John Hobbs on coding, Omaha, and life in general

Thursday Quote: Ernie Chambers

john — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:00:31 +0000

“You do not have the right to have an addiction and impose your weakness upon other people,” he said. “You don’t have the right to impose your stupidity on others.” - NE Unicameral Sen. Ernie Chambers

Automated Road and Pavement Condition Survey Vehicle

john — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:22:57 +0000

I saw this on my way to work today. It’s got lots of stuff hanging off of it, pretty cool looking. I couldn’t get a better shot (stupid stick shift) but there was more hardware on the front too. I definitely saw some laser warning stickers on the bottom and the side read “Automated [...]

Great bash calculator

john — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:13:47 +0000

I spend a lot of time on the command line, and one thing I run up against every once in a while is doing math. I normally jump through the bc hoops, but today this bit came through my feed reader. calc(){ awk "BEGIN{ print $* }" ;} Just drop it into your .bashrc, .alias, or [...]

Disable Gnome Keyring for SVN

john — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:27:01 +0000

Although I am personally switching over to git for my projects, we still use Subversion here at work. Something I’ve noticed recently is that SVN now stores my passwords in gnome-keyring. This appears to be a feature in version 1.6 and I am running 1.6.5. It seems from that article that it can also [...]

House!

john — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:10:23 +0000

Okay, so it’s been a while since we actually closed, but I’ve been busy. Darcy and I bought our first house (thank you $8,000 tax credit) at the end of September. It’s not huge, about the same size as our apartment actually, but we love it, especially the back yard. We finished moving in on Saturday, so everything [...]

Three More Tracks From Nikolai

john — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 02:16:50 +0000

Nikolai is dead. Long live Nikolai. Before the band split up we recorded three last songs that we wrote near the end of our run, which had limited plays but lots of our love in them. I don’t think they are ever going to be polished beyond these versions, so I give you those three songs [...]

KolorTool For KDE 4

john — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:56:59 +0000

Update (2009-07-25)Turns out what I needed was KColorChooser in KDE4. Oh well :-) Maybe I’m blind, but I can’t find a nice, simple color tool on KDE 4 for my life. The color picker Plasmoid is okay, but it doesn’t do what I want: to mangle colors and get the resulting hex values. To fix this, [...]

Data throughput with ExternalInterface

john — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:23:50 +0000

I’ve started tinkering with Flash and AS3, and I’ve used the ExternalInterface a lot. For one project the amount of data to be pushed into JavaScript from AS3 was highly variable, could be huge. I couldn’t find a good reference for how much it can handle, so I threw this together. In the end [...]

Take Me Somewhere Rework

john — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:56:24 +0000

Over the weekend I knocked out a new code base for TakeMeSomewhere.org. It’s not much, just a new look and feel as well as some back end work so that I can get fancy later. Check It Out

MySQL & Ruby on Debian (sidux)

john — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:37:08 +0000

I’ve started learning Ruby on Rails, and I needed the mysql driver. Should be simple, right? Just gem install mysql or something? It wasn’t. root@asuka:~# gem install mysql Building native extensions. This could take a while... [...]