But I Digress

Windows App Aliases...Really?

Michael P. Soulier — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 11:00:00 -0500

So, I recently requested a laptop from work for working from home, and it of course came with Windows 10 on it. I can cure that, but I figured, lets give it a good shakedown before messing with it. I like to learn, even when the OS sucks.

So of …

Income tax, what a mess

Michael P. Soulier — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 13:00:00 -0500

It's approaching tax season again, and this quote always jumps out at me:

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.

-- Albert Einstein

I found a post at quoteinvestigator.com for this.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/03/07/einstein-income-taxes/

Playing with DWM

Michael P. Soulier — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 10:15:00 -0400

I recently started playing with suckless tools more, jumping into their window-manager, dwm. It's pretty bare, and requires recompilation to customize it, so I installed a few patches, customized the colours, made it more Debian-suitable, and added some functionality.

I found I was accidentally using the i3 keystroke to kill …

A quote from an unappreciated movie

Michael P. Soulier — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 11:00:00 -0400

I recently re-watched the movie Primer, which is completely under-appreciated IMHO, and this quote jumped out at me:

What's worse? Thinking that you're paranoid or knowing that you should be?

-- Aaron, Primer

AFAIK you can watch this movie free online. Just search for it. I might have to buy a …

I love working with strange people

Michael P. Soulier — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 17:00:00 -0500

Digging through my old work quotes, I realize just how much I love working with very odd people:

<tim> I smell dead people

<msoulier> look under your desk

<tim> They're in the filing cabinet

or from another day:

<tim> If anyone needs me, I'll be out back, mugging old ladies …

We're all Hallucinating

Michael P. Soulier — Fri, 25 Aug 2017 09:00:00 -0400

From a TED Talk by Anil Seth:

In fact we're all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that 'reality'.

I just love this mind-bending stuff.

A Pilot Metropolitan with a Smile

Michael P. Soulier — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 14:00:00 -0400

Wow, it's been a ridiculous amount of time since I posted anything. The fact is that I've been busy in a lot of non-technical things, like my hobbies. One of those hobbies is working to create, and use fountain pens.

Yeah, I know. Whatever. Fountain pens made me love writing …

Honda Finally Comes Through

Michael P. Soulier — Sat, 07 May 2016 21:00:00 -0400

So, previous I ranted on about an issue with my car that I brought up with Honda Canada, complaining about Kanata Honda and their ridiculous justification for the key cylinders in my car to wear out so quickly.

Well, Honda Canada did, in fact, get back to me. A nice …

Cloud storage for my photos

Michael P. Soulier — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 10:00:00 -0500

I do love to take photos. I was geeky enough in high school to take photos for the year book with an old 35mm camera and a good wide aperture lens, developing my own pictures in black and white. Yes, I feel old now.

From there once my son was …

A working logger

Michael P. Soulier — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 11:00:00 -0500

So it took some work, and likely there are better ways to do this, but this logger satisfies my current needs in providing multiple levels of logging, and an iostream interface to make composing strings simpler. First some includes and definitions.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <ostream>
#include <boost/thread.hpp …

Re-learning C++

Michael P. Soulier — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 19:00:00 -0500

So lately I've been dusting off my C++ knowledge, experimenting with replacing a daemon written in Python on the product that I work on with one written in C++. For most Python programmers this may seem like serious masochism, but I wanted to know just how much harder it would …

Learning Google Go

Michael P. Soulier — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 16:00:00 -0500

So, I heard from a friend that Google Go was worth learning, so I've started to look into it. I must admit, while working on updating my C++ knowledge to account for the new 2011 and 2014 standards, and working on learning boost, picking up Go is a lot of …

A Letter to Honda Canada

Michael P. Soulier — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 17:00:00 -0400

I recently had reason to write to the CEO of Honda Canada, Mr. Jerry Chenkin, to outline why I am less than pleased with my 2010 Honda Fit, and ensure that he, or whomever ends up reading this, has the full story of what our experience with his company has …

Disabling Bash Completion

Michael P. Soulier — Fri, 10 Apr 2015 20:30:00 -0400

The bash shell is the standard shell on most Unix-like systems. It is full of great features to make your life typing on a command-line fairly painless. One of the most important features for any command-line is the ability to reduce unneeded typing via smart completion. Say I want to …

Why X11 still rocks

Michael P. Soulier — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 13:00:00 -0400

For years now, I've heard from Linux developers about why the venerable X11 is an obsolete piece of crap that needs replacing. The Wayland project aims to do so, real soon now, kinda like Perl 6. It's a tough problem, so I can hardly complain.

