Sometime ago I stumbled across gearman and thought it looked cool — map/reduce and distributed processing for shell commands? Neato! Unfortunately, at the time I was looking for a distributed database (and found couchdb) so that didn’t go anywhere. The session at lca reminded me how cool at was, but didn’t get much further on […]
Yes, this post is going to mention notmuch. Whether that’s the answer to the question posed is another matter… My email habits have defaulted to mutt and procmail for quite some years now (and prior to mutt, pine which was essentially the same except older and less nifty). I had a brief interlude under OS […]
When I was looking at what new smartphone to get, the cheapest place to get it from seemed to be Mobicity which seems to be a local shopfront for a Hong Kong warehouse. That there was a discount voucher on tjoos helped too. Anyway, the price was right and it got here reasonably quickly so […]
When I last posted about my pygame/trigrid hax0ring, I said: I’m now at the point where that all works, but there’s no intelligence — peon’s will buy and transport goods without checking first that anyone actually wants them. Getting past that is proving troublesome, so this is me thinking out loud about it. The key […]
One of the XP systems I look after had a trojan this month — looks like it came from a fake “UPS package” mail with a zipped attachment that got clicked on, then stuck its tendrils into the registry and all over the place, and started popping warnings about viruses and instructions on how to […]
Subtitled: David Pennock’s Wall-Street pick up lines Dr Pennock’s latest post is about fitting stockmarket data — he comes up with a nicely matching randomly generated histogram based on a Laplace distribution over the daily log differences (that is, take the log of the ratio between daily close prices — so if you gained 20% […]
Possibly my longest blog post title ever? Anyway, here’s a link to today’s little bit of scripting. I’ve now written this script three or four times, so I figure that means it’s useful and maybe worth keeping around. I’m calling it dir2tree and all it does is take a (sorted) list of pathnames and convert […]
So this past weekend I had (hopefully!) my last Linux Australia face to face meeting — handed over the chequebook to the new treasurer, passed on some advice, and whatnot — which more or less ends my major existing responsibilities to the open source world. That happened to more or less coincide with a tweet […]
So much like last year, the Linux Australia face to face meeting has somewhat spoiled my WoBloMo posting frequency. Though, technically it’s still the 13th in UTC, New York and Hawaii, so there’s that. Anyway, I’ve bitten the bullet and signed up for the Upstarta Meetup. I’ve been in two minds about Upstarta for a […]
Ooops. Emergency woblomo post coz I forgot. Here’s the link to the other day’s screencast that apparently didn’t make it through aggregators. Hohum.
So here’s where I’m up to with my “trigrid” project. The idea is you’ve got a bunch of roads on a triangular grid (hence the name), with little peons on each segment of road that will carry goods from one end to the other. Some segments spontaneously create goods, others destroy them. The point is […]
I don’t have anything interesting to say today, so instead I’m going to link to an oldish post on my junkcode wiki (rss feed). Namely redcat — a program that merges ed-format diffs, so they can be applied in a single pass. That makes a big difference when dealing with anywhere more than a few […]
ajtowns – Scamming my way onto “Team Samba” (“hey, I use it!”) was a good idea. Winners! #lca2010 #hackoff Wellington Perl Mongers were awesome enough to run the Hackoff during LCA 2010. It consisted of a couple of hours of team hacking to decode craftily hidden eight character tokens. I’d seen Rusty carefully putting the […]
At this year’s linux.conf.au I decided it was high time I learnt how to program simple graphics. The use case I had in mind in particular was simulating/visualising resource transportation in a grid based real-time strategy game like Widelands, but really I’ve been a bit annoyed that I haven’t been able to do basic graphics […]
So with March coming up again, I thought I might have another go at some regular blogging. The World Blogging Month page doesn’t seem to have been updated (and David Pennock hasn’t blogged at Oddhead since October…) but I figure every other day still sounds more reasonable than every day, so I’ll stick with that, […]