| Glass TTY TTF |
[31 Oct 2009|12:28pm] |
I just found the Glass TTY VT220 TTF font. It makes for a great full-screen terminal experience. I set up a new gnome-terminal profile that uses the font at 20 points, disabled the menu bar, and ran it full screen:
Edit: If you're into this, a more complete immersion has been possible for 5 years with Xscreensaver's phosphor program.
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| Eclipse Galileo blogathon entry |
[03 Jul 2009|03:39pm] |
The new Eclipse (3.5 AKA Galileo) is out. They're giving out prizes to folks that blog about the new release. Two years ago, they had another such contest for which I submitted an entry. I was so happy with the nice logoed polo shirt, that I decided to do it again. (Actually, I probably would have written a review anyway).
So, here's a bulleted list of items that were notable to me:
- Under Linux, the buttons appear in the correct order (!). So "OK" appears on the bottom, right hand corner of a dialog, according to GNOME standards.
- The Install tool is much nicer, making it a lot easier to find the right plugin quickly, such as Subversive, which is pretty much a required plugin these days.
- VE is still installable under Galileo, though it continues to be the 1.4 version. Linux support continues to be present, but weak. (Installation instructions)
- Webtools has long had a "Download and Install..." button for Tomcat 6 in the Servers view, but it still points at an out of date release (6.0.14) and failed to function on system. Nevertheless, it's easy enough to download Tomcat 6.0.20, extract it and place it under the control of Eclipse for deploying, testing, and debugging web/JSP/servlet projects.
- A large number of servers are still supported, and the "Download additional server adapters" feature continues to exist, but the adapters need to be updated (the Glassfish adapters require an obsolete plugin, and the Jetty plugin fails to install).
- CDT appears to work better than the last time I took a serious look at it. Completions seem to work better and more refactorings and source transformations appear to be available which should make working with headers and implementation files easier. I'm not sure it's enough to keep me out of Emacs, but it's getting closer.
- It looks like TPTP is going into "Maintenance mode," and as such, has seen some improvement with respect to reliability. Under Linux, with Sun's Java 6 (update 13), code profiling works "out of the box." In the past, it used to require fiddling with Agents or switching to older releases of Java, due to the tooling API change in Java from JVMDI to JVMTI.
- Mylyn continues to be solid and has a workable plugin installer (for third party support for additional task trackers).
So, the new release is an improvement. Some third party items need to be updated (particularly the additional Webtools adapters). If those tools are required, it would be best to wait some time before upgrading.
I'm still waiting for an improved welcome page with connections to the Eclipse community (similar to what I've seen in Visual Studio's start view).
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| Starting my full on job search... |
[01 Jun 2009|11:01am] |
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 energetic |
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I recently defended my Ph.D. dissertation and will submit my final paper work for graduation in September. As such, I'm starting to look for work starting in October.
I'm most interested in working in a research lab building prototypes, authoring papers and patents, and attending conferences. The communities I've been most involved with are represented by the IPDPS, HPDC, and SuperComputing conferences, though I am interested in other fields.
I'm also open to considering joining a technology startup or working in more traditional software engineering roles, and will certainly discuss and evaluate any such leads.
My resume and CV are linked from my university web site: http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~mike
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| Spending in a recession... |
[12 Dec 2008|12:37pm] |
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After getting sick of brewing weak, yet bitter coffee at home for at least a year now, we decided to buy a new coffee maker. I had originally been eyeing these "grind and brew" machines which take as input water, whole roasted beans, and a brew time and output fresh ground and brewed coffee at the appropriate hour. ( Read more... )
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| Converting chemical energy into mechanical energy |
[02 Dec 2008|11:47am] |
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I finally got around to biking to work again today.
I foolishly thought I would save time by taking my bike to the shop to get a tune up. Sadly, the owner of the shop decided to take an unannounced vacation from the store and left me without the bike for two weeks. Worse, while he did a satisfactory job replacing the brake pads, the derailleurs aren't tuned quite as tight before, leading to gear slippage and even chain drop.
Still, it's working satisfactorily enough to get me back and forth to work. Even better, I've brought my on-road time down to about 30 minutes for the 3 mile ride. The weather was nice today, probably around 40 when I set out. My ski thermals, padded bike shorts, long sleeved shirt I got at SC08, fleece, ear muffs and gloves kept me warm enough once I got my internal temperature up on the initial ~300' climb.
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| Highlights from first week in Austin |
[16 Nov 2008|02:24am] |
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After a week in Austin following a number of events, there have been a number highlights:
- Burgers and beer at Casino El Camino
- Burgers at Huts
- Pad Kra Pow at Mekong River Restaurant
- Forrest Gump mocked by Master Pancake at the Alamo Drafthouse
- Drinks at the happy hour on the roof deck at Boundless Networks
- Getting down with Junior Brown at Antone’s
- Beers at The Ginger Man
- Winning a rice cooker at Dave and Buster’s
- Watching nurses rallying at the state house
- Watching gay marriage advocates rallying on 6th street
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| A thought after the election... |
[05 Nov 2008|08:56am] |
There's a lot that could be said today in the wake of history, but I want to focus on just a small portion of the events of last night: John McCain's concession speech. If you missed it and haven't seen a replay of it, I recommend it. I won't link directly to any particular news organization's copy, but your favorite search engine should find it easily enough.
I rarely use the plural first person when reflecting on my personal impressions, but I think it may be safe to do so today.
