Scott's Blog

Evolution of Conditioner Bottles It's happened to me more than once that I got home from shopping and I picked up a bottle of conditioner instead of a bottle of shampoo. Conditioner bottles have evolved to look more like shampoo bottles, and get taken instead. I'm sure some time in the past, some designer created these two bottles of shampoo and conditioner because they looked nice together on the shelf. All of a sudden the sales people noticed a large increase in the sales of their conditioner. Bottle designs that confuse the consumer ended up selling more. These designs end up having more stickiness, until the entire population of conditioner bottles is like their shampoo brethren. Evolution of Microwave Ovens Consoles I remember when we got our first digital microwave oven from Panasonic. To start it up you had to press the "power" button 4 times to get "high", then press the minutes and second buttons, and finally start. I look at microwaves now a...

This Friday I bought a new PC to be used as my Linux Home Theater PC (HTPC). ATX 480W Slim HTPC cabinet VGA 512 GFORCE 8500GT, PCI CPU Intel Core 2 DUO E6750 DDR2 1GB 667 Kingston DVD/CD DL Samsung Gigabyte GA-P35K - LGA 775 SATA 500 Gig HD (Western Digital) Gyration Wireless 3d Mouse and Keyboard . I tried using the beta of Linux MCE, but it didn't work at all (video problems). I used an older version of Linux MCE and got it working a bit. But I didn't like the fact that it picked it's own name for my machine and user name. I gave up on that and am now using the 8.04 alpha (yes alpha, I never learn) of Mythbuntu . Mythbuntu worked reasonably well out of the box except a lot of the configuration screens didn't fit my 480P. The OK or Next button would be off screen and I couldn't figure out how to move the window up so I could see it (Alt+Drag with the mouse is the trick). Other problems I had was that Myth defaults to hiding your mouse cursor so you can't s...

As a regular linux user I have some hints and tips how to setup bash : Create a ~/.bash_aliases file and store all your aliases and functions there. You'll need to source the file in ~/.bashrc, see below. For common directories you visit create an alias that cd's to that folder starting with _. Using the underscore is short and sweet and doesn't pollute your namespace as much. Here are two examples (the latter also changes the window title): alias _mydir='cd /home/scott/my/dir' alias _other='cd /home/scott/src/projects/other;echo -ne "\033]2;Other Project\007"' Use these cd aliases: alias ..='cd ..' alias ...='cd ../..' alias ....='cd ../../..' alias .....='cd ../../../..' Use these ls aliases. (h is for "human" file sizes, F is for adding a trailing / for directories) alias ls='ls -hF --color=auto' alias ll='ls -lhF --color=auto' alias la='ls -AF --color=auto' alias lrt='ls -lr...

My NewYear's Resolutions: Health Have a regular exercise program (3 times a week, tennis or squash counts for at least 8 months). Continue eating healthy, but eat little less meat and dessert (hard to quantify). Loose 12kg over the 12 months. Go back on the Shangri-La diet for at least 3 months. Fix/Build Get a new computer Give my old computer to Victor. Get another 500 Gig of space. Make the practice green It won't be finished this year, but I plan to have the hole dug, the channels and gravel and the first level of sand done by December. Do something with MAME . I have an old computer it may be interesting to get it working as a dedicated MAME setup, if it can handle it and maybe leave it at the farm. Have a commercial printer print up a plasticized design that we draw up for Victor's MAME console I built. Work on my open source programs Have unit tests for all of them. Publish/revive one of my older stuff. Make one new project this year. Make 6 commits on some other O...

I was thinking why I keep using GIMP instead of, say, Photoshop. Here are my main reasons in bullet form: It's free and open source and I support that. It uses Python as one of it's scripting languages. I've created two mini utilities using that fact. Using Python-Fu instead of say PIL is that it uses the same object and object names as GIMP uses. Learning more about Python-Fu makes me a better GIMP user since I know better how GIMP works. Create the images using GIMP by hand I can decide later if it might be easy to script. If not, I'll just do it all by hand. I can install GIMP on anyone's machine in minutes, no legal hassles or possibilities of installing a virus from pirated software. Once I install GIMP on a machine, I can use it immediately. I don't have to figure out the interface of a program I'm not familiar with. Some cool new features come out first for GIMP. GIMP can load files directly from the web or FTP. GIMP has everything I need: cli...

Project Euler is having some problems, and in any event, I wanted to download the questions that I haven't completed yet so that I could work on some problems even when I'm off the net. I thought of use httrack which is made for this, but it doesn't seem to support passing cookies from firefox. Wget is the swiss army knife for things like this here's what I did: wget --load-cookies $COOKIE --convert-links --recursive --level=1 --restrict-file-names=windows $SITE Where COOKIE points to my firefox cookie file (~/.mozilla/firefox/ .defulat/cookies.txt) and SITE is the project euler site (http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems) The parameter --convert-links will update the links so that they work offline and --level is to go only one level deep. The restrict-file-names=windows is needed so that firefox can read files with ? or = in it.

Of my tools that I've written, the one I use most often is clipboard-modifier . I have it on my panel so that it's only one click away. I had longtime desire to make this tool more flexible, before I would have to always modify the code in order to have it do something different. Now each plugin can add wxPython widgets on the dialog, thus they can control their own state and parameters. Perhaps the most useful is the ability to send the clipbard (via stdin) to any program and then update the clipboard from the program's output. A good example is sorting the clipboard. Another is filtering it through grep, say. The program still needs more polish, but it's already very useful, for me.