Wikilogs
From Ben's Writing
Making a Power Mac G5 use one CPU
This one is really quite simple: First, boot into Open Firmware by holding down Cmd-Opt-O-F
0 > setenv boot-args cpus=1 0 > mac-boot
Letting the online seller to give you a discount
This post my have been better titled: "Getting [an] online seller to give you a discount." But that would imply there are stores that will out right bargain with you, I don't know first hand if there are many. However, you can test If the company is willing to bargain by cancelling an order proceeding some distance between the time you start enrolling in their online program, but then later thought better of it, and canceled. This seems to be a common way for advertisers to get your business, if you fail to enter user data for registration, they send you a discount code, as an incentive to come and fill in the form. They are effectively paying you for the time it takes you to give them your personal information, which is where they can extract a lot of revenue.
Blind (or double) SSH hops
In a previous post, I wrote about using a simple load balancer to find a suitable remote machine to connect to via ssh. The intention was to simplify getting access to a workstation in my office. Unfortunately, none of my office machines are public facing, so they require a second hop once I've logged in to the public machines. This can get a little tiresome to type if you end up working remotely a lot, like I do.
First phone based manipulation
I am surprisingly easy to manipulate apparently. Not for malicious intent, which is fortunate, but the outcome of it still felt abusive in some way.
I've realized that I have been so sucked in to Reddit that I've actually had to go out of my way to fill the front page I get displayed with mostly pictures and a dozen article links. Further, I only allow myself to read whatever is on the front page after which my time is up. I almost went on to Reddit just to post this. It's that bad.
What got me interested in Computer Science
Some one recently asked me what first got me interested in Computer Science. I had a bit of a hard time coming up with a good answer.
A Speculative Memoir
I started writing this is 2007, and I'm surprisingly not to upset at how it started. It's only a small portion of the text, but it seemed worth having in a place that is easily accessible. Keep in mind it needs some serious editing.
The story is about me, many years from now. By then my family and wife have left me, and I’ve gained over 800lbs and grown rather fond of KFC. Well, fond does not quite describe my new found affection for the food. If you’ve ever seen the Seinfeld episode where Kramer gets hooked on the bird, then you only have an inkling of what I’m referring too.
My new addition get so bad that I stop even bothering to bathed or even wash my, what have then become paws, between meal, so my entire house hold slowly becomes coated with a thin to medium coating of grease and honey mustard meddle.
Once, In Belize
I remember a time in Belize, we had just finned a hike. We were starving, hot and exhausted. On our way back down the trail we saw a sign to a waterfall. We weren't convinced it was a great idea, but we figured we'd likely never be back, so it would be best to see it while we could. It probably took us 20 minutes longer than the 10 minute trail hike to get there, but what we found made up for it all. I am not sure if you have jumped in glacier water, but that is how cold the water felt. I think I recall wondering if my body was going in to shock. Fortunately that passed, and the hunger and exhaustion disappeared as we found different ways to jump in and through the water fall. The water was poring over so swiftly, and from such a hight, it felt like you were being hit with very large and very cold rubber mallets. After we go out, all the pains from before returned, but I think it was the best part of the trip. (And this is compared to snorkelling for hours on the reefs.)
Getting an Acer Aspire One (722-BZ610) to run Linux
I just got my hands on a new (to me) Acer Aspire One (722-BZ610). It's a nice little 10-11 inch netbook with a rather interesting CPU. Actually, it's an APU: it is a CPU and GPU combination. Anyway, before I could working on running experiments on it, I needed to get it to run Linux. Surprisingly, given the state of most modern Linux distributions, there were a number of frustrating issues that came up during the configuration of the new machine.
Force Mail to Display All Messages as Plain Text
For one reason or another, I've grown used to viewing my email in plain text, and having to continually subject myself to other people's idea of a good font is irksome, to say the least. I've had my system configured to hide all the jazz from me for sometime, but I have no refenrece for how I did it originally. It seems the simplest method to put this in effect is:
$ defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE
Restore alternate-click in OS X Lion
The new track pad options in OS X Lion (10.7) do not allow for Snow Leopard's classic two-finger plus button click combo as a right-click. Running the following from the shell will enable it:
$ defaults -currentHost write -g com.apple.trackpad.enableSecondaryClick -bool YES
The best quality LaTeX is made with Rubber
Addressing threats to Canadian an US security, or: How I learnt to feel concerned about the misuse of personal information on Canadian citizen
"The Declaration on a Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness is based on principles that recognize and respect our separate constitutional and legal frameworks that protect privacy, civil liberties, and human rights. It also recognizes the sovereign right of each country to act independently in its own interest and in accordance with its laws.
...
Collaborating to address threats before they reach our shores, we expect to develop a common understanding of the threat environment through improved intelligence and information sharing, as well as joint threat assessments to support informed risk management decisions."
Go here to voice your opinion.
Writing online
As much as I like writing, blogs and wikis, I wish the whole mess was a lot more unified. As much as I fight the Facebook urge, I love sharing things with people, and having to do it manually each time I write something is tiresome. Maybe we'll have another rainy Sunday and I can sit down and connect this thingamabob to Facebook, so I don't have to push the updates manually. Should I really be publicly advertising that I have so little a life that I'd welcome a rainy day after so many months of snow. Yes, I guess I should be; maybe it's a cry for help.
Help! I have no social life!
Naw, just kidding, I'm ok.
Dynamic link libraries and grids
It seems natural to have an error at the OS level, when a dynamic link library is missing. If the library is not on the machine, or not in the search paths, then of course the executable cannot be run. But this style of feedback does not scale well.
Last time on...
I was thinking the other day---odd, I know---that it might be nice if the video game industry paid closer attention to the needs of their aging players. As much as I hate to say it, my memory---if it ever was worth anything---is starting to fade. For years TV shows have been kind enough to remind me of the critical details in the stories plot so far, but video games still have me resorting to writing notes, so as not to loose any precious clues. I'm not saying they need to add a full highlight reel, but it would be nice if they gently reminded me of some of the things I previously did in the game that might be relevant to my current position.
Finding Balance in remote terminal sessions
While working remotely on a *nix system, it is, as times, convenient to have a series of hosts aliased to look like the same entry point. Not only does this simplify script writing, it also saves valuable irritation time that could be best be spent on things that matter, rather than on hosts that are not responding.
A more powerful spelling tool
Second round on the suggestion tool. This time, I used a sqlite database for the back-end, and seeded it with 17,000 common misspellings. The tool first checks the database, then tries Google. If a correction is found in the database, it simply prints it. If a suggestion is made by Google, then the program prints it and stashes it in the database.
Using the tool is pretty easy:
group-spell-suggest <word>
As before, the code is freely available here.
Using Google to help me spell
I have been meaning to write this tool for ages, but I finally found the time. It is a very simple idea: use Google to do my spell-checking. I already do it by hand, whenever the native checker fails, so I figured I would try to automate the whole thing. It turned out to be very simple. The new tool's interface is equally simple:
google-suggest <word>
Where word is some poor attempt at using the English language. The code is available here.
Simplest method of enabling the root user on for OS X
I recently found nice and simple new way to enable the root user on Mac OS X:
$ dsenableroot -u <your-username> -p <your-password> -r <root-password> dsenableroot:: ***Successfully enabled root user.
That should be all you need. No GUI; not wait.
