Safe For Seneca – Grumble Grumble

You try to give Microsoft a break but no…

16 January, 2016

I feel like Microsoft hates me. It’s not just that it doesn’t care – it is going out of its way to keep me off its operating system, its ecosystem, everything it owns or controls. A few weeks ago I decided to accept the inevitable and “upgrade” from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I know …

Exam/test clock and timer

16 December, 2015

Why is it so difficult to find a simple clock that will show the time on the screen? Honestly you would think building one is rocket science, that’s how hard it is to find one online. I can never find one to show on the projector while my students are taking a test or exam, …

Towards a Functional Licence for Open Hardware

15 December, 2015

I’ve always been interested in hardware but I’ve never learned much about it past simple analogue PCBs I made back in when I was in highschool. I am a software guy though, and specifically an open source software guy. So the name of this paper got my attention: “Towards a Functional Licence for Open Hardware”. …

CC Registry – What it’s all about

14 November, 2015

In this series: CC Registry – What it’s all about (this post) CC Registry – Architecture CC Registry – Next steps Wouldn’t it be nice if one day you could find an image online and know whether you can legally use that image and for what purpose? This is fundamentally what the Creative Commons registry …

Installing proprietary NVidia drivers in CentOS7

11 November, 2015

I don’t even know if this should go into Open Source, but there are definitely machines that will not run X.org with the Nouveau driver with some of the newest NVidia cards, and this is the only realistic way I know to fix it. The procedure for installing this thing is incredibly weird and error-prone …

OSTD: an experiment that didn’t work

2 October, 2015

There are plenty of people in our industry (software development) who advise to fail early and fail often. This is a story of such a project. The OSTD is a really cool idea: get free translations, or at least get started on them. I never pushed it too hard but I developed it to the …

Using ImageMagick without running out of RAM

22 June, 2015

For our research project we needed to use pHash to do some operations on a lot (tens of thousands) of image files. pHash uses ImageMagick internally, probably for simple operations such as resizing and changing the colour scheme. I am pretty familiar with errors such as these coming from convert or mogrify: convert.im6: no decode …

Screen scraping timetable data from a PeopleSoft Faculty Center

3 May, 2015

Our school moved to PeopleSoft for.. I’m not going there.. but that’s where everyone’s timetables are now. I thought maybe this big fancy company has an API to let me access the data but no, it’s basically impossible to access the API directly. So I was left with screen scraping, which I always wanted to …

Perceptual hash comparison: pHash vs Blockhash: false positives

27 April, 2015

I’ve been considering a project idea for Seneca’s partnership with Creative Commons. For that idea to work I would need a tool to create perceptual hashes from images that: Give true positive results when comparing images that were resized, and/or their colours changed. Give very few (near zero percent) false positive results. Too many false …

How to get a tourist visa to travel to Russia from Canada

27 April, 2015

I’m going to Moscow in a couple of months, and we bought the tickets a while ago. More recently I’ve randomly discovered that I need a visa to travel to Russia. I’m glad I know people who know these things, it would have been very annoying to arrive there and be told we’re not allowed …