I use an external HD to to carry large files between home and office but the Mac (or at least Leopard) doesn't support NTFS as a writable filesystem so the arrangement is only useful when all the new data is at the office and nothing needs to be changed at home. Obviously this is not ideal.
MacFUSE allows the addition of new fileystems to the Mac including NTFS-3g which originated on Linux (I believe). Installation is quick and simple (install MacFUSE, install NTFS-3g) and after a reboot, NTFS partitions are writable without any configuration required.
A quick search turns up a number of other filesystems that could also be used through MacFUSE incuding two that will encrypt a partition and one that will allow the se of a Gmail account as storage.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Illegal Use of Linux in the Classroom
A teacher in Austin, TX did not like what she saw when she found a student in her class experimenting with a liveCD from HeliOS.. so she confiscated the CD, reprimanded the student and then wrote a letter to his after explaining he was potentially liable to a civil suit and that the kids should be using Microsoft products which they (MS) would be happy to supply for free..
Wow.
Breathlessly awaiting the followup after the teacher and the parent meet in the superintendent's office.
Wow.
Breathlessly awaiting the followup after the teacher and the parent meet in the superintendent's office.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
More Uses For An OLPC
Video player for toddler.
Meghan likes watching DVDs in the minivan and she likes banging on the keys of the OLPC so I combined the two. I used Handbrake to rip one of her favorite DVDs then loaded mplayer onto the OLPC and played back the movie from a a thumb-drive.
VLC and mplayer had similar problems with freezing before announcing the file was longer available. I tried turning off power management with no improvement. It wasn't until I disabled the radio that playback was successful .. then I found the defect mentioned earlier.
Meghan likes watching DVDs in the minivan and she likes banging on the keys of the OLPC so I combined the two. I used Handbrake to rip one of her favorite DVDs then loaded mplayer onto the OLPC and played back the movie from a a thumb-drive.
VLC and mplayer had similar problems with freezing before announcing the file was longer available. I tried turning off power management with no improvement. It wasn't until I disabled the radio that playback was successful .. then I found the defect mentioned earlier.
Perl is Dead! Long Live Perl!
This somewhat risible survey reveals that Perl has almost fallen out of the top 10 programming langauges in use. Given the many different ways that statistics can be mashed together and the loose method of collecting the numbers, I think it is unlikely that they can claim 3 decimal places of accuracy for any of this.
On the other hand, using activity as a barometer of interest in a langugae and perhaps what to brush up on to stay/get employed, take a look at stats on Ohloh. You can pick a basket of languages and compare check-ins and TLOC and decide that actionscript is not about to overtake C++ any time soon.
This page lets you look at a ramge of stats for a language off their long list while this will let you compare a wide range of languages with a pretty chart: take a look at this comparison showing that the volume of Python checkins is growing faster than Perl and Ruby together. Or maybe it is showing the rate of Python projects being added to Ohloh? Who can say?
On the other hand, using activity as a barometer of interest in a langugae and perhaps what to brush up on to stay/get employed, take a look at stats on Ohloh. You can pick a basket of languages and compare check-ins and TLOC and decide that actionscript is not about to overtake C++ any time soon.
This page lets you look at a ramge of stats for a language off their long list while this will let you compare a wide range of languages with a pretty chart: take a look at this comparison showing that the volume of Python checkins is growing faster than Perl and Ruby together. Or maybe it is showing the rate of Python projects being added to Ohloh? Who can say?
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
My First Defect (for the OLPC)
I noticed that turning the radio off and then back on from the OLPC control panel resulted in being endlessly prompted for my WEP password.. so I investigated a little more and then raised this defect .. now I will have to see if there is something similar in Fedora.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Other Uses for an OLPC
Baby webcam monitor..
Downloaded motion and set it up, put the lpatop on some furniture and left my daughter sleeping while I watched her in a browser window from another room. It worked ok.
Downloaded motion and set it up, put the lpatop on some furniture and left my daughter sleeping while I watched her in a browser window from another room. It worked ok.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
New OLPC Spin
Funny thing coincidences.. I was talking to a co-worker about the OLPC and suggesting he avoid vmware images or ISOs and that instead he should use a Fedora system and add Sugar from RPM because the ISOs that I had seen and become out-of-date or unavailable.. and then we found Sebastian Dziallas reports there is a new spin of Sugar available from Fedora. This is a customized version of Fedora that can be run as a live cd or even from a USB stick.
