My former roommate had the idea a few months ago to build a ‘green’ PC, which would be very low power, easy for anyone to use for things such as email and office applications, and (of course, the clincher) cheap. So he went ahead and did it… it worked out quite well. Its a shiny lil box, actually. The performance isn’t that bad either, and it is in fact power efficient.

Its running Ubuntu on it (of course, its supposed to be cheap!), and he mentioned some plans to research patches and tweaks to make the Linux kernel more power efficient, and include other peoples power-related patches and such in there as well.

Anyways, visit his site, it doesn’t have a whole lot of content there yet but he was planning on adding some more…

Power efficient ‘green’ linux-based PC

Best election twist *ever*:

Wargames III: The Obama Code: The mysterious hacking of Joe the Plumber’s motor vehicle records was America’s only warning of Barack Obama’s secret past as “The0n3,” a founding member of the 1980’s hacker group Legion of Doom. Once in office, Obama reassembles the now-middle-aged cyberpunk gang for “the l33test Cabinet ever,” and new defense secretary “NinjaBoy” promptly declares cyberwar on China, Russia and, oddly, Canada (“I always hated that poser Mafiaboy.”) Cyber Armageddon seems inevitable until rival hackers from MOD change all the White House phone lines into pay phones. (by Threat Level)

So I found this rather amusing, on their story about the “Hunt for the Palin ‘Hacker'”, they were hotlinking an image from Project Gutenberg. You would think that they would know better… guess not.

Well, I am happy to announce the release of version 0.2 of my standalone GPS logging software, geoHist. This version actually makes geoHist useful: you can export the data from the MySQL database into a GPX format. From there you can use a program like Google Earth to display the tracks it records on a map (Note: Google Earth doesn’t work for all tracks… I’m not quite sure why yet, but I’m probably going to change things around to dump to KML format soon).

You can find out more about geoHist at its page: http://www.virtualroadside.com/geoHist/

The website describing the GPX standard describes a way to validate your GPX file in windows, however it does not mention a way to do it in Linux. So heres how you can validate your files (one way of many, I’m sure). The program you use is called xmllint, and in ubuntu, the package that contains this is libxml2-utils …

GPX 1.0:

xmllint --noout --schema http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0/gpx.xsd testfile.gpx

GPX 1.1:

xmllint --noout --schema http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1/gpx.xsd testfile.gpx

Hope that saves you some time!

Programmers, we should make our infinite loops more exciting! A lot of times in C or other languages, you see infinite loops represented by things such as

while (1) { /* do stuff here */ }

Or perhaps by

for (;;) { /* do stuff here */ }

Thats so boring! Why not be more creative in your work? I propose that we use the following construct instead

while (42) { /* do stuff here */ }

Now you might ask, why use while() instead of for() or do.. while()? In my opinion, its cleaner (the while part, not necessarily the number part). while() seems like the correct options, since (in my mind, at least) for() implies some set amount of iteration, whereas while() implies keep going until some condition is false. Of course, I do realize that they all do the same thing and each different one can do the same things as the others with some modification.

Yes, that was a rather useless post, but I had to get it off of my chest 🙂

I have very mixed feelings about art. I can appreciate good art (though, not some ‘modern’ art) to some extent, but usually its just easier to make fun of it. Today I took the opportunity to go visit the Museum Of Bad Art… which had some really god-awful art in it, but was definitely quite amusing, and was a delight to make fun of. They are dedicated “to bring the worst of art to the widest of audiences”. It was only a short drive from where I’m located at, and was definitely worth the visit.

Of course, I simply HAD to take some pictures (though, they have pictures on their website as well) that I could share with you:

(more…)

So I got a job at BBN Technologies in Boston, MA at the beginning of January, and moved my stuff out here in a giant 26-foot U-Haul (despite having very little stuff… ) on the 31st! Which, that was a lot of fun. Been adjusting to having a ‘real’ job for a week now, but the people there are pretty cool.

However, its been an interesting adjustment for me. Boston is such a huge place with people all around at all hours of the day.. I mean, you don’t get stuck in traffic at 11PM in Kalamazoo! And of course all the streets are going in a million different ways.. though in many respects, it feels like you’re driving on a racetrack sometimes, which is really fun.

One thing that I’ve really come to dislike is the huge amount of full-serve gas stations around here… its so annoying. I’m not 100% sure why, but I hate giving my credit card to people (though, you could argue that waitresses and such do the same thing, and it doesn’t bother me). Anyways.. its weird, but I’m enjoying myself. More later.