Cyclopedia Square

I stumbled onto a new build tool today: fabricate . I can't believe how cool it is, and that nobody has thought of it before (OK, actually, one person did , but still!). You give it a command, and it runs the command with strace and looks for all the files the command reads and produces and uses those as the command's dependencies and outputs, respectively. The next time you run the command with fabricate, if the outputs don't exist or the dependencies have changed it re-runs the command, otherwise, it doesn't. In other words, it does all the work that you normally would try and do with make, automatically. Another cool thing about this is that it will work with anything. You don't have to write builders for it like you would for scons (another tool I looked at for a bit). I spent some time trying to get scons to run modelsim compiles and simulations for me, and it was way too hard to make it work. I just tried fabricate with a small modelsim job and it ...

Since my family and I just moved to a new state for this new job, we took the opportunity to look at different options for home phone. Some friends had switched to ooma and liked it, and after a little research, we decided to go with ooma too, specifically the ooma telo . We got it at best buy on sale for about $225, and that's all you pay. Apparently we'll eventually have to start paying about $11 a year for some sort of telecom tax. Other than that, nothing. You might be able to find the telo for cheaper on ebay or something too, I didn't look into that too much. I connect my cable modem directly to the telo, and then the telo to my router, and then my computers to my router. You plug your normal land-line phone into telo too, and then it works like it always has. With everything going through the telo, it does QOS to make sure your voice traffic always has enough bandwidth, and it can do port forwarding so web and ssh requests still get to my linux machine. It...