Feeding The Machine » Uncategorized

Migrating

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:37:00 +0000

I’ve moved my blog over to a self-maintained WordPress setup. If you see this, you are looking at the new site. Oh, RSS might be broken too. Gonna have to update that I suppose. Anyway, if you can’t figure it out or something looks terribly wrong, email me. qhartman@gmail.com

Fun Times

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:44:00 +0000

Went Geocaching this weekend. Meant to try this out for ages, but only just now got to it. Turns out it’s a lot of fun. Totally addictive. I feel a new hobby coming on. Yay! Liz talks about it more over at Modern Crafter.

In other news, it seems that it has become the fashion among OSS contributers / bloggers / fans whatever to get offended on the behalf of other people for things that are said in conference presentations. The latest was an apparently off-hand ( can’t say for sure, I wasn’t there ) comment made by Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxCon. Talking about how things in Linux need to be improved to make it easier for him “to explain things to girls”.

This is something that I find irritating. Seriously people. Has our society really gotten to the point that we can’t let people stand up for themselves, and we have to assume offense for them? I suppose it’s possible that these people are genuinely themselves offended, but I find that unlikely. In any case, there are better ways to deal with it than demanding apologies in public spaces. How self important, petulant, and egotistical is that? I would say more, but a very eloquent summary of my thoughts has already been written over here.

Subversion Version Control Fundamentals

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:49:00 +0000

I help organize (peripherally, Hal really does 90% of the work) a local IT group called the IT Pro Forum. A couple months ago I did a presentation on the fundamentals of Subversion; what it is, why you might use it, etc. Pretty basic stuff. Unfortunately, the audience was already pretty familiar with VCS systems, and in a lot of cases SVN in particular so I don’t think the presentation went very well. In an attempt to keep it valuable I pretty much threw away the content I planned on presenting and dove into more advanced stuff that I hadn’t really prepared for. It ended up being an interesting “conversation” though, and I learned a bit, so it turned out ok in the end.

And now, finally, I am getting my slides up. I’m a slacker, I know. Mea culpa!

IT Pro Subversion Fundamentals IT Pro Subversion Fundamentals qhartman An introduction to Subversion for people new to VCS.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: How-to-Guides & Manu subversion vcs

Middle School Math is Important

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:41:00 +0000

This is an old post, but it’s new to me. Here is an absolutely (painful!) hilarious conversation with Verizon reps about converting dollars to cents. Wow. Just awesome. Stay in school kids!

Dear Nintendo

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:06:00 +0000

Swapping the “Yes” and “No” buttons on the last screen of a transaction in the Wii online store is not a good way to make sure people are really sure about doing something. All it does is make so that someone who is sure has to go through the process twice because they reflexively click where the “Yes” button should be and end up clicking “No” instead. It’s not cute. It down’t increase security. All it does is piss people off.

Today’s Wisdom

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:13:00 +0000

“To err is human, to really screwup you need the root password.”.

That is all.

Oh, to have this kind of spare time…

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:57:00 +0000

I found this to be utterly hilarious. Enjoy.

Free Upgrade!

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:50:00 +0000

So, it turns out that there is something wrong with the speed governors in Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit in that they never fully crank up the speed on my X2 6000+. I did a little experiment tonight, turning off Cool&Quiet in the BIOS. Turns out, my computer can be a helluva lot faster than I thought it could be.

As a point of reference, transcoding video previously ran at about 48fps. Now it runs at about 80fps. Wheeee!!!!!

This would be sweet if it weren’t so annoying.

Theorizing

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:59:00 +0000

The image below represents the essence of a theory I’ve been working on for some time:

I’ll have a post up talking about elsewhere soon.

Use Fake Bananas

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:31:00 +0000

So, on my Google home page I have the “howto of the day” listed. The title of today’s is “How to Trick Monkies”. Oh wait no… That says “How to Track Money”. Damn, that would have been cool to know…