Archive for September, 2005
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30 Sep 2005
Did you know that 4 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices now serving were confirmed by unanimous votes? And another 3 had fewer than ten opposing votes each. Only Clarence Thomas’s confirmation was even close.
Justice Appointed by Vote John Paul Stevens Ford 98-0 Sandra Day O’Connor Reagan 99-0 Antonin Scalia Reagan 98-0 Anthony Kennedy Reagan 97-0 David Souter G.H.W. Bush 90-9 Clarence Thomas G.H.W. Bush 52-48 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Clinton 97-3 Stephen Breyer Clinton 87-9 John Roberts G. W. Bush 78-22 Discuss (7) -
23 Sep 2005
Recently, Sun released version 3.1 of the Sun Ray Server Software. It now has Linux support for USB devices connected to the thin clients. Instead of being kernel-level, this support is user-level — in the form of a modified libusb. Unfortunately, roughly 97% of applications expect kernel devices, and thus lack support for libusb. Luckily, pilot-link belongs to the minority. The following are my (roughly chronological) notes on getting a Palm (in the form of an old Handspring Visor) to sync with my Sun Ray.
- You’ll need to have libusb 0.1.8 or newer installed. For reference, RHEL3 doesn’t have a new enough version; I needed to find a non-standard RPM.
- Get the latest version of pilot-link from http://www.pilot-link.org/. I used 0.12.0-pre4. You’ll almost certainly need to compile it, since even if your distro has a package for it, it probably won’t be compiled with libusb support.
- Be sure to add the –enable-libusb flag when you run configure for pilot-link. (I assume the reader knows how to compile and install stuff under Linux)
- When you run commands that you want to use the Sun Ray libusb support, you need to run them with the LD_PRELOAD environment variable to include “/opt/SUNWut/lib/libusbut.so.1″.
- I’m not sure what most of the executables that pilot-link installs do, but I know the important one is pilot-xfer. This command line works for me:
bin/pilot-xfer --port usb: -s $HOME/.pilot-link
This command will fail unless you have the Palm already trying to sync. You’ll also need to run it as root, although the pilot-link guys say they’re working on a fix for that.
I’m still on the hunt for something that will allow me to access data on a USB thumb drive.
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16 Sep 2005
My first reaction to the now-revealed Nintendo Revolution controller was to think of every remote control I’ve ever used. With very few exceptions, they’re uncomfortable and hard to get to do what you want them to do. But after reading that 1up article, and watching the intro video, I started to get it. “Revolution” is the only word that fits. If you think of this as turning a television into a three-dimensional DS-like touchscreen, the controller design makes a lot of sense.
Joystiq has an overview of Iwata’s whole keynote, with a lot of his (and Nintendo’s) rationale and point-of-view.
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14 Sep 2005
Even apart from the particularly catastrophic devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, this has been an extremely active Atlantic hurricane season. Forecasts for the season started out relatively average last December. But as the ocean waters warmed, updated forecasts were released: from 11 named storms to 13, and to 15. After a remarkably busy spring and the most active July on record, the forecasts had been increased to 20. Hurricane Dennis was the strongest storm to ever form before August, and eight days later, Emily broke that record. Katrina was the fourth-strongest hurricane ever measured. Ever. And thanks to its surgical strike on New Orleans, it already stands as the second most deadly Atlantic hurricane.
There have been fifteen named storms so far this season. The season officially lasts for 11 more weeks, and there are only six names left (Philippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, and Wilma). After that, hurricanes will be named for letters of the Greek alphabet for the first time since they’ve had names.
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14 Sep 2005
My Uncle Steve will be racing his lawnmower at the Terryville County Fair north of Waterbury this Saturday at 6pm. Tickets to the fair are $7, and unfortunately no pets are allowed.
It’s kinda silly, but I’ll be there.
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6 Sep 2005
I just got an email from an HR person at Google. It was really personalized, not just a form letter, saying that I might fit in well with their Server Engineering team. And from the description of the job, I think I would. I had to tell him that I didn’t know where I’d be a year from now, but I might contact him in March.
Oh, even better, he told me how he came across me: my goddamn contributions to fucking Wikipedia.
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3 Sep 2005
Yesterday, I passed my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam with flying colors. I’m willing to call it a legitimate certification. The entire test was hands-on troubleshooting (“Here’s a machine that won’t boot. Fix it”) and installation and configuration (“Here’s bare metal, and a four page description of how we want the machine setup. Go”). It’s very indicative of the kind of work I do on a daily basis, so it’s far more useful than a multiple-choice test would have been.