http://www.touset.org/blog I'm only in this for the profits Thu, 07 Jun 2007 14:17:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The MESSENGER probe successfully completed its flyby of Venus, and heads towards Mercury. Seriously, these guys are incredible. We want probes to get where they're going fast, but going fast in space has one nasty implication: slowing down requires just as much energy as it took to speed up. In order ... http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2007/06/07/nasa_wins_intergalactic_billiards_championship/ I've decided to spin off all my technical writings to another blog, and keep this one for my political and/or personal musings. http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2007/06/05/fork/ For those of you using my gemtracker plugin or otherwise pointing to my repositories, the location of my anonymous Subversion repository has changed. It's now svn://devel.touset.org/, with no svn component of the path. I'm building a new VPS to host my open source development and blog (WordPress is grating on me, ... http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2007/06/02/subversion_repository_moved/ After going through the hell of chasing down gem after gem for a Rails project at work, then discovering that it actually uses a few older gems than what are currently released, I decided to write the gemtracker plugin. Short summary: you write config/gems.yml, which is nothing more than a YAML ... http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2007/05/25/trackin_your_gems_like_you_just_dont_care/ It's been tried before, with Nick Sieger and Philippe Hanrigou both providing some .autotest files to customize autotest for the purposes of RSpec. Using both their code as a template, I've come up with a few small changes for my own nefarious purposes. Behold, my .autotest! Autotest.add_hook :initialize do |at| # run ... http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2007/05/05/behold_rspec_and_autotest_get_married/ The Atlanta RUG met today, and one of the topics discussed was the brand spanking new (released today) Joyent Slingshot. While sounding promising, it's not really all that groundbreaking. Keep in mind that the following rant stems from initial impressions based on the presenter's demonstration and group discussion about the ... http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2007/05/02/joyent_slingshot_a_disappointment/ This is something that drives me batty when downloading torrents: compressing videos into .rar format. What's the point? First off, splitting it into multiple files was a reasonable idea, back when people had terribly slow connections, which were mostly unreliable. Nowadays, people have resumable downloads and always-on broadband. Not to mention, ... http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/compressing_video/ I hereby present my Browsenberg Uncertainty Principle: As one increases the layout precision of a section on a webpage, all other sections of the page have their layouts perturbed by a proportional amount. And its corollary: The more precisely one specifies positioning and layout for a page in one browser, the less accurately ... http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2006/09/28/the_browsenberg_uncertainty_principle/ The first assignment for my Operating Systems class is to write a threading library for Linux. It's not comprehensive, but it should support most of the "basic" functions: init, create, wait, join, exit, and so on. Plus, it should come with a mutex library for synchronization (which, coincidentally, it should ... http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2006/09/02/writing_a_threading_library/ I'm pretty overloaded right now between work and school. Although, somewhat refreshing is that, for the first time in a long while that I can think of, I'm really enjoying my school assignments. They're pretty difficult, and most of them time-consuming. On my plate so far: Prove five statements in computational theory. ... http://www.touset.org/blog/archives/2006/08/31/assignments/