Safe For Seneca – Grumble Grumble

OSTD: Open Source Translation Database

8 December, 2011

I have an ideas list, a sort of todo list for when I have time to burn. One of the ideas on my list is a website that can help authors of open source software to translate their software into languages other than english. I have recently agreed to teach part time at Seneca and …

Designed a database recently?

29 November, 2011

Today I got some news that tells me I’m going to have some spare time on my hands. So I figured I might as well find something to do with that spare time. One of the ideas in my list caught my attention and I started working on it. Sort of the centre of …

How I almost switched to Ubuntu

24 June, 2011

Lat week I got a fancy new printer. I was trying to find something that will work for years and years so I shopped around for a couple of days. The shopping experience was pretty painful. It’s very difficult to find whether a printer is actually supported in Linux before buying it and trying it …

CreateProcess for Linux

20 January, 2011

Do you remember the first time someone told you about fork()/exec() for Linux? Do you remember beeing completely confused? I do, and it’s an ongoing pain in the ass for me – every time I want to call something simple without blocking and without worrying about pipes or the structure of exec()/execl()/execlp() parameters, or the …

How to save 10$ a month on the power bill

16 January, 2011

Once a year or two ago they were lending out power meters at the Richmond Hill library, the sort of thing that you put in between an electrical device and the power plug in the wall to see how much power the device uses. Trying to find it again.. PowerStream’s Watt Reader Loan Program, could …

Two years of uptime

9 January, 2011

Check this out: andrew@littlesvr:~$ uptime 00:20:16 up 730 days, 15:13, 1 user, load average: 0.57, 0.22, 0.11 At 4AM this morning it was 730 days, that’s exactly two years! The server would have been up for about 6 years if I didn’t decide once to upgrade the hardware, once to upgrade Slackware, and once to …

What’s digital broadcasting got to do with animated images?

7 January, 2011

just finished my master’s so I’m allowed to quote Wikipedia again :) In 2008 WorldDMB adopted APNG as a backward compatible extension to enable animation as part of the MOT SlideShow user application for Digital Radio. “APNG 1.0 Specification – Animated Portable Network Graphics” is included as normative Annex A in the ETSI standard TS …

Dealing with stress – some truths to help

8 October, 2010

I’ve been having a really hard time on my new job. I had to help out on a project where I knew nothing about the technology or the code or even the basic concepts. It was so bad at times I thought I would go crazy or else my head would explode. Then I got …

Remember how good you are

12 January, 2010

I’ve been reading about literate programming, and was reminded that most programmers don’t write comments in their code. Whether to write them or not is a question that’s asked all the time, in all circles – starting in school and all the way to teams of masters of the known universe like Linus (who I’m …

APNG is still alive

11 January, 2010

I’ve been running my more-or-less regular backup of littlesvr.ca, and found that yet again the online APNG assembler data directory is the one taking most of the time. Turns out that even though I cleared it a few months ago there is over 4GB of PNG files in there (half of that – 5800 APNG …