About a week ago I picked an M3 DS Real card for my Nintendo DS for playing homebrew, and more importantly, watching movies on a series of annoyingly long flights in the coming months. After a moderate amount of fighting, including finding out that the SD card I bought for the device wasn’t compatable with it and having to pick a new card up, I’ve been pretty pleased. It works great as a music player, plays back movies from MythTV nicely, and I’ve hooked up some scripts to transcode recorded programs from Miro, so I can load up on content and then watch it as I sit at the gate waiting for my plane to be delayed again.
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One of the major issues with utilizing a virtual machine for a server is that of time synchronization. VMWare normally has access to a real time clock handler that helps to synchronize time, but even that causes time to skew. This issue becomes more prominent with modern processors that support CPU frequency scaling. However, there are many cases where even the VMWare custom kernel module can’t manage the time skew properly.
This morning while sitting in my office, I received a telephone call from a presidential campaign seeking a donation. I found this interesting because I have yet to donate to any presidential candidate this year. While I was more than happy to donate some money to the campaign, a thought came into my head while dealing with the guy on the phone – how do I know you’re really working for campaign X?
Recently, there were two enormous acquisitions in the world of Open Source Software. Back in January, Sun Microsystems announced it was purchasing MySQL for $1 billion. About two weeks later, Nokia announced it was acquiring Trolltech for $153 million, about a seventh of what was paid for MySQL. Both purchases have huge implications for Open Source – MySQL, despite its shortcomings, is the most popular database for web application stacks, and QT, the major product from Trolltech is the foundation for KDE and a variety of other cross platform graphical programs.
Last Friday, I had the chance to hear CMU SCS Ph.D. alum, and president of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee speak on the building Google China and what it means to do business in China versus the United States. It reminded me of the fact that what we accept for “The Internet” – Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc – isn’t universal. In fact, what we refer to as the “The Internet” barely exists in other markets.
I was looking for a store in the South Hills of Pittsburgh a few weeks ago and wanted to make sure that I found the store okay, enter Google Street View. I popped up the location into Google Maps and started looking around. Yech, it was pretty far off. However, I did discover that even the googlers need to eat. Apparently they favor Wendy’s.
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In August of 2007, Jeff Atwood wrote an article about Thirteen Blog Clichés. While there is some irony in the sense that one thing that he said he hated was blogging about blogging, and that’s what that article is, it generally contains some pretty useful information. I’ve tried to follow some of those pieces of advice in the design of my new weblog software. Thus, you won’t find the calendar widget anywhere – no one used it and I didn’t blog enough to have it up there.
First of all, I cheated a little, it’s been 24 hours and 51 minutes since I started my little challenge yesterday afternoon. I started with no code written, no database schema, and no HTML templates. As of right now, I have a system that has accomplished all of the goals set forth in the original 24 Hour Blog Challenge post, but is really ugly. Along the way, I also did some nifty things that I’d like to share.
I’ve had a weblog of some sort since my early 1998 – back before they were called weblogs. Originally it was a set of PHP 3 scripts that talked to a MySQL database, pretty high-tech stuff for the era. In 2001 I moved over to Movable Type because it was the blogging hotness at the time. In 2003 after moving out of Chicago and seeing SixApart squander their opportunity due to asinine licensing terms (and the fact that Movable Type is written in Perl), I started using PyBlosxom, a dead simple system that relies on a set of files in the directory tree for posts.
My servers have run OpenBSD since sometime in 1998. I still have a few really ancient official CD sets laying around for OpenBSD 2.3 (May 1998), 2.5 (May 1999), and 2.7 (June 2000). My name can be found on the OpenBSD Donations page, and I think that PF is one of the sweetest pieces of software I’ve seen. I’ve ran OpenBSD on x86, PPC, and Sparc on both physical and virtual hardware.