Hello, World!
There are details coming out soon with regards to GSoC:2013, so all this is without any official hat of any sort on.
However, I had an idea, and I was wondering if there were people interested in mentoring it.
For a long time, I’ve wanted a Debian android application — one that will use API calls to fetch PTS info, BTS info, and intercept bug URLs to display Debian related information on the native interface.
It’d also be neat to set a profile (e.g. my emails) and get notifications when things happen that I care about.
Anyone know how to code for android and interested in GSoC?
In no particular order, here are my 4 picks for the DPL thunderdome:
I hope they all run. Really.
Hey y’all,
As some may have seen, I’ve taken a shine to a project called Firehose, and plan on helping this format support Debian. I really enjoy how it’s looking so far, and plan on slowly building out scripts to output this format.
The idea here is I’d use it to help with debuild.me, and eventually support larger archive runs.
More to come.
As many of you know, I’ve been spending some time hacking on a Lisp variant that’s fully hosted in Python. If you want to read more about it, check out the slides I prepared for Boston Python’s meetup — in particular, pay attention to the “magic REPL”.
I’ve been pondering what to do next, and the natural instinct is for me to take a step back, and properly implement a few things I’ve forgotten. Namely: Macros. Yes. Macros. It’s a Lisp without Macros.
I’ve hit a few stumbling blocks in it’s implementation, and it’s been holding me up. I’m mostly concerned with how Hy should treat quoted forms, in particular I’m concerned about loosing the distinction between a vector and a list, since both convert into Python lists.
There is of course the option to encode Lists as:
`(list foo bar baz)but that seems wrong.
I’ve also got some concerns about “derefing” values in a quoted form — I think this is just going to result in a lot of special casing for Macros.
More to come soon.
The Ohio Local Community Team helds its inaugural educational session on Monday, 28 January 2013, in #ubuntu-us-oh on FreeNode IRC. The topic covered was "The Joy of BeagleBoard" and after the main presentation a lively discussion ensued. The transcript of the session has been posted with PNG graphic exports of the slides interleaved to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OhioTeam/IRC20130128.
There is not a known plan for what may be in store for February 2013 yet.
So, every week I do a "past week in tech and startups" newscast-show-thingy at a local startup incubator - here is this weeks links, and audio is available here.
How CloudFlare aims to save the future of the internet with a Amazon-style Technology rollout, for free. (Via ReadWriteWeb)
Foursquare Hack helps you plan your next trip (Via ReadWriteWeb)
Amazon announces the $199 7-inch Kindle Fire (punny, eh?) (Via ReadWriteWeb)
The Facebook Timeline is the nearest thing I've seen to a digital ID, and it's creepy as hell (Via Ben Werdmuller)
How Bad Boards Kill Companies: HP (Via Monday Note)
HTML5 scores a point, slideshare drops Flash for HTML5 (Via ReadWriteWeb)
How to counter the statement "You don't need (strong) security if you're not doing anything illegal!"? (Via Security.stackexchange)
Is it a good strategy to quit college and learn about entrepreneurship just by reading books at home? (Via Answers.onstartups)
It's truly the end of the world as we know it.
After Facebook's latest changes, I'm deleting my Facebook profile on Wednesday (that is, 9/28/2011) night. So, connect with me through the various services I've got listed over here, at http://jamesrgifford.com/.
Email: james @ jamesrgifford.com
Txt number: 216-223-8574.
If you can't contact me through those, then I probably don't want to talk to you (no offense meant, just saying).
You can send James suggestions for next week at james@jamesrgifford.com
Note: This week is pretty short, I’ve been busy and haven’t had time to look at stuff as much. Next week will be better, promise. :)
http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/29779/what-to-be-aware-of-careful-of-...
http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/29805/as-a-founder-shareholder-office...
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/09/eight-deadly-sins-of-site-desi.php
http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2011/09/06/the-essential-guide-to-working-fro...
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/09/why-keeping-up-with-rss-is-poisonous-...
And the recording: http://cinch.fm/jrgifford/281087
This week in tech news for Thursday, September 1st, 2011.
Send suggestions for next week to james@jamesrgifford.com
As a beginner, I’ve got this tendency (it’s downright annoying actually) to be all like “Well, why don’t we have some sort of example project for this that’s got comments” or “Gee, sure wish someone had some actual commented code so I could understand this!” – and I’m sure that other beginners in the Ruby (and Rails) worlds are like this as well.
That’s why I’m proud to announce that I’ll be hosting all the code for the Rails Getting Started tutorial on Github.
The way I’ve got things setup right now is if you’re following the plain vanilla Rails 3 one, you can look at the rails-3 branch – if you’re following the new, fancy Rails 3.1 guide, you can take a look at the (as of right now unmade) rails-3-1 branch.
Bugs etc can be filed on Github.
Here’s to Beginners in Rails, learning code. Have fun, and if you’re a beginner and run into issues, just contact me and I’ll help you if I can. :)
I recently learned that tumblr transmits passwords in plaintext . You might think ‘So what? Who’s looking?’ Well, lots of people, actually. For starters, you don’t know who is sniffing the airwaves at that internet cafe you’re always logging in at. I could be capturing every packet that whizzes through the air, sifting through them for usernames and passwords. To make matters worse, most people don’t use different passwords for all their accounts, so once someone has their tumblr password, they’ve also got their facebook password, their gmail password, their myspace password, their password, and their banking password. This is huge, and fairly common, apparently.
However, there IS a solution for tumblr: log in to https://www.tumblr.com/login rather than https://www.tumblr.com/login Note the ’s’ in https, as opposed to http – this encrypts the connection between you and tumblr.
tumblr is supposedly working on a fix, but the more pressure people put on them, the sooner they’ll get it done. If you happen to have a tumblr account, do everyone a favor and drop them an email expressing your concern.
OLF was a blast, even if we didn’t get there ’til almost noon. Leave it to Ohio State fans to get me stuck in a traffic jam in the middle of nowhere, between a field full of sheep and a field full of cows… Along with a flat tire and a late start. It was great to meet other Ohio LoCo members and what’s-his-name from System76, who was a lot of fun to talk to, even if I can’t remember his name. He was at our booth, showing off their amazing line of laptops. If you’re in the market for a laptop specifically designed to work with Linux, and more specifically with Ubuntu, be sure to check them out. All their systems are guaranteed to work without problems.
The new motherboard in Bob apparently has a dead SATA port. After trying several different SATA cables, a SATA card, even conencting a second PSU just for the drive, BIOS still didn’t recognize it. It DID recognize the drive once I plugged it into the first SATA port. Oh well. 40 bucks for the motherboard/processor combo wasn’t too shabby, and I can still use the motherboard, it just doesn’t like more than one SATA drive.
On another note, I’ll be attending OLF tomorrow, spending at least part of the day manning the Ubuntu LoCo booth. Drop by and say ‘Hi!’
It should be here in a few days. Once installed, Bob should be able to hold everything I throw at him for a few weeks…. then I’ll need to add more drives.
I had an interesting question pop up in #shellium this afternoon… Someone asked how to recursively chmod everything but folders to -x. A little googling came up with
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
thanks to damonparker.org for the command.