a geek and his life
Archive for May, 2004
windows is odd
03293 days
in geeky
the cut and paste behavior between an rdp cilent on xp and ts on a win2k machine appears to be dependant upon the size of the window. maximized windows share the clients clipboard.
typeperf is useful, except when you are limited by the maximum command line length by cmd.exe.
Pages of Folks from Technomads
03293 days
in geeky
found via google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fbengt.norum.org:
Pages of Folks from Technomads
Bengt-Erik Norum, a self-professed computer geek, who lives in Moscow.
more than slightly out of date..
zempt
03294 days
in geeky
i need to setup a category for blog specific stuff. i installed zempt, thinking i might post more, if the process were somewhat less byzantine. i wonder how much blog content is self-referential?
i also looked (briefly) at greymatter, livejournal, and dasblog. i think i’ll probably move to wordpress, after 1.2 is released.
[listening to: Shake Your Rump - The Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique]
photo-a-day
03295 days
in life
i’ve decided to do a photo-a-day project. http://gallery.norum.org/pad/
update: obviously, this is a bunk link, now. my flickr feed is at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/verygeeky/ (12.02.2008, while upgrading to wordpress from moveable type. because i’m in hawaii, enjoy a picture of waikiki beach…)
insta-tufte
03295 days
in geeky
i’m swimming in data. i need something that will let me take a stream of data (filehandle on a text file, in this case) and graph it in real-time. i need to be able to spin up a new real-time graph for an arbitrary number of datapoints completely ad hoc. i need scatter graphs and line graphs. i might occationally want a bar graph.
ideas (mostly bad) i’ve had so far:
- shove the data into a perfmon counter (or 56, in this case) and graph using perfmon.exe
- write some nasty module for a cutesy desktop widget like serious samurize. i think this might actually be useful for a hallway/conference room display.
- do it in perl with gd
- do it in perl/tk (ala the scotty/tkined graphlets)
two drink minimum
03297 days
in life
coffee
nicole has instituted a rule in our house. the kids can ask nothing of us until after we’ve had two cups of coffee. this has helped; note the time of this entry. today celeste asked me to make coffee.
booze
had tapas and drinks at cascal, wednesday. first exposure to mojitos and i’m sold. rum, soda water, sugar (raw), muddled fresh mint, and lime in a highball. the tapas were good, though fairly typical. the service was horrible, though we fell victim to the beer vendors parading through with schwag for the bartender.
bay area radio
03297 days
in life
there are a few bay area college radio stations that i don’t think i could live without.
kfjc is what radio stations should aspire to be. well trained djs with good scope of music knowledge and a free form format. i am a huge supporter of kfjc.
kpfa is good to have around as pacifica reminds me that i’m not all that radical a left-winger.
kzsu is the prototypical college station, complete with 4 hour sets of boston followed by a riot grrrl marathon. i listen often.
i haven’t included links to mp3/rm streams, as they tend to move around.
no particular order:
| KSJS | 90.5 | http://www.ksjs.org/ |
| KALX | 90.7 | http://kalx.berkeley.edu/ |
| KZSU | 90.1 | http://kzsu.stanford.edu/ |
| KPFA | 94.1 | http://www.kpfa.org/ |
| KFJC | 89.7 | http://www.kfjc.org/ |
| KUSF | 90.3 | http://kusf.org/ |
poor man’s threads
03298 days
in geeky
this is easily the most useful perl module i’ve found in recent history: Parallel::ForkManager. doing something in parallel without the overhead of actually writing really multithreaded code is quite cool.
use Parallel::ForkManager;
$pm = new Parallel::ForkManager($MAX_PROCESSES);
foreach $data (@all_data) {
# Forks and returns the pid for the child:
my $pid = $pm->start and next;
work goes here
$pm->finish; # Terminates the child process
}
highly inelegant and hardly clean, but damn this is useful.
microsoft 802.11g usb 2.0 paddle
03300 days
in geeky
i picked up a microsoft mn-710 usb 802.11g dongle, last friday. the microsoft company store had them for $40 (access points for $70, pci and pccard nics also for $40). with the recent purchase and bastardization of a linksys wrt54gs, i thought i should at least have one 54mbit/sec capable nic in the house.
looks like we just started producing these and are discontinuing them. circuit city had them for $40 ($20 after rebate), but were all sold-out, of course. they are back in stock, but sans rebate. i found them online for as low as $34.
hoping to find that it was a prism 54, broadcom wl, or another hostap/openap/linuxap/freebsd-capable chipset, i looked at the fcc filings for it. the fcc filings were submitted by microsoft with testing done by a company called, ‘adt,’ (advance data technology corporation). all the chips in the photos were photoshopped black. nothing relavent. note to self: revisit for power output specs.
the device is not listed in the wlan-ng list of prism gt devices. interestingly enough, though the pci and pccard (mn-720 and mn-730) versions appear to be broadcom.
took the thing apart… sure enough, there’s a prism 54, a “netchip” usb ic, and one other ic.
i used the new version of netstumbler and wardrove (wardrived?) home, picking up a number of ssid strings i’d never seen. most interesting was a pair of networks seen (albeit weak signals) while at the apex of the dunbarton bridge. “Allison South SJ Link 3″ (in BSS mode with a Proxim MAC address) and “Allison North SJ Link 2″ (same). wigle.net maps this right next to the newark mall, 4-5 miles away!
i picked up a pile of new networks while headed toward mission on decoto, paseo padre, peralta and walnut. one, in particular, cracked me up, having seen reference to it, only days before.
i’ll take it apart, again and photograph it. i’ll also plug it into a host with a more flexible os, so i can pull the vendor:deviceid pair off it and try to force the prism 54 development driver on it.
grass is greener
03300 days
in house
to sod or not to sod…
the backyard on the new house is in pretty bad shape. i’ve been contemplating the options. the guy at dale hardware suggested starting with weed and feed, just to see what it’ll do. he said that there’s typically lots of grass lying dormant under all the thistles and weeds. we’ll see what it can do. i’ll try that later this week.
i am somewhat obsessed with the thought of new sod, though. some random guy’s re-sodding adventure turned out looking quite nice. lots of work, though.
i’ll flip a coin, i guess.
update: an image referenced here is long since gone. removed the busted img src. (12.02.2008, while upgrading to wordpress from moveable type.)
