorts of weather related exhibits the other...
The art is gone.
I found a fascinating article by Rob Pike (of Unix/Plan9 fame), “System Software Research is Irrelevant”. He claims that there has been very little innovation in software (OS and computer languages specifically) since the 70s and that most of the stuff that we have today is simply a repackaged/copied/ripped off version from yesteryear. The following paragraph was particularly...
Crazy haxors%3A DNS Tunneling
So apparently some crazy german hax0rs came up with an idea to tunnel network data through DNS traffic. That’s intense. Basically, arbitrary data is stuffed into the haxored DNS packet. The DNS packet travels through the legitimate channels to a DNS server under your control where the haxored packet is dealt with accordingly. Brilliant. This can be used anywhere you have access to a DNS...
New toy%3A Nokia N800%3F
Well, my birthday has come and gone and I haven’t bought myself anything nice. Choices abound but I just can’t make up my mind.. Lately, I’ve been thinking about getting another electronic bookreader.
I have a miniscule attention span - unless I’m coding or doing something similarly attention grabbing - so I tend to read 10 books at once. Most of these books I get online...
GNU make has a -j switch, to parallelize compilation. In other words, if you have two CPUs you should run “make -j 2” so that two jobs are launched at the same time. I have a P4 2.8 with hyperthreading (I guess this box is quite old now). Hyperthreading shows up as two CPUs so I tried running make with “-j 2” and “-j 1” (the default):
make -j 2:
real ...
And again.
I love Linux and Linux loves me back:
dmitry@river:~$ uptime
11:39:53 up 160 days, 22:38, 33 users, load average: 0.32, 0.37, 0.55
That’s my work machine, a machine that’s running all sorts of stuff - mulitple instances of vmware and X. Firefox has been running here for over 2 weeks. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m not a fanboy but there’s gotta be a reason why...
%22...your biggest liability is your need to...
Conan O’Brien’s fascinating and funny grad speech at Hardward:
I’ve had a lot of success and I’ve had a lot of failure. I’ve looked good and I’ve looked bad. I’ve been praised and I’ve been criticized. But my mistakes have been necessary.
Books
Vonnegut, Kurt — Galapagos (must read)
Banks, Iain — Consider Phlebas (in russian!, scifi, moderately interesting)
Ishiguro, Kazuo — Never let me go (must read) Apr-04-2007
Introduction to CMake%3A Quick tutorial
OK, earlier in the year I was complaining about how I need to write a versioning scheme for my little project. In truth I was indirectly whining about the autotools suite. It’s a terribly confusing piece of software, what with the shell magick and the M4 macro language. I’ve been using it for years for compiling stuff as a user (./configure
Cooking%3A%3ASoups
Come in, have a seat, I’ll be your host for this, uh, post. I’ve been asked to showcase my awesome cooking so here it is as promised.
I love soups so consequently I make ‘em a lot. In general, my approach has been very simple. If it tastes good separately then it should taste good together. This has worked out well for me in most cases.
Anyway, to start, you gotta have some...
Fog of War
An interesting question came up on AskMefi recently. How close were we to a nuclear war? Everyone pretty much knows about the Cuban Missile Crisis (soviets placing nukes in Cuba). There are a few other occurrences that aren’t that well known that kinda sent chills down my back. One of them is particularly scary. In 1983, US was conducting war games and soviet early warning system mistook the...
Blue Origin%27s Goddard
Where have I seen Jeff Bezos’ new spacecraft Goddard (pic on the right)?
Maybe in Kin Dza Dza, possibly my most favorite soviet movie. How can you say no to this beauty:
Bash magic
I’ve been using bash for ages, I’ve read the man page a couple of times (it’s bible-sized). I keep finding new features though:
Brace expansion: ls *.{c,c~} = ls *.c *.c~
C-x C-e: invoke $EDITOR and edit
stty -ixon : disable flow control (so you can use C-s to forward search).
source.
Asia 2006%3A Singapore
This post is brought to you by my subsiding hangover. Remember, drink responsibly!
Our second stop (after HK) was Singapore. Why Singapore? I’m not entirely sure. It was the luck of the draw, I suppose. Singapore was one of the destinations that we haven’t been to, Cathay flew there, so why not?
Singapore is a pretty interesting country. To begin with, it’s tiny. To give you...
Idle Randomness
I’ve gotten an outdated mac mini to play with. The hardware is subpar (1.5ghz G4?, half a gig of ram) but OS X, oh man. It’s like someone took one part windows, one part linux and one part illicit drugs. It feels strangely like home. I keep hitting alt-tab to switch between windows, but it’s actually windowkey-tab. Whenever I get frustruated with too much mouse movement I just...
Steve the Gambler puzzle.
Des Traynor posted a puzzle his buddy got at an interview the other day. Briefly, from a list of integers, find N integers such that they add up to zero. I think most people will agree that it’s an easy programming problem. I remember doing something similar either in second or third year university. The problem is actually implementing it. It took me much longer than I expected (~1-2...
Origami Project
There are several way to feel about Microsoft. Some hate noisily (a typical slashdot linux fanboy). Some cheer them on (one of my friends is a microsoftie). Myself, I’m ambivalent. I used to love Windows because it was pretty cool. Then I found out about Linux and became a fanboy. I think with the age though, comes a bit of wisdom.. I’m more aware now of how computers are really used...