Still, when I hear the …

Getting IPython Notebook Working on Mac OS X

Michael P. Soulier — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 08:00:00 -0400

I've been getting into ipython notebook recently, especially since seeing some demos at PyCon 2014. I maintain a toolchain at work for processing monthly stats of our product's use in the field, using python but graphing in GNUPlot, Given the capabilities of matplotlib and pandas, this little project is ideal …

Validation with Server-side call in AngularJS

Michael P. Soulier — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 19:30:00 -0500

I've been playing with AngularJS for a little while, and in trying to understand how to validate a user's data as it's being entered, it didn't take long to find that to check with the server for some validation rules, like uniqueness constraints.

This presented a problem since the built-in …

Getting RunSnakeRun Working on Mac OS X

Michael P. Soulier — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 10:20:00 -0500

As I mentioned previously, I have a Mac Mini at home as a workstation. While some things are easier working with it, like video editing, and basic office productivity, some things are harder.

One of the harder areas on OS X is customizing the Unix side of it for my …

Scripting RSA Encryption

Michael P. Soulier — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 08:30:00 -0400

So, I have an OAuth 1.0 implementation for work that I'm extending, and the one area of OAuth 1.0 that I didn't implement was RSA-SHA1 signatures, as I didn't think that anyone would care. Of course, someone cares. So, I'm looking into them now, and looking into how …

Drivers, it's really not that hard

Michael P. Soulier — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 10:20:00 -0400

I am constantly amazed at the ignorance and outright laziness of Canadian drivers. Yes, we could be worse, but we could also be much, much better.

Case in point, I see people constantly turning left, and swinging out into the right lane, or turning right, and swinging out into the …

Java, usable but pointlessly difficult

Michael P. Soulier — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 00:30:00 -0400

I've been working on a REST client in Java at work lately. I know, it scares me too. I've had to revisit much of my old Java knowledge, and pick up a lot of new chops in Swing, Eclipse, and author a decent JSON-parsing HTTPS client.

Our internal servers use …

Matplotlib is really cool

Michael P. Soulier — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:30:00 -0400

Recently at work I needed to produce a pie chart for some data that I had to crawl through using basic scripting. Pulling out the numbers, sorting, filtering, etc., was all tasks that I'm used to doing, but for graphing I normally use Gnuplot. But, Gnuplot can't do pie charts …

Joysticks on Mac OS X in Flightgear

Michael P. Soulier — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:00:00 -0400

I like flight simulators. I've played all of the good ones, Flightgear is an open-source flight simulator that isn't bad, and is steadily getting better with every release. While it is available to run on Mac, there's no way to calibrate the Joystick due to a lack of caring on …

Video on Raspbian

Michael P. Soulier — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:00:00 -0400

Currently our upstairs TV has a raspberry pi attached to it. It's running the basic Raspbian distribution, based on Debian Linux. I'm using it for development as well as for a media center at the moment, so I'm not using RaspBMC, I'm going to order another one has a dedicated …

Jim Butcher on Men vs. Women

Michael P. Soulier — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 09:30:00 -0500

I'm reading Jim Butcher's "Cold Days", his latest installment in the Dresden Files, and I felt the need to share this quote:

So, ladies, if you ever have some conversation with your boyfriend or husband or brother or male friend, and you are telling him something perfectly obvious, and he …

Checking the weather

Michael P. Soulier — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 20:30:00 -0500

A while back I needed a way to check the weather forecast, simply, from a terminal, as is the preference of most Unix geeks like me. Being a Canadian, I'm not interested in the Weather Channel as much as the Environment Canada data. Thankfully, they do publish an RSS feed …

Signatures in OAuth

Michael P. Soulier — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 18:00:00 -0500

Hi again. I already went into the basics of OAuth in a previous post, and alluded to the signatures being the hard part of the implementation. I'm using a python-oauth module for the client, but for the server, I decided to implement my own in Perl and Mojolicious, since I …

Understanding OAuth

Michael P. Soulier — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 10:30:00 -0500

We meet again. Thanks for stopping by. This post has a high geek factor, so if you're not one, feel free to move along, nothing to see here.

