goplexian.com

Back in the saddle, beer and dragons

2011-09-01T10:39:00-07:00

Alex opens the cellar door, and whistling a summer tune he steps into the darkness. Half way down an insidious noisome odor assaults his nostrils in what only can be described as sinus rape. He reels, arms flailing, hastening his pace, and stumbles to the bottom. Searching through watery eyes he scans for whatever unspeakable horror must surely be waiting... "Oh", he gasps, "it's you." Hello

A love hate relationship with the Gnu/Linux desktop

2010-09-30T17:38:00-07:00

I've been using Linux on the desktop for many years, but sometimes the state of the Gnu/Linux desktop really frustrates me and it seems that a rant like this is the only thing that I have the ability to do about it. So hopefully I'm not just screaming into the wind and I actually have some valid points in here but I will leave that for you to decide. Now of course Gnu/Linux on its own is not a

6 Tips For Improving Hard Drive Performance

2010-09-28T05:48:00-07:00

I am a compulsive tweeker, and although it has yielded great dividends over the years I actually consider it to be one of my worst qualities because it can also be a real time-waster. I can't tell you how many times I've ended up chasing my own tail trying to squeeze those last few drops of performance out of my machine. So believe me when I tell you that quality information regarding computer

Creating icons with Inkscape

2010-09-21T16:15:00-07:00

Recently I was having a look at the wiki site for my favorite audio player Deadbeef and I noticed that they were asking for artist contributors for a new logo/icon. In case you are unaware the name 0xDEADBEEF is just a reference to a filler for debug memory and has nothing to do with death or cows, so it is a bit of a strange name but it is a great audio player nonetheless. Deadbeef is free and

A good example of Closed and Open integration

2010-09-08T23:15:00-07:00

Closed Source Software is a reality of the world we live in, and as much as I love OSS and admire the work that the FSF has accomplished, I just can't see how such movements will ever become the dominate players in the commercial sector of the software development industry. Closed and Open Source are going to exist side by side for a long time, probably forever. What that means is that "

New video series: A Quick Blender Tip

2010-09-07T12:40:00-07:00

In this video I explain the merits of the "Align to View" feature, and give a practical example showing how this can speed up workflow. If you have problems with the embedded video, there is also a higher quality copy uploaded to vimeo. I apologize for the sound quality, I realize it sounds a bit hollow I'm not sure why, but hopefully by the next episode I will have that fixed. If you

Luxrays Blender Render package for Archlinux

2010-09-04T00:03:00-07:00

("Luxrays" is the name that has been chosen for the part of the Luxrender dedicated to accelerating the ray interesection process by GPU's, from now on I will refer to SmallLuxGPU as Luxrays.) Yesterday after watching this Luxrays video tutorial I decided that I wanted to give it a whirl myself, but there was no Luxrays package for Archlinux ...so today I made one. Here is the package if you

15 tips every computer geek should know to stay healthy

2010-09-02T11:16:00-07:00

(I will be writing a Blender related article once per week on Mondays, and therefore since this is neither Monday nor a Blender related article you are free to consider this an irregular bonus article.) Now I must admit that in general I am not a fan of these types of lifehack style articles. I often find them to be boring, or honestly a bit ridiculous, and yet despite that such articles often

Getting started: Python scripting in Blender 2.5 on Linux

2010-08-31T04:39:00-07:00

First, on Linux for Blender to launch properly it must be set to launch from a terminal or console window. The reason for this is because the output from Blender scripts is displayed in the console window which Blender was launched from, so if you just click an icon to launch Blender then you need to right click that icon and change it so that it launches blender from a terminal. In Gnome this

Setting up Jack Audio for GStreamer, Flash, and VLC

2010-02-25T22:02:00-08:00

First of all I need to say that I won't be mentioning Pulseaudio so if that is what you're here for then you are at the wrong place because I don't use Pulseaudio at all, Pulseaudio can be run ontop of Jack but doing so will increase CPU load (a very tiny amount on modern systems). Someday I may find a reason to run Pulseaudio on top of Jack but right now I don't have one. I'm going to try to

Facebook will set indie gaming back 5 years

2010-02-24T04:17:00-08:00

I read books just about every day, and I'm talking real books mind you, not e-ink, not e-book. I'm talking paper and dust and the musty smell of old print. So if you're one of those people who gave up reading a few years ago and whose fingers spasmodically continue to click long after the hand has left the mouse then you may not exactly understand the reasons for my grumbling, but just a brief

The first rule of Lua.