John McCain's concession speech reminds us that of the Senator McCain that has long enjoyed broad support outside his own party. He reminds us that his slogan, "Country First," is a true guiding principle for him. This speech may mark his shift from maverick, to presidential contender, to elder statesman.
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| Simple tax question... |
[22 Oct 2008|02:12pm] |
I generally dislike getting political in my blog, but this is an issue that has been bugging me.
I've been trying to figure out why increasing the the upper tax rate (for the 250K and up bracket) at the expense of reducing everyone else's taxes is bad for small businesses (where I define small businesses as sole proprietorships making less than 1,000K/year).
Isn't growth actually promoted by increasing that upper tax rate? If I have a business that has already realizing 250K of actual income (revenue minus costs), wouldn't I just decide to invest the rest in the business, saying hiring a new employee, making capital expenditures, or paying for a health care plan for my employees? Further, wouldn't I rather have more customers coming in because their taxes were lowered? What's more, my employee morale might improve as they can realize more of their income (i.e., I need to withhold a smaller percentage of their earnings in each paycheck).
Followup Q: why is this not being discussed? Maybe the answer is that the Obama campaign doesn't want to be on the defensive here...
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| Biked to work for the first time today |
[15 Oct 2008|09:29am] |
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Gentle spin of the ventilation fan |
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I biked to work today. Not too bad... there's a pretty serious grade right up front, but the rest of the ride is fine. The showers at the office are decent.
It's a ~3.3 mile trip and, if I'm reading the topo maps right, a ~300' climb. It took about half an hour. Hopefully I can bring that down before it gets too cold. I'll be in this job until Jan 31 and would like to bike at least few days a week until then.
Anyone have suggestions for cold weather biking?
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| HP OfficeJet j4550 all-in-one on Ubuntu 8.04LTS |
[07 Oct 2008|08:44pm] |
Just got a Sam's Club membership yesterday. We picked up enormous bags of frozen vegetables. On the way out of the store, I noticed that there was a printer/scanner/fax combo (HP OJ j4550) for $39. I fired up my N810 and confirmed its Linux compatibility. It's got a flatbed scanner with a document feeder, which beats the other cheap officejet I've seen which can only scan full sheets. It should be good for scanning receipts, odd sized pages, and multi-page documents. gscan2pdf is great for the later.
Today I hooked it up. Printing worked on the "first plug-in" on Ubuntu 8.04LTS. I already had the hpijs package installed, so the printer auto-detected and Ubuntu set everything up correctly. Scanning was a little more difficult. I tried a few scanning programs which kept saying no printer was detected/attached. Turns out I needed to install the hpoj package, too. Once it was installed (the installer detects the scanner bits of the OfficeJet), all was well and I was scanning my test stack of documents.
I've found myself in need of a copier, scanner, and fax machine a few times recently, so it's good to have a decent one at home.
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| New chairs in the lab! |
[27 Aug 2008|02:12pm] |
Came into the lab today to find that the previous set of chairs, which were really terrible, have been replaced by comfortable, cushioned "manager" style chairs. 'course I won't be here this semester to take advantage of them, but until I leave for White Plains, it'll be nice to have them.
The 99¢ webcam shot below doesn't do it justice, but it's the only image capture tool I have available here:
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| Crazy project idea |
[20 Aug 2008|02:44pm] |
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music |
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Slight hum from a fan in the USB-powered refrigerator |
] |
Walking to campus today, I had a crazy idea for a project: an LED-based digital display. The idea would be to build pixels out of bundles of LEDs, all powered off a custom controller. The DPI here would be tiny, like 10 or less, which means a 480p display would be enormous (~7') and ridiculously expensive: ~350,000 pixels, each at perhaps a dollar a piece in bulk. So indeed, crazy... but maybe it's possible to build a prototype at much lower resolution (if DVI supports something very small, like 12x10) or one that does subpixel interpolation to make use of a much smaller amount of pixels. Or perhaps start on a small corner of a complete display, leaving the rest dark for the time being.
Anyway... it could be an interesting (and cost inefficient) way to build a wall size display over time.
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| Back from California |
[17 Aug 2008|01:26am] |
I'm sitting here on the airplane flying back from my latest Google interview, this time for a "Software Engineer, Google.com" position, otherwise known as "Site Reliability Engineering." The interview didn't go as well as last time, so I think it's highly unlikely that I'll be offered a position. I probably did really well with just 1 of the 5 technical interviewers, making a couple massive brainfarts in the other sessions.
( Read more... )
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| Unexpected search results.. |
[12 Aug 2008|01:26am] |
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I was writing some LaTeX today and was looking at different ways in which TeXers encode big O notation. Let's just say that searching for "big o" and latex will turn up results substantially unrelated to math and computer science authoring.
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| Auto-adjust the output width of R |
[10 Aug 2008|08:27pm] |
I find myself searching for this post every so often, so I'll copy it here for safe keeping:
# auto width adjustment
.adjustWidth <- function(...){
options(width=Sys.getenv("COLUMNS"))
TRUE
}
.adjustWidthCallBack <- addTaskCallback(.adjustWidth)
Running this in an R session will cause the output width to match the terminal width. This works inside an Emacs/ess window, too.
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| Getting proper SSL certificates |
[07 Aug 2008|06:14pm] |
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mood |
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I've seen a heck of a lot of mozilla bashing lately due to firefox's handling of self-signed SSL certs. Personally, I like the updated system and the dialogs. It's generally a bad idea to accept a self signed cert handed by a web site.
Problem is, folks like me want to be able to use SSL to connect to services on their own servers or servers of friends.
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