Cyclopedia Square

(UPDATE 12/5/2015: moved to github) If you read Steve Yegge's Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume , you'll notice that he lists various words and phrases that you should avoid using in your resume. I was re-reading that hilarious, uncouth, yet insightful blog entry a couple days ago and started sweating that I might have a Weasel Word or two in my own resume. This could happen purely by accident, of course (we all get sloppy now and then, right?), so this obviously called for an automated tool. As a result, I present to you the Less Awful Resume Tool, or, lart. lart is a simple tool (written in Python) that searches a text file (ideally your resume) for those words and phrases called out in Steve Yegge's essay, and alerts you to their presence. I have claimed no copyright over this work, and the code is hosted at the Less Awful Resume Tool project on gitorious github. You can do a git pull as instructed there to get the code, or download a zip archive . T...

Having seen Bristlebot , I thought I knew exactly what I was looking for as I carefully disassembled my Samsung SGH-C417 phone. You see, it had accidentally gone for a ride in the washing machine and after quickly removing the battery, and then patiently letting it dry for a few days, it still wouldn't stop vibrating. Everything else worked fine, so I figured I'd open it up, find the little motor that looks like the one powering the Bristlebot, cut the wires to it, and then I'd still have a working cell phone. Here are some pics of what I saw once I opened it up: Can you see the little DC motor? I couldn't either, and as I fought with stubborn little screws and plastic tabs to uncover more of its innards, I became more frustrated with this little phone. I could still power it up and feel it vibrating the whole time, but I could not pinpoint where it was coming from. I definitely could not see a spinning motor anywhere. After a while, the last part to look un...

If you receive a document as an attachment, open that attachment, start editing, and then click save, guess what happens? You work is quietly saved in a file in /tmp . Guess what happens when you try to find that important file later? Sure, it shows up in the menu under File->Recent Documents, but when you select it, it has likely been deleted, as is the fate of most files left in /tmp for too long. Wonderful. This happened to my brother-in-law (a non-geek who has successfully been using Linux for a couple years now, well, until now, I guess) a couple weeks ago resulting in the loss of some hard work of his, and I almost let it happen to me today. Couldn't we make our apps a little smarter? If it's running on a UNIX like system, would it hurt to make it aware that /tmp is not a safe place to save its user's files? Could it at least give people a little warning before doing so? UPDATE : I don't know what happened, but I received an attachment today and O...

My wife is from Oklahoma and we currently reside in Vancouver, WA. We don’t get to see her family out there in the midwest very often and we just missed a trip out there in April due to the stomach flu (long, messy story). Since April our youngest has turned 2 thereby raising the price of airline tickets for our family by another $500 or so. We also recently purchased a nice new minivan. All of this coalesced into a decision to pack up our three boys and drive to visit her family. We took it in two weeks, visiting friends and other family members along the way, and it was quite an adventure. Even with the price of gas these days it was less expensive than flying us all and renting a van for the time we would have been there. In fact, gas got cheaper the farther we got from Washington. Those Oklahomans have it pretty good at $3.87 or so a gallon. We had a really fun time and connected with a lot of people that we hadn’t seen in a while. It is especially fun to see your kids h...

When you run olpc-update to upgrade the software on your XO laptop, you lose some of your customizations (which I just did ). Here's what I've customized so I have a quick reference to get it all back next time. Set the timezone : su sugar-control-panel -s timezone 'America/Los_Angeles' Set a root password: su -l passwd This allows me to ssh to the XO (as root, I know, I know) which at least allows me to use my nice desktop keyboard and monitor to do most of the rest. I tried setting the user account password instead once, but it seems like Sugar wouldn't start after that. This page seems to indicate that you should be able to do that (now?) though. I'll have to try it again. Set up quake terminal (scroll down the page a bit). I keep a copy of the quake_terminal.txt file in my home directory on the laptop. To set it up I just do this: su -l cp /home/olpc/quake_terminal.py /usr/share/sugar/shell/view/quake.py Then apply this patch to /usr...

I upgraded my XO to Build 703 this week. It was a little difficult at first, but I like it now. It's so cool that it now suspends when you close the lid. This is the first Linux laptop that I've had that does that so smoothly. Disk space is at a premium on this little machine. I actually couldn't get Sugar to start after the upgrade until I did a ctrl-alt-f1 over to a virtual console and removed some files from my home directory. One utility that is nice for adding and, maybe more importantly, removing Activities is xo-get.py . Once installed you can just ./xo-get.py remove ActivityName to free up more disk space. Nice. Removing activities wasn't nearly enough though. I was still really full on disk space and after poking around with du I found the /versions directory that seems to contain the complete set of files for the previous version of the OLPC software (after an update you can boot the previous version by holding down tho 'o' gamepad key...

I have a confession to make. I'm an avowed Linux geek, yet I haven't complied the kernel in years. The last time was probably in school when I had to write my own scheduler for the kernel as an assignment, which isn't all that bad when you consider that most people compiling their own kernels are just enabling some obscure driver that they needed. They haven't made Major Modifications to a core piece like The Scheduler. Right? Right? Well, OK, the scheduler wasn't anything to write home about, but it still felt pretty l33t. Anyway, I've decided it's time I delve into the source of Linux again. It's one of the most successful large software projects on the planet, and it's completely open for anyone to dig into. It would be a horribly wasted opportunity for a serious software engineer to miss out on, especially someone interested in nitty-gritty low-level stuff. Even if you aren't interested in OS code or drivers at all, you could study...