Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Feb 8, 2012, 8:49 pm
I have my bow. And now I have MY AXE. It was made by the hand of Anders Stromstedt in Sweden, who looks totally awesome: The axe feels fantastic, looks fantastic, and has a very sharp edge. I can’t wait to go chop some stuff with it.
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jan 21, 2012, 3:10 pm
Firefox seems to be the only browser strictly enforcing the X-Content-Security-Policy header at the moment. This is both good and bad: good because it doesn’t adversely effect me here in my Chrome bubble, and bad because it seems to effect some of my readers. I installed Firefox 9 to debug the i...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jan 20, 2012, 2:46 am
So, I finished the first version of my FusionRunner script mentioned in the previous post. Currently, it takes all the runs from Google Fusion Tables and imports them into Smashrun after massaging the data. You can see a list of my “runs” (they’re really walks so far) Click a run to see mo...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jan 19, 2012, 2:10 am
The other day, I kinda sorta got excited about running, mainly prompted by a friend telling me about a half-marathon in May. I’ve been needing to find an exercise outlet for a while, and this may be it. Throughout this experiment, I’d like to track my progress with some level of detail, and ma...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Oct 29, 2011, 5:19 pm
I’m a pretty big fan of NY Strip Steaks. I usually just buy them from Costco (USDA Prime for about $15/lb). But, recently I’ve been curious about trying some other sources. I already put in an order to Baldwin’s, and I also plan on trying Lobel’s. I’ll also probably get a grill sampler...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Oct 16, 2011, 1:30 pm
Recently, I’ve been having some trouble with passwords. Either the login name is a string I never use, and therefore never commit to memory (like my real phone number that I mask with Google Voice), or the password policy forces me to use a password that I’ll never remember (like sites that kee...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Sep 10, 2011, 2:04 am
tomato signs With Tomato cheap talk and send SMS messages to all networks in Croatia at the lowest prices simply, without complications and without signing of the contract. What you see, it will be. practically New Tomato and the number of vouchers can be purchased at retail outlets across the co...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 28, 2011, 4:27 pm
Last night, I participated in a RACES amateur radio net, manning 2 different fire stations over the course of 12 hours (2000 – 0830).  This was my first time doing something like this, so I brought what I thought I would need: 2m/440 radio (IC-92AD) 12v AGM battery (just in case) Cellphone with...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 25, 2011, 5:29 pm
I learned a cool LVM trick today – how to resize a logical volume to use a certain percentage of a volume group.  Since I just have one logical volume in the group, I did the following:# lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/diclonius/vector Extending logical volume vector to 7.28 TiB Logical volume vec...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 21, 2011, 10:27 pm
So, ZFS is cool.  OpenSolaris derivatives are cool.  RAID-Z is cool.  But it lacks one simple feature that other software RAID solutions handle – the ability to grow a volume by increasing the stripe size.  For instance, let’s just postulate that you have 3 2TB hard disks in a RAID-5, and y...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 21, 2011, 12:18 am
I now am a proud owner of an OpenIndiana server, and I’ve been moving files to it over gigabit ethernet for the past few hours. During this time, I’ve made some important realizations, and I figured I’d note them here for everyone’s benefit.  My transfers started off at about 10MB/s sustain...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 18, 2011, 11:26 am
So, let’s say that you want to change your shell to zsh, but fall back to bash if it isn’t available on whatever system you’re using. This is useful if you use something like NIS or LDAP with home directory NFS, since you’ll be sshing around and bringing your .bashrc with you everywhere. T...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 16, 2011, 11:42 pm
Oh yeah, zsh guys.  It’s awesome, and you should know that, but what makes one switch from good ol’ bash?  Generally, it’s prompt magic, but really there’s some other nice features that make it worth considering.  But first, prompt magic.  I had some trouble getting the prompt to respect...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 9, 2011, 3:04 am
So, after a bunch of research about building a DIY NAS, I decided to buy a whole bunch of hardware to do so. But, the real question was which software to use. FreeNAS seems to be the most popular solution, and I heard it was better than something called OpenFiler. Then I stumbled across NexentaStor,...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jul 22, 2011, 4:59 pm
OK, most UNIX programmers are familiar with the echo command. It just takes input and writes it back out again – pretty simple, right? WRONG. Solaris has at least one shell, it seems, that has a version of echo with epic bugs. For instance, here’s what it does when you give it the -n flag, w...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jul 8, 2011, 2:50 am
You probably already know what this post is about. Why are people so eager to funnel everything they do online through Facebook’s webservers? Can’t we just comment anonymously anymore?
