November 05, 2006 •
Comments
Here is a quick and dirty script that I wrote to take the current artist and track playing in iTunes and send it to a Terminal session:
tell application "iTunes"
set _artist to artist of current track
set _track to name of current track
end tell
set the clipboard to _artist & " - " & _track
set info to the clipboard
tell application "Terminal"
do script info in window 1
end tell
And here is a script to display the same thing in an Evocam caption:
tell application "iTunes"
set _artist to artist of current track
set _track to name of current track
end tell
tell application "EvoCam"
set webcam item "iTunes" to _artist & " - " & _track
end tell
September 05, 2006 •
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If you haven't watched Prison Break, I strongly recommend doing so. Here is a link to a video stream of the most recent episode. This is easily the best television series ever created.
August 17, 2006 •
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If you haven't heard by now, I've accepted an Application Development position at a local establishment. My first day was this past Monday and so far I am really enjoying it. There seem to be quite a few very talented programmers here and I am really looking forward to being a part of the team.
I also wanted to mention that I am in the process of moving back to my hometown. There really is no point in living where I do now and I have a chance to get out of my lease, so I'm going to do it. The next few weeks are going to be extremely busy for me.
July 31, 2006 •
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Sometime over the weekend one of the main system hard disks in my home server went bad. Luckily, I was able to mount it in time through a Gentoo LiveCD and back up all of my important databases and configurations. I was going to put Gentoo back on, but after talking with a friend I decided to try out Ubuntu server edition. So far I am thoroughly impressed. Within 20 minutes of booting the installation CD, I was up and running on a full LAMP setup.
I have been a dedicated Gentoo user for 3-4 years and nothing has even come close to making me switch until now. If you have yet to try Ubuntu, I highly recommend giving it a shot.
July 11, 2006 •
Comments
The Hacker's Diet is a serious book about how to lose weight and permanently maintain whatever weight you desire. It treats dieting and weight control from an engineering and management standpoint, and provides the tools and an understanding of why they work and how to use them that permit the reader to gain control of their own weight. The book is intended primarily for busy, successful engineers, programmers, and managers who have struggled unsuccessfully in the past to lose weight and avoid re-gaining it.
There is no magic secret to losing weight and keeping it off, just as there is no hidden key to instant wealth. Nonetheless, every year another crop of "magic diet" and "secrets of investing" books appear on already-creaking shelves. The human capacity to ignore inconvenient facts and avoid unpleasantness is immense. Success in any endeavor requires coming to terms with the true nature of the task at hand and, if the goal is worth the effort, getting on with it.
"How can I lose weight?" "Simple, eat less food than your body burns." "How can I learn to do that?" Read this book.
May 23, 2006 •
Comments
Manually backing up your files through FTP can be very time consuming and a very big waste of resources. This is why rsync was written. Rsync allows you to transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network, using an efficient checksum-search algorithm. In this tutorial, I will show you how to mirror a remote filesystem over an SSH tunnel.
Let's start off by setting up SSH:
ssh-keygen rsa
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
Copy the output of id_rda.pub to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on your remote host. You should now be able to SSH into the remote host without having to type in a password.
We are ready to start backing up our files. This is accomplished in just one step. Make sure you've created a directory to store the data that only you have access to. When you've done so, execute the following command:
rsync -azPe ssh user@remote.host:/remote/path /local/path
Rsync will crawl through and download all of the data in the remote path to your local path. It may take some time to download all of the files the first time you run this, depending on what you are mirroring. However, the next time you run rsync, it will only download the files that have been modified or added to the directory structure.
May 11, 2006 •
Comments
As I was filtering through the gobs of e-mail I had here at work this morning, I came across this piece of work that I had to share with everyone:
How are u?
I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (http://[URL cut out]) are bad.
Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..
My dog and I are still alive :)
Do people actually fall for stuff like this?
April 26, 2006 •
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If you are like me, customizing your desktop's look & feel to match your personal style is a very important task. As we all know, Windows XP does not come with any visually appealing themes--unless you consider the "Fisher Price" theme attractive (I certainly don't). While I don't mind the Windows Classic appearance, I still wanted something more like my old FluxBox skin. As unbelievable as it may sound--I have found a simple solution: Visual Styles.
You really only need to do two things in order to start using Visual Styles:
- Download and install the hacked UXTheme DLL (reboot required).
- Choose a style from here. I personally use Black Mesa v2.
And there you have it. Enjoy! :-)
April 10, 2006 •
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As I was sifting through the local classifieds early last week, I happened across a nice complex in a nearby township. After meeting with the landlord that Tuesday night I decided to take it. I ended up taking last Thursday and Friday off of work to initiate the moving process. I never realised how much stuff I actually had packed into my room until I had to go through it all. Fortunately, everything went pretty smoothly and I am finally starting to get settled in.
So, no, I will not be moving to Springfield this year. I plan on working from home until my lease expires and then taking a look at how things are going at that point.
April 01, 2006 •
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After many years of debate, I finally gave in to the temptation of purchasing a flat panel LCD monitor. I decided to go with the Dell E196FP 19-inch analog only for $254.15 with free 3-5 day shipping. The reason I went with an analog only monitor is because I do not want to upgrade my video card at this time. My plan is that in the future I will purchase a video card with both analog and DVI support and run a dual monitor setup.
I can't wait for this to arrive. It will give me so much more desk space compared to the 19" CRT I'm running now.