Still here? K, your funeral. At work, I'm trying to add a ReST Web Service to a product that could desperately use …

Getting started with autotools

Michael P. Soulier — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 08:30:00 -0500

So, I'm still reading O'Rielly's 21st Century C. I know, too many books on the go and I read slowly, and not often enough. I'm going through the section on GNU autotools, which I've never been a heavy user of, albiet I'm a heavy consumer of. I just don't spend …

Brewing a better UNIX

Michael P. Soulier — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 08:00:00 -0500

Being a Linux user, I'm used to a fairly standard set of tools on my command-line. On OS X, it's essentially BSD UNIX underneath, which I have had some experience with thanks to FreeBSD. The environment is very similar, but not identical, and on FreeBSD, you quickly find yourself using …

The Apple Support Experience

Michael P. Soulier — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:20:00 -0500

So, having jumped into Apple land with a Mac Mini recently, and having some problems, I of course took advantage of my included 90 days technical support. Being part of the Apple ecosystem includes being subject to how they support their customers, so I think it's important to write about …

Parenting can really make you feel helpless

Michael P. Soulier — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:00:00 -0500

I've only been kicking around for a bit over 40 years now, but I've never found anything in the world to make me feel more helpless than my own child telling me that they feel bad, and knowing that I can't fix it.

My daughter was sick last night, and …

Customizing Awesome

Michael P. Soulier — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 07:00:00 -0500

As I mentioned previously, I'm currently running Awesome on my netbook. While I added suspend on lid close, I still need to customize the crap out of it. I had nothing showing me my current battery status, so I searched around to find the appropriate lua code, a language that …

Tweeting on OS X

Michael P. Soulier — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 09:00:00 -0500

For some time my desktop has been an older, underpowered Linux box, so using services like Twitter via the website has been painful, as loaded with heavy javascript that would consume my CPU's limited resources.

So, like any Python programmer would do, I wrote my own client. Well, lets be …

Suspend on lid close in Debian Squeeze

Michael P. Soulier — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:10:00 -0500

I recently decided that Gnome is not the best desktop for my little EeePC netbook with a little 10.5" screen. So I'm playing around with a window manager that mainly just maximizes everything. I've tried Ratpoison, I've tried wmii, and now I'm trying Awesome.

I have a lot of …

Joysticks? We don't need no stinking joysticks...

Michael P. Soulier — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:00:00 -0500

So, after unpackaging my brand-spanking new Mac Mini, I grabbed a copy of the X-Plane demo, dropped in an old usb joystick and fired it up. Oddly, X-Plane itself asked me if I wanted to calibrate the joystick, which struck me as odd, that hasn't happened in years, not since …

Umm, done unzipping yet?

Michael P. Soulier — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 14:00:00 -0500

So, the first thing I did after after wrapping my head around the cocoa interface was to start installing software like a madman. I wanted Firefox, VLC, Kobo, Gimp, Vim, etc, etc, etc. So, I had to learn how to install apps on OS X.

Apps in OS X seem …

Ok, nobody panic, there's a fruit on my screen

Michael P. Soulier — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 18:00:00 -0500

I've needed a new desktop for a while now. As I'm primarily a Unix user, I typically buy a cheap PC and put Linux on it. This involves doing a bunch of research into available hardware to make sure that everything is going to work, like accelerated graphics for any …

What Curling has taught me about life

Michael P. Soulier — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 10:00:00 -0500

I've been curling for about 4 years now, and it's already taught me a lot about life. I thought I'd share some of what it has taught me:

balance is very important

anything worthwhile requires hard work

you often can't brute force your way out of a problem

you must …

I sit too much

Michael P. Soulier — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:00:00 -0500

Yeah, I really do. From my childhood I always prefered more intellectual activities than active ones, reading, watching movies, tv. Growing up asthmatic had something to do with that, but I overcame it later in life and had no excuses anymore. Still, studies to do, computers to play with, digital …

21st Century C

Michael P. Soulier — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 22:12:00 -0500

I saw a sale from O'Reilly Publishing tonight on an new ebook for 21st Century C. I have a good history with O'Reilly and C programming, so it caught my attention.

When I was in University, Practical C Programming taught me much more than any of my professors, and Unix …

Dusting off old games

Michael P. Soulier — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 18:43:00 -0500

Back before I had any real responsibilities, I spent a lot of time playing various games. I've probably played most of them. Roleplaying games, tabletop battle simulations, although I stayed away from the card games like Magic. I'll rant about that some other time.

My two favorite games were Air …

New blog

Michael P. Soulier — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 10:20:00 -0400

So I decided to dump Wordpress and go to something that I have more control over. I was thinking of building my own static blogging system, but I looked around and found that there are a few already. Being a fan of Python I decided to try out Pelican. It …