Cooking With Technology

Announcing: Barcamp Tacoma

peasleer — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:29:09 +0000

Mark your calendars and start thinking of topics to discuss: Tacoma's first annual Barcamp is coming August 8th, 2009 at Suite133!

mod_python Project Configuration Files

peasleer — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:00:35 +0000

In my last post I brought up how to get around mod_python’s default inability to handle relative paths for imported modules. The next night after writing that, I faced a very similar issue with configuration files. It is a sin to duplicate data in a project (except when caching), so most sane desktop applications will have [...]

Relative Import Paths Using Mod_Python

peasleer — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:00:29 +0000

A long while back (a year already? Jeeze!) David Brenner and I wrote a web application without using any frameworks, only mod_python and python server pages (PSP). We ran into a few problems along the way, one of which being that the import path mod_python used had to be composed of absolute paths. It isn’t [...]

Alien Milk

peasleer — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:39:22 +0000

This? This is tasty. Hope everyone is enjoying their weekend as much as I am - happy Valentine’s day!

Measuring Execution Time in Nanoseconds in Java

peasleer — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:46:25 +0000

Sometimes measuring time using the trusty System.currentTimeMillis() static call isn’t of high enough resolution to measure the execution time of methods with any meaning. Fortunately for those facing this problem, Java 5 introduced a method of accessing the system’s most precise clock through the System.nanoTime() static call. This returns a long that represents the current [...]

Reading Environment Variables in Java

peasleer — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:38:47 +0000

A quick search on google for “Reading environment variables in java” yielded a lot of (older) documentation stating that System.getEnv(”varname”) has been deprecated. This is no longer accurate, as System.getEnv(”varname”) and System.getEnv() have been reinstated as of Java 1.5. Quick post, I just wanted others to know that the API again exposes those useful method [...]

Part 2: Connections and Configuration

peasleer — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:30:40 +0000

In part one of this series, I covered the hardware and basic operating system installation for a home theater PC running Mythbuntu. In other words, part one covered the easy stuff. Running the audio cables between the PC and the TV is actually a more complicated affair than I had imagined, yielding three major issues [...]

Part 1: Mythbuntu HTPC and a Panasonic Viera

peasleer — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:30:03 +0000

I purchased a 46″ Panasonic Viera 1080p plasma TV at the beginning of January, and the resulting fun I’ve been having with it is largely responsible for my lack of recent blog updates. I, being the cheap geek I am, have no desire to either pay for an HD package from my cable company, nor [...]

Microsoft’s Pay-as-you-Go CloudOS

peasleer — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 22:53:11 +0000

Microsoft is quite apparently determined to not miss the possible shift to cloud computing. On top of October’s Microsoft Developer Conference announcement that the company will be launching “Azure” (Microsoft’s answer to Amazon Web Services), they also announced a next-generation operating system that will be cloud-centric. Overall, it seems like a logical progression for a [...]

Arbitrary File Ownership Exploit in Linux

peasleer — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 07:49:34 +0000

Remember our discussion on viewing computer security as threat mitigation? Well the likely risk of one attack vector being exploited has just increased. An issue was uncovered in Linux’s /bin/login and utmp being able to change the ownership of arbitrary files upon remote login. The example they discussed was changing /etc/shadow to be readable by a [...]