So, after documenting how I save a timestamped log of my bash file, I got curious about what kind of analyses I could pull out of it. (caveat: I only started this logging about a month ago, so there aren’t as many data points as I’d like. However, there is enough to see some interesting […]
Category Archives: computer
Saving Command Line History
12-Mar-11I’ve never been satisfied with the defaults for the way linux & osx save command line history. For all practical purposes, when we’re talking about text files, we have infinite hard drive space. Why not save every command that we ever type. First, A Roundup of What’s Out There Here’s the baseline of what I […]
Consolidating Music Metadata
04-Dec-06Finally finished a script a couple weekends ago to synchronize data between Amarok, Rhythmbox, and iTunes. I now use Amarok exclusively, and it’d been bugging me for a long time that my old metadata from multiple machines and multiple apps was locked away and unexploitable. So i fixed that, for myself at least. I harvest […]
Migrating From Quicken
08-Jul-06A short while back, my wife appropriated my iBook. She couldn’t resist its OSX-y goodness. Until now, I’d been tracking my finances in Quicken on the thing, and, as I have very little love for Quicken on the Mac, this gave me a good excuse to finally migrate away. My primary machine is a gentoo […]
Gentoo 2006.0
08-Mar-06Dusted off my old 5-year-old laptop–thinking it might make a good server–low power consumption, built-in UPS.� The new Gentoo Live CD is very slick.� Too bad it doesn’t quite work: The LiveCD auto-starts a gnome session.� Too bad it doesn’t allow the screen resolution to be any higher than 640×480.� This size is unfortunately too […]
Information, Knowledge as Art
28-Nov-05Came across Newsmap this afternoon, a google maps mashup by Ben O’Neill today that plots locations mentioned in BBC news on a map of the world. The implementation was neat, but I can’t help but dream of what this could be like. Imagine a map of the world (perhaps OLED, mounted on your wall), with […]
AI Scaremongering
16-Nov-05This post on boingboing, “Google: our print scan program has no hidden AI agenda”, which points to this ZDNet story cracks me up. Talk of a “hidden AI agenda” just cracks me up–it feels like scaremongering, of some lumbering, lovecraftian, inhuman intelligence, artificial intelligence. When questioned on whether a renaissance of the general paranoia about […]
Bibliographic Management
13-Nov-05Bibliography Management Linkdump: Bibdesk : an excellent BibTeX database management system. Beautiful. But for mac only. jabref : an open-source, java BibTeX database management system. Lacks Bibdesk’s panache, but not bad. bibtexml: an excellent tool. Takes .bib files, converts them to xml, and then uses DTDs or XSLTs to mark them down to html APA, […]
Painfully Learning Zope
25-Oct-05My research demands that I write an interface for native speakers to annotate sound files of learner speech. Up until now, my poor annotators had been using an excel sheet I generated via a python script, with one column that pointed to sound files on the web. It worked, and it had nifty features like […]
things elecronic
06-Oct-05I think part of the reason I enjoy programming so much is that there is no entropy in what I create. Information gets out of date, standards change, yes, but that’s just a synchronization problem, not a Universe problem. Or is entropy a bad thing? It’s the enemy of order and structure, yes. But it […]