2010-02-16T15:45:00-08:00

This is a follow up to an article I wrote titled "Why nobody talks about Lua" it's funny how sometimes little questions like that can turn into big discussions, because its not even a week later and that post has had over 10,000 views and generated something over 200 comments through various forums. So I wanted to capitalize on my success do a brief review today of how the various communities

The cost of Ubuntu's Success

2010-02-12T16:06:00-08:00

My father has a saying that "success is like a meat grinder, lots of different meat goes in, but it all comes out looking and tasting the same". Its a pretty jaded view, but time they say is the greatest teacher and hes almost as old as dirt now so who knows maybe he's got something. There is no doubt Ubuntu is the most successful Linux desktop on the market today, and while technically they

Flattr, not just another hand in your pocket

2010-02-11T13:37:00-08:00

A founder of the now infamous "The Pirate Bay" has started a new project which is aimed at changing the way content providers are paid called flattr. While another hand in my pocket doesn't exactly thrill me, once I got all the details on this project it turns out this is something I would definitely use. In a nutshell you put money into an account and that money gets distributed evenly on a

Why nobody talks about Lua

2010-02-11T13:20:00-08:00

Like many web savvy folk, I've known about Lua for a long time, I'm sure you've heard of it as well. But is it just me, or does it seem like Lua never generates any buzz in the media? In the major tech news aggregators (at least the ones that I typically check) its always Javascript this, or Ruby that, or Python everything. Yet when you look at what Lua's actually done and been used for in the

The trouble with renaming a blog.

2010-01-25T12:06:00-08:00

When I first began writing this blog the "Google Go language" had just been released and after just a few days I had become pretty enamored with it. I thought it would be pretty cool to dig through this new language and blog about that process and thus was this blog born. Over the past couple months though I've found myself talking about a wide range of topics and not often specifically about

Hello Fedora, Goodbye Ubuntu

2010-01-16T16:57:00-08:00

This week I switched my desktop from Ubuntu to Fedora, user wise I have had no issues with Ubuntu as a desktop it does pretty much everything I need it to do, and the same goes for Fedora. So you're probably wondering why anyone would jump ship when things seem to be going well and there are no major user issues. The change started from a conversation with a friend, I told him I used Ubuntu as

Emacs TAGS for Go

2010-01-09T22:54:00-08:00

Tool creation is, to me, one of the most enjoyable things about knowing how to program, but unfortunately it can also lead to a huge waste of time if you let it get out of control. The reason is because while it is true that a good environment can make writing code faster and easier, the speed gain is offset by the amount of time which it takes for you to build and maintain the environment.

Unusual control structures cause us all to slow down a little.

2010-01-04T03:12:00-08:00

Maybe I'm tired, but I had one of those moments today where something seemed to make a lot of sense and I just had to tell someone about it. So here you go. As you may know I'm in the process of cutting my teeth on the Go language, but Go isn't the only language I'm looking at in my spare time although in honesty it is the one that's been getting the lions share of my available hours. Another

Shorthand initialization of structs in Go

2009-12-31T21:44:00-08:00

They say there is always more than one way to do something, and certainly this is true of Go just as it is of every other programming language. With regards to initializing structs in Go you may run across an example of initializing something like this where new() is called on the struct type and then each field of the struct has its values filled in one at a time and then finally the struct

Go Roadmap, App Engine support for Go!

2009-12-17T21:48:00-08:00

The Go Roadmap was uploaded yesterday, looks awesome! They have included support for NaCL and App Engine. Edit: I originally copied the Roadmap to my post, but since things are moving so fast a static copy of the Roadmap is unlikely to stay accurate for long so I've removed it.

Monty says: Help saving MySQL

2009-12-13T12:26:00-08:00

Monty says: Help saving MySQL Sorry for breaking the Go Programming trend, but I think this is important news worth spreading around. I've used MySQL and it would be a really sad thing if Oracle were to trash such a great OS project. Maybe Google should jump on this as well.

Been very busy, and I'm not alone.

2009-12-08T23:06:00-08:00

I will be continuing this project sometime in the new year, but for now if you're interested in checking out some more of the Project Euler exercises in the Go language then take a look at this git repository by Josh Goebel. In other news I just found out that my cellular provider Bell Mobility now has an Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy, I will likely be upgrading to that when it is time to

Project Euler: #5 in Go

2009-11-28T23:18:00-08:00

Here is my brute force attempt. I'm sure there is a brilliant math way to solve this problem, but this solution solves the problem in 0.067 seconds for me, so I think that it is good enough. /*What is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by all of the numbers from 1 to 20?*/ package main import "fmt"; func main(){ var x int64 = 20; divisible := false; for ; !divisible; x+

Project Euler: exercise 4 in Go

2009-11-28T20:36:00-08:00

Alright, this problem was actually quite easy to solve despite that I noticed there was a sharp dip in the number of people who have solved it compared to the last 3 exercises. The only tricky part was figuring how to compare the digits of one number to another. s_mosher from #go-nuts pointed me in the right direction with the divide by 1000 then modulo 10 trick. This solution, just like #3