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jun 30, 2011, 1:24 am
Here’s an interesting results page I got today. I think they’re rolling out some new theming. UPDATE: Thanks to Chris – it was apparently due to signing up to be notified when Google Plus launches, since apparently I’m still not activated there yet…
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jun 19, 2011, 11:53 am
OK, this is getting old. Today I received an email from Amazon about a “contest” to win a digital camera. I read it, and it sounded interesting, so I clicked the link in the email and arrived at .. Facebook. The contest rules are simple – “Like” the contest on Facebook for a chance to...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jun 4, 2011, 5:31 pm
We’ve went camping at Dolly Sods on Friday. Dolly Sods is in West Virginia. It was fun. We’re back now, safely.
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - May 22, 2011, 5:12 pm
I have been having some issues with newer versions of mkvmerge creating files that make mplayer cry. I finally messed around with the options enough to discover what (I think) was the problem. Header compression reduces filesizes of attachments significantly, but there are some compatibility probl...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Apr 3, 2011, 2:01 pm
I started using LXDE last night, and I’m really liking it. It seems to take a whole ton less memory than Gnome did, and as a result my Intel Atom box runs a lot smoother because it doesn’t have to continuously swap. Anyway, I’ve been customizing some things, and I eventually found myself in ...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Mar 17, 2011, 11:08 am
So, I got a ticket for turning right from a lane with a green light when there was a red arrow in the adjacent lane. The penalty was $140 and 2 points on my license. Since I only work part-time now, I decided to see what traffic court is like. I had my hearing today, and it was very different fro...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Mar 8, 2011, 3:13 am
I finished my conference namebadge tonight. I’ll post a video pretty soon. Here’s some pictures:
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Feb 27, 2011, 5:55 pm
I’m learning a lot programming in AVR C.  There’s are a few subtleties to watch out for, and some of them have had me banging my head against the wall for days.  This post is an attempt to prevent anyone else playing with AVR outside of AVR Studio (I’m using Linux and the command line) from ...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Feb 26, 2011, 2:30 pm
I created an HD44780 LCD library for the AVR architecture today. There were a ton already, and mine is based off of one by Peter Fleury. I added a couple cool little features, and decided it needed to be on github to allow people to improve it and access it easier. LCDiesel on Github Here’s a ...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Feb 22, 2011, 5:33 pm
So, I got this Rigol Oscilloscope – I wrote a little instructable about it. One cool feature is the ability to save waveforms to a USB stick. There are many options for the file format, but the default is a WFM file. Now, a true minimalist could just use the CSV option, but the WFM is a binary ...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Feb 21, 2011, 10:27 pm
I had quite a bit of trouble getting PWM to work on the ATTiny85 for some reason, but after many trials, I finally got it working and tweaked it so it acts a lot like the sleep light that you see on so many Apple notebooks. This chip costs about $1.50, and even less if you get it in SOIC rather than...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Feb 12, 2011, 2:13 am
Since 1990, I’ve had IBM-compatible desktop computers in my life. Before that, I had Tandy computers beginning at age 2. At first, they were the only computers I had, so I did everything with them – gaming, BBS surfing and eventually the internet, word processing, etc. In college, I got reall...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Feb 4, 2011, 2:44 am
Well, it’s a kit, so it’s kind of cheating. The other project was the Theramin, which I worked on for days. Anyway, this is a cute little kit you can buy for about $22 that, once assembled, can program pretty much any Atmel microcontroller IC. It’s pretty cool – for real. Anyway, it only...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Feb 3, 2011, 2:35 pm
Well, I got an invisible fence kit for my dog, and found out the battery in the collar was dead. It has big letters on it that say DISPOSABLE, which was interesting – why is there no recharger for the batteries on this thing? That would seem to be logical. After checking online, I found out tha...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Feb 3, 2011, 1:20 pm
I finally finished my second real electronic project: The Pocket Theramin. I made a few changes/improvements to the design found here, and I really like my result. The basic circuit is exactly the same, but I added an LED and a toggle switch so I can keep it together as one unit all the time. Als...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jan 28, 2011, 11:03 am
Well, I finally drilled my PCB for my MintyBoost XL last night, and it was a great success. If you need PCB drill bits, order them from stevie66 on ebay. I got various sizes from 50 to 85, but I found the 65 to be the most useful. I used it to drill all but the largest holes on the board. Once t...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jan 9, 2011, 8:41 am
Well, yesterday, I made a nice long response to a blogger I follow who was confused and upset over this idea to have the government as a TLS client certificate authority, much like Thawte or CACert, but with its own system of identity verification. He apparently refused to post the comment, and ins...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jan 7, 2011, 11:34 pm
