June 18, 2009 at 2:33pm
Man in the loop
The other day I was fortunate enough to meet Seth Vidal, the inventor of the Yum package management system, and a key contributor to Fedora Linux.
Despite being a programmer myself, I sometimes lose sight of the fact that Open Source software doesn’t just appear, that behind the code there are people who are passionate about the problems they are solving. It was nice to get to shake Seth’s hand and thank him for making my job easier, and for contributing to the larger community.
Alex’s excellent philly based urban hydroponic farm classes are up and running. Waiting to see the 45 pound tomatoes.
June 10, 2009 at 7:13pm
The first version of environmentfinance.com, a global project focused on promoting sustainable enterprise, is now live. It was great working with John Ganzi and Fred Gerards, looking forward to collaborating with them further.
June 2, 2009 at 12:33am
Why is my Macbook running so hot all the time? I said to myself today. Could there be a hidden process running thats gobbling up my CPU? Could it be a rootkit cloaking itself from a normal ps? Could I be hacked? Oh the paranoia. I couldn’t stand it, so I downloaded the antiquated Mac version of Rootkit Hunter and let it fly.
Searching for RH-Sharpe’s default files… Possible RH-Sharpe’s rootkit installed
Oh boy, I thought, and proceeded to wade through the enourmous shell script that is Rootkit Hunter for an hour, finally determining that the file /usr/bin/slice was the supposed culprit. slice, it turns out, comes from:
sh-3.2# /usr/bin/slice
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:636:in `report_activate_error’: Could not find RubyGem merb-slices (>= 0) (Gem::LoadError)
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:141:in `activate’
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:49:in `gem’
from /usr/bin/slice:18
The merb slice gem. Ay yi yi, a case of mistaken identity. So my computer just runs hot. Maybe.
April 21, 2009 at 9:59pm
When efficiency isn't everything
According to an article in the Internationl Herald Tribune, as many as sixty million Chinese citizens are facing a unique problem. China is rolling out a new identity database to keep better track of their citizens. Unfortunatly, the new identity database only recognizes 32,252 unique characters, far less than the estimated 55,000 characters in the Chinese language. Meaning huge numbers of Chinese citizens who happen to have those characters in their names, will soon have to change them.
It’s not clear why this apparent trade-off (fewer characters means fewer hard-drives to store the names database?) was made. But saving storage space at the expense of the developing cultural and lingual richness of the Chinese language, and the traditional freedom to uniquely name your children, seems like a poor trade-off in any language.
February 16, 2009 at 5:35pm
My professional profile, hosted at LinkedIn.
5:28pm
Various Open Source projects I have started or collaborated on, past and present.
5:26pm
First post
My Hosting Rails account has long been neglected. Because of that I’m moving to tumblr, because:
- It’s more fun.
- I don’t have to maintain it.
I hope to post more regularly in the future, thanks for stopping by!
