Archive for the Open Source Tag

Dennis M. Ritchie

According to filesystem timestamps, I wrote this 4/9/1998. I know where I was seated when I wrote it, and it was definitelyspring, so that date is plausible. It seemed apropos, given Dennis’ passing, to post it now. Hopefully, those who might be offended will remember that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. DMR is my shepherd; I shall
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Two Turntables… and a Microcontroller – Part 1

My father is into HO railroading.  He’s got quite the layout in-progress in his garage.  However, he’s having trouble finding DCC turn-tables for his engine-yards.  The ones he can find are expensive and back-ordered.  My brother and I decided it would be a fun project for an Arduino (or three).  Here’s the first installment of build pics and videos.

Rainy afternoon Robotics, or the “Frankentruck FT-5”

So, the day turned rainy and there is a somewhat rigorous moratorium here on desktop computing.  I decided that didn’t include supervised robotics.  Full details, more pics and movie mayhem after the break.

Regex for Java in Unicode…

Think The Producers‘ “Springtime…  in Germany” when reading the title, it might make slightly more sense… A friend of mine was recently posed a challenge by hir instructor in an introductory Java class.  The challenge was (sic.) “I was recently writing a program to generate usernames from the first seven letters of a student’s last name and their first initial,
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A UNIX Wizard…

So, I heard “Pinball Wizard” on the radio the other day and it reminded me of a parody (author unknown) called “UNIX Wizard…”  While googling for the text for all of you, I also ran across this “UNIX Heirarchy,” which explains the difference between mere mortals and sucessive progress towards enlightenment.

Integrated Gallery While You Post…

I wanted to use Drupal to post pictures, much as LiveJournal can.  However, I already have…  an image gallery.  And, while it is a good and wondrous thing to have the gallery integrated with Drupal, what I really wanted was to be able to nicely choose images mid-post, without having to do crazy things like write my own <IMG> tags. 
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USCGC Mackinaw

The USCGC Mackinaw pulled into the bay this afternoon, shortly after lunchtime.  What she was doing, exactly, is anyone’s guess, but she appears to be capable of tending buoys, and that seemed to be what she was doing.  After work, she still hadn’t left, so I lugged the telescope down and started getting insane with optics.  I first tried just
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Office 2007 / DOCX files got you down?

Recently a few people have asked me how to open DOCX files, which are created in Word 2007 / Office 2007. I have found 4 solutions so far: Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is perhaps the canonical solution. It won’t make new Office 2007 documents, but I haven’t tried doing that in the other solutions either.
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You ain’t all that.

Very few things amuse me more than insignificant wannabes who think they can own my box for more than a few minutes. My system paged me last night about 5 minutes after some dork exploited a hole in Drupal 4.6.1 and started laying down tracks all over /tmp, /usr and /lib. Unfortunately for the snot-nosed little weasel, my machine is smarter than the average script kiddie and immediately detected something was amiss.

On the slightly sophisticated side, the attacker used chattr to try to make clean-up a bit more difficult for me, denying the removal, replacement or renaming of offending files. However, the idiot pulled down a rootkit that should have replaced a number of system utilities and didn’t even use it to cover tracks. What a loser.

Unfortunately for me, when such things happen, I need to run a full analysis to be sure they didn’t leave anything behind. Believe it or not, that is easier and takes less time than restoring from known-good backups. So, a few hours later of letting the machine do most of my dirty work and confirming key details by hand, and we’re back up, patched and running.

Taming the beast – Part 3

As a brief follow-up to my experiences with the Tiger upgrade, I have some news about my iFruit. As you may recall, I had trouble syncing my PDA after updating to Tiger. The fine people at Mark Space made a valiant effort to walk me through isolating the issue, with little success. However, their 4.0.5 “final” update to the Missing
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