Downloading now..
Downloading now..
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Ruby Rocks!
About two weeks ago, I was at Nerdbooks (check them out at http://www.nerdbooks.com) and I bought a couple of great books; The Art of Debugging and Programming Ruby.
The Art of Debugging by Matloff and Salzman from Nostarch Press. I picked this up off the shelf and found a couple of things I didn't know about using gdb inside a minute so I went ahead and got it. The plan is to have it around for those late-night sessions when using gdb on some weird version of Unix (like, say, AIX) is keeping me at the office. Its also proven a good book to share with the team..
The other book is Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas from Pragmatic Bookshelf and it is gathering dust. I only got this because I may have to work with some Ruby programmers at the office and I want to find out more about the language. It seemed like a good idea at the time.. After all, Ruby rocks! Right?
The Art of Debugging by Matloff and Salzman from Nostarch Press. I picked this up off the shelf and found a couple of things I didn't know about using gdb inside a minute so I went ahead and got it. The plan is to have it around for those late-night sessions when using gdb on some weird version of Unix (like, say, AIX) is keeping me at the office. Its also proven a good book to share with the team..
The other book is Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas from Pragmatic Bookshelf and it is gathering dust. I only got this because I may have to work with some Ruby programmers at the office and I want to find out more about the language. It seemed like a good idea at the time.. After all, Ruby rocks! Right?
Friday, October 17, 2008
Nerd Score
I just tried the Nerd Quiz and thought I was doing so-so, kind of average (missed some of the questions) so I was surprised to get this:
Monday, August 11, 2008
Faster! Faster! And Smaller!
I have been hacking some Python code in a (vain) attempt to get a working algorithm for the Netflix prize and I have something that looks promising but is slow so I have been investigating optimizing it.
I got a dramatic speed-up after I noticed that I was searching a list using index when the list was ordered and so amenable to a binary search.
Using the bisect module for this looks like:
import bisect
pos = bisect.bisect_left(sortedList, val)
Binary searches run in logarithmic which is so much better than the index method of a list which is linear, starting at the left and looking until it either falls off the other end or find a match.
Timings using timeit:
First, using index..
>>> timeit.Timer('a.index(10)', setup='a=range(0,100)').timeit()
0.50195479393005371
>>> timeit.Timer('a.index(99)', setup='a=range(0,100)').timeit()
2.3854200839996338
Now, using bisect:
>>> timeit.Timer('bisect.bisect(a,10)', setup='import bisect; a=range(0,100)').timeit()
0.63758587837219238
#Uh-oh, slower than than index by a little bit
>>> timeit.Timer('bisect.bisect(a,90)', setup='import bisect; a=range(0,100)').timeit()
0.54854512214660645
# Faster
Smaller!
The array module allows the efficient storage of basic values. I have a list of scores for each Netflix subscriber that is probably internally represented as an int or even a long int (at least 4 ytes, maybe 8) but the range of values is 1-5. When I change from list to array('B'), the memory footprint falls from 2.2Gb to 900M.. now I can run this thing on a smaller machine!
I got a dramatic speed-up after I noticed that I was searching a list using index when the list was ordered and so amenable to a binary search.
Using the bisect module for this looks like:
import bisect
pos = bisect.bisect_left(sortedList, val)
Binary searches run in logarithmic which is so much better than the index method of a list which is linear, starting at the left and looking until it either falls off the other end or find a match.
Timings using timeit:
First, using index..
>>> timeit.Timer('a.index(10)', setup='a=range(0,100)').timeit()
0.50195479393005371
>>> timeit.Timer('a.index(99)', setup='a=range(0,100)').timeit()
2.3854200839996338
Now, using bisect:
>>> timeit.Timer('bisect.bisect(a,10)', setup='import bisect; a=range(0,100)').timeit()
0.63758587837219238
#Uh-oh, slower than than index by a little bit
>>> timeit.Timer('bisect.bisect(a,90)', setup='import bisect; a=range(0,100)').timeit()
0.54854512214660645
# Faster
Smaller!
The array module allows the efficient storage of basic values. I have a list of scores for each Netflix subscriber that is probably internally represented as an int or even a long int (at least 4 ytes, maybe 8) but the range of values is 1-5. When I change from list to array('B'), the memory footprint falls from 2.2Gb to 900M.. now I can run this thing on a smaller machine!
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