I’ve always wanted to make my own PCB, so today is a special day for me. This is for the MintyBoost XL, which is totally awesome. Now I just have to etch it, drill it, and solder all these little components onto it… I used the instructions found here to create this little gem. They are very ...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Dec 15, 2010, 9:22 am
I’ve used a few different types of HDMI cables in the past – really expensive Monster cables, very nicely made cables from AV-Express, which I recommend if you want to order a mount from them and save on shipping, and cheap ebay crappy cables that work great, but don’t have the best build qual...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Sep 26, 2010, 2:24 am
So, I was trying to use Ruby to get the date 6 months ago.  This is usually accomplished using the core extensions in ActiveSupport, which is OK, but it was too much work.  Then, I found an awesome article talking about Chronic, a minimal date/time parsing library for Ruby: $ irb -rrubygems -r...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Sep 25, 2010, 1:13 pm
I have been keeping track of bad music I have for a long time.  Today, I found out the number of bad tracks has hit 10,675.  That’s a lot of wasted space!  So, I tried to use an Amarok script to move the files to a directory I lovingly titled BADBADBAD, but it stopped after just a few tracks. �...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Sep 21, 2010, 4:54 pm
After spending quite a while looking at different online brokers, I think TradeMonster might be the one I’ll choose. Its commissions ($7.50/trade) are higher than TradeKing and Zecco (and barely higher than Scottrade), but I pay a lot less in commission every year than I do in margin interest. T...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Sep 21, 2010, 4:00 pm
So, I went to check out Siebert today. Turns out they hate Google Chrome. I guess they’re not getting my business.
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Sep 21, 2010, 12:41 pm
So, Zecco works OK, but there could be some major improvements to it. 1. Stock quotes in different tabs interfere with eachother. You’ll be reading about ADBE in one tab, and click to change the stock chart, and all of a sudden you’ll be looking at the chart for MSFT but it will still say ADBE...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Sep 17, 2010, 9:23 am
After learning about Zecco’s margin rates, I set out to find a brokerage with a very low margin rate, as this represents more of my cost than commissions.  Most traders will be different.  TradeKing seems to have a very low rate, and their commissions are very competitive with Zecco.  Yet the f...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Sep 17, 2010, 9:13 am
Zecco is my new favorite discount brokerage.  They offer $4.50 trades for stocks and options, as well as $0 trades if you execute more than 25 trades a month or have more than $25,000 in your account.  This is huge, as it basically eliminates a big part of the cost of personal investing.  I highl...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Sep 2, 2010, 10:13 am
I never really thought about it, but a good strategy would be to sell out of the money puts at your loss point depending on if you’re bullish on a stock. I always tell myself I should set stop loss orders at -5% on all my stock purchases, but I never do, and it ends up hurting my portfolio. This...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 30, 2010, 10:23 am
The story I got burned by options a couple years ago, and have stayed away ever since.  But in the last few days, I’ve been learning how to manage risk using options, especially by using spreads.  I decided to try out some spreads today in my optionshouse practice account. WARNING: If you are n...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 27, 2010, 10:22 pm
Here’s some little stock analyses I did today using QTStalker. Google Fibo 50% and upward trendline should help this go up a bit, assuming Android continues to get market share. Atwood Oceanic These guys are in a lateral channel between the 61.8 and the 38.2 Fibo lines.  Buying around $25 loo...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 26, 2010, 11:24 pm
Say you want to set an option tag to selected only under certain conditions without the code getting really ugly. Do this!: I was messing around with the ternary operator in other ways inside the element, but none of them actually interpreted properly. I hope this helps someone else struggling wi...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Aug 1, 2010, 9:32 pm
I think almost everyone has experienced the following phenomenon at some time in their lives: you and a close circle of friends are involved in something wonderful, and it’s ruined when the community at large adopts it. I can think of several examples: the BBS community and the Internet, the ...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jul 23, 2010, 2:19 pm
While trying out Google Go, I found out whitespace seriously matters, certain constructs you’re used to are not present, there is more than one way to declare variables, etc. This is a short collection of those observations. Blocks Blocks cannot have a newline between the declaration and the...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - Jun 7, 2010, 11:21 pm
So, I read this story today, which says the following: Even if someone is not a Facebook user or is not logged in, Facebook’s social plugins collect the address of the Web page being visited and the Internet address of the visitor as soon as the page is loaded–clicking on the Like butto...
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Erik G. posted an article on Ruby stole my o`o - May 17, 2010, 9:48 am
Ocropus is a new book scanning software package and C++ library.  I’ve compiled it on Ubuntu Linux 10.04.  It’s rather easy to set up: hg clone https://ocropus.googlecode.com/hg/ ocropus cd ocropus hg clone https://iulib.googlecode.com/hg/ iulib cd iulib/ sudo apt-get install libsdl1....
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