Sunday, January 27, 2008

cython and sympy

looks like cython is the new coolness for compiling python-ishness to c. they forked from pyrex last year to meet the needs of the sage project, and they seem to have a more active development. plus, they intend to get picked up into the main python distro. and speaking of sage, i remember giving it a spin a while ago. i was impressed at the scope, but i was disappointed at how so many kitchen sinks could bog me down. i think it took more than a day to compile. there's one reason to give sympy a chance. looks like they have some serious support and heavyweight devs (including the author of the original pyginac and one of the authors of the more recent swiginac), so i'm hopeful about where that goes. and they're integrating with sage, too, so it shouldn't be hard to migrate to sage if necessary. sage, meanwhile, looks to be a contender with maple and mathematica. o joyful day! also, a couple of projects use sage-style packages but don't make you install all of them at once: http://code.google.com/p/spdproject/ http://femhub.org/ ...and i found out that matlab now uses mupad instead of maple for its symbolic stuff. interesting.

Friday, January 25, 2008

kino for zaurus

found a neat little frontend for zauri. same page also has a package for switching a zaurus to usb storage. i'll have to try it some time. might also be able to get a console-based frontend like mplay working. pymplayer is another one i might check out.

fixed scratchy mplayer

mplayer was sounding really scratchy when playing mp3s. i figured out that it was using -ao openal by default, so i recompiled it to use alsa instead (USE='alsa' on gentoo). now it sounds great.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

embed files in pdf

looks like there are a couple of ways to embed files in a pdf document. attachfile2 (see docs for attachfile for usage) attaches a file with a tag in the pdf. embedfile puts the file in with no association to anything else in the file. it also makes a table at the end of the pdf, which i will have to see if i can turn off.

embed movies in pdf

just noticed the movie15 tex package. wow, this could make a killer combo with my beamer setup. i'll definitely need to try this. are there any other tex packages for embedding multimedia? the 'related packages' lists 'none known'.

sqa and cyclomatic complexity

read a very interesting post about measuring code complexity and risk using mccabe cyclomatic complexity. i should have this in my dev process, right alongside my doctests and coverage analysis (probably integrated into test coverage somehow). be sure to check out the link near the bottom to the python wrapper.

auto python checking with emacs

there's a description of how to use pyflakes with emacs flymode here: http://www.plope.com/Members/chrism/flymake-mode. apparently pyflakes works by walking the ast rather than executing the code, so it's fast and has no side effects. there are also some neat customizations in the comments at the bottom. pychecker can execute the code, so i might be able to set things up to autorun my doctests. according to the emacswiki, there's a way to plug pylint into the default python mode (look at the bottom of the page.) looks like it's not too hard to customize, too, so maybe i could get my doctest-running script in there. EDIT: auto-compile looks like the kind of hook i want -- it runs 'make' automatically when a file is saved. i would need to modify it, though...

Friday, January 18, 2008

cvoicecontrol

i just rediscovered a cool package: cvoicecontrol. i've got to play with it some more, once i have some free time.... i remember i once got it working on my zaurus (old school 5500), which made me feel like a really macho geek for a day. not maintained anymore, apparently, but should still work.

Monday, January 14, 2008

google plans to store my data. do it, google! and they can eat my entropy when i mirror an encrypted fs. can't wait to see which content-related ads that will churn up. not much to go on yet, but the internal codename is 'my stuff'.

more reasons to put off buying a cell phone

looks like the neo1973 open cell phone is coming out, and its hardware is comparable to the iphone. runs openmoko, for double geek drool. google is also telling us that their android phone os will run on many different phones, according to wikipedia. i want it. all. but i will definitely wait until things stabilize, prices drop a little, and some 3rd party development gets released. i'll keep an eye on it.

google apps on thin clients

i just discovered this google service for simplifying and reformatting web pages for mobile devices: http://www.google.com/gwt/n looks like it would be very handy for pdas, phones, and ancient laptops on life support that i can't throw away. i also hope to get the official google mobile stuff (http://mobile.google.com/) working on my zaurus 5500. it's just java, and someone apparently made the .jar work with an ibm jvm for a pocket pc. (http://www.downloadsquad.com/2006/11/06/how-to-run-gmail-locally-on-a-pocket-pc/) maybe i can do the same thing with the built-in jvm on my zaurus. in case i can't get that working, i might be able to use this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gmail-mobile/ i would need to get php for the z, though. [EDIT] looks like the gmail-mobile project is for html<->wml translation/filtering, not for offline reading and editing. too bad. i did manage to snag the mobile gmail java app with wget. (google puts up a bit of a fight because it wants to get your system info, i guess to send you the right version.) looks like it needs some java microedition libs for handling midlets. these posts look like they might be helpful: http://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=17019&st=0 http://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=15610 according to google support, the gmail mobile app requres j2me with midp2. the me4se.jar refered to in the oesf posts has incomplete support for midp2, but one of the posters indicates that classes can be extracted from midp-2_0-src-linux-i686.zip in the midp developer kit. or get everything from here. i'm still not sure, though, if the gmail mobile app will let me have some offline capability or if it's just replacing a web browser with a jvm. maybe google desktop instead? or google gears?

Saturday, January 5, 2008

xming for gnucash

i set up xming to use gnucash remotely from a windows machine. the xlaunch file linked by the desktop icon has <xlaunch xmlns="http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes" xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" schemalocation="http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes XLaunch.xsd" windowmode="MultiWindow" clientmode="StartProgram" program="gnucash" clientstart="PuTTY" passwordstart="true" remotehost="10.0.0.6" remoteuser="linuxuser" display="0" clipboard="true"> the user is prompted for the password (to ssh) and it starts gnucash on the server. substitute gnucash for any other server program you frequently want to use on a windows client.

fixing the wireless access point

my linksys wrt54g hasn't been working well lately, thanks to neighbors who just pop up their own networks without checking which channels are already being used. my problem is that i'm not using the gateway/dhcp features of the linksys, since i already had a lan on 10.0.0.x. so i couldn't log in to the linksys' web admin page. here's how i fixed it: with kismet, i determined that channels 1, 6, 9, and 11 were being used within range of my house. a little scanning the neighborhood picked up channel 3, too. channels 1-11 are legal in north america, according to /etc/conf.d/wireless.example. so i'm going to use channel 4. i got into the default linksys network by booting the wap unplugged from ethernet starting my eth1 on the same channel, with dhcp. my wireless ip was then 192.168.1.101. http://192.168.1.1/ got me to the admin page for the linksys. default username and password are 'admin' and 'admin'. once i was in, i turned off the dhcp server. (apparently things got turned back on from a reset.) pretty simple menu navigation to change the channel settings and get security back. i used a wep passphrase. (i seem to recall it was too much hassle to use wpa with linux before, and i don't think any of my neighbors are very 1337, given their ignorant clobbering of my network in the first place.) 128 bit, 26 hex digits conveniently generated by linksys. had to reboot linksys and restart eth1 (with manual ip now that dhcp is off) after changing the channel and turning on wep. reset the password under the administration tab, changed the ip to 10.0.0.101, and rebooted linksys. after a couple of minutes, i could log into web admin again. no more messing around with 192.168! hooray! something odd that i noticed was that the wireless card kept wanting to use the old channel 6, even though i set channel_eth1="4" in /etc/conf.d/net. the only workaround i could find was to take out the channel_eth1 line and let it choose the channel automatically by the essid. this worked as long as i was connecting only to the linksys, without dhcp. once i plugged the linksys into the lan and used the dhcp server on my dsl modem, it would still report using channel 6. but it worked. weird.