A couple of months ago, Mark and I were playing some wormux on the PC. I had all my characters and teams set up, and all my macros just the way I liked them. The next day my computer crashed and lost everything. To prevent this from happening again, we sat down and wrote this python program, “Save Game Saver”. Basically you set up a profile for a game (location of save game), then it allows you to upload those saves to gmail. Each upload is versioned in gmail, so you can store and retrieve multiple saves you uploaded on any day for any game. Considering Steam and Xbox are both moving towards this internally, this would be kind of a stepping stone till game developers get off their asses and figure it out. Mark and I both found it really useful though, so go ahead and download it or alter the source. As usual, it’s GPLv2.0.
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As it turns out, with a little bit of effort you can put together a cheap (50$), handheld, wireless, graphical wikipedia browser ala the HitchHiker’s Guide.
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It turns out that with a bit of source code modification, you can get dosbox running quite well on your zipit z2!! This is HUGE for me, as I’m currently reliving my youth with a Pools of Radiance campaign on...
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So I’ve got a new pet project, the zipit z2. If you don’t know this 50$ handheld is actually a moderately powerful computer. 32 megs of ram, a 2g sd card, and a 300mhz arm processor means I can do quite a bit of interesting stuff (we’ve certainly worked with less!). After doing the prerequisite install of Angstrom linux, I decided to see what it would take to run tor and privoxy on it.
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Ok, So having lost 30lbs since I wrote the python calorie counter, I’m a big proponent of counting calories. It WORKS. Not only that it’s easy, and it appeals to the chewy mathematics center of my brain. All is well...
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Ok so here’s a hilarious photo from Halloween 2008. If you like it as much as I did, feel free to buy a mug at my cafepress store. I make no profit from anything sold, just the thought of that photo being out there is hilarity itself. King Me!
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So I’ve started a new website. Live For Free Originally I had planned for these articles to go into a book, but after 20 or so articles it became clear that the scope of a book is not great enough to encompass all that I have learned, or would like to learn.
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I no longer fear waking. My entire life, I have dealt with sleep paralysis. If you don’t know, sleep paralysis is a condition where you wake, terrified, unable to move. Wikipedia has a good article on it, as usual. I just learned to live with it up until a few years ago. I was living with my future wife, who would see me hyperventilating, and shake me awake. At this point, I was just happy I didn’t have to lay there in fear. Time passed, and I began to feel bad for those who didn’t have wives to wake them up. I also worried it would happen on a business trip or vacation. The answer, as usual, was staring me right in the face.
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For many a scientist like myself, the pear-shaped waistline which has become synonymous with the unix guru has become all too familiar. While there are a number of mitigating factors, I’m going to chalk it up to the sedentary lifestyle of the typical programmer. A study posted on Digg last week showed that on average, dieters who kept a food journal lose twice as much weight as those who don’t. That’s a pretty powerful tool. Carrying around a notepad doesn’t make a lot of sense for me, as I’m almost never without my laptop, so I’ve been keeping a csv spreadsheet like below: <br></br> 07:53 ,oatmeal , 160<br></br> 07:55 ,water , 000<br></br> 10:40 ,kudos , 100<br></br> 10:40 ,water , 000<br></br> Which is fine. It accomplishes what needs to be accomplished, with regards to the diary at least. However, I would like some statistics with my diet. How many calories do I have left in the day, how many glasses of water, how many calories did I eat at lunch, etc. These little statistics and calculations really drive home the message. I always keep today’s .food file on my desktop, and I have my .bashrc set up to show me my dietary information whenever I login or open a shell like so:
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Ok, so here’s the deal. I write a lot of C in my line of work, so when I get the chance to write some clever shell script, I relish it. I do a lot of long supercomputer simulations, which tend to be hard to debug (especially when a problem arrises 3 days into a 4 day run). This is where logfiles come in handy, I know I’m not alone in this. Unfortunately, for really long runs these logfiles can add up to hundreds of gigs of space, which is a hard to come by commodity on supercomputing clusters. I found numerous solutions online, all of them tending to be long and overly complex shell scripts… No thanks!, when I want something done on shell it needs to follow the shell paradigm, small and powerful.
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