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While high on Vicodin after my knee surgery, I disobeyed the post-surgery advice that said not to make any big decisions and I purchased an XO Laptop through the Give One Get One program. I really should have written about this sooner, because now it's too late for me to talk anyone else into doing it with me. The program ended December 31st. I think I was feeling a bit guilty about spending the money, especially while under a pain-killer induced haze. I'm not usually that irresponsible! The more I learn about the laptop, though, the more the guilt is replaced with excitement. This is one freaking cool computer . The video of Ivan Krstic impressed me the most. Custom ASICs, extreme power management, and serious security (and he's from Croatia, where I lived for two years. Bok, Ivan!), what more could a geek want? Because I didn't order at the beginning of the G1G1 program I knew my laptop wouldn't be arriving in time for Christmas, but I was hoping m...

My boys got some Legos for Christmas (of course!), and my 7-year old brought me the brochure that came with his set and said, "Dad, go to legoshop.com !" I obliged and he, my three-year old, and I had fun looking at the expensive Death Star and Millenium Falcon sets for a while. Then we poked around some more and discovered the Lego Digital Designer , which is a very cool program. It basically let's you build with Legos on your computer in 3D--kind of a little Lego CAD program. Finding pieces is much easier than digging through the big pile on the floor. You can rotate views, zoom in and out, and play to your heats content. You can also take screenshots of your designs, print them out, or even send your designs to Lego and they'll box up all the pieces needed for it and sell the kit to you. Genius! It gives you some base models you can use to get started. My boys liked starting with those and they had a lot of fun just discovering the pieces that were availa...

I've used some of the online office apps a bit, such as Google Docs, and I really like that you don't have to continually save your work. They take care of that for you. The blogger web interface that I'm using to type this entry does the same thing. A few people I work with are big Microsoft One Note fans, and it doesn't even have a save button. I believe it's time for emacs to save my files for me. I have a c-x c-s twitch that I'd like to get rid of. I hunted around a bit, thinking that I couldn't have been the first emacs user to think of this, but I didn't have much luck. It turns out that Emacs does save your work for you automatically , but it's not quite what I'm looking for. It saves to separate back up files that you have to use special commands to recover information from, and it still bugs you about saving whenever you do things like compile or exit. Of course I want to save my work! Is there really no good auto-save featur...

After playing with kvm and qemu during my knee surgery recovery , I got hooked. I have a working windoze XP install running under kvm on my Core 2 Duo, Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon box, and it flies. It almost, almost feels like native speed (I also got help here and here ). It's great. Except, not being a regular windoze user, I'd lost track of how much space a windoze installation (and all the service packs and security updates) needs. When I created my original hard drive image file I made it 6 GB, which, it turns out, is too small. I didn't want to just create a new disk image and re-install, it took a lot of work to get this image up to it's full 6 GB glory. I hunted and found some instructions for resizing qcow (qemu copy-on-write) disk images , but they just didn't work for me. Once I converted from qcow (qcow2 actually) to raw, windoze wouldn't boot on the raw image. Gparted didn't show any partitioned drive space either. Then I remembered I'...

I took a class at work called, "Real-Time Software Design with UML 2.0." The instructor seemed to think that it was destined to be the Next Big Language . I have my doubts. When I design with code , I can type it very quickly and even somewhat sloppily into a code editor . The editor will then take care of formatting it all nicely, indenting, spacing, presenting with an nice font, colorizing the various code constructs, and so forth. I just have to get the ideas expressed and the tool takes care of most of the formatting for me. Even more, it's saved in a simple text format that is universal. Any text editor on any operating system will understand it. Once I've written the code, I then have a compiler and/or linter that will tell me if I've left off any key constructs, made any syntax mistakes, or any of a number of common logical errors. Basically, with the good tool support that is out there, I can write code as fast or faster than I can dream it up. ...