Freelance Freedom #139 This seems to be a central tenant of all creative processes, from programming, to graphic design, to web design, to finger painting. Theres a hell of alot of apparent ’nothing’ to do before you do anything, and if you play your cards right, its chargeable nothing time :D Programming With Proportional Fonts? An interesting new look at a programming environment mainstay that I admit I just assumed was a best practice! ...
As part of the whole New Years Resolutions plan, I’m gonna get started on the OSS development thing. The Gist: Cross Platform Mobile application to collect international data on cell reception. The Gimmick: While services that do this exist, they assume even circular propagation of the signal. Granular reception maps that tell you where to head to to get more bars. The Detail: Low level should be relatively simple; the Android, Blackberry and Iphone API stacks allow easy reading of the current cell ID, RSSI, and GPS Co-ords. Upload those three values over XML (or Something), Web service plugs that into a MySQL server, which is then aggregated, and displayed on the Web, and can be queried by the mobile app. The Potential: While its unlikely that its going to ‘blow up’ since there is relatively little incentive for the end user, since the Applications are going to be free, there will be some that will install it for the sake of it. There is the opportunity to license the data gained service providers but the aggregated data will be made available online in open formats. ...
Post something at least once a day on either blog or web-album Stop sleeping in after 10am Drop some savings into the stock market, only take profits out, don’t add anything more Write an actual blog article once a week Find and contribute to an open source project Pull together a real portfolio of work Find more clients for my freelance work Set a timetable and stick to it Well, its a plan at least.
Finished my approach to Euler Problem 1 last night and checked everything into github. If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000. Was not happy with limiting the specific factors of 3 and 5, and limit of 1000 so i implemented a generalised solution. ...
I must apologise for my lack of activity on the blog, but more is coming. I’ve begun working towards working with Ian Clarke on his Swarm project, that is if i can bring my Java and Scala chops up to scratch enough to give meaningful impact. Beyond that I’m heading to NJ this week to be with my partner for her graduation and have my 21st birthday while im over there (21 means absolutly squat in Ireland, so I’m expecting a repeat of my 18th…) ...
Last week or there abouts, there was a big buzz around the interwebs revisiting Dan Kaminski’s OzymanDNS tool, a perl based toolkit for tunnelling TCP traffic over DNS requests (technically its TCP over SSL over DNS but whos counting) That was originally released mid-2004. I never really found the true source of the new hype surrounding a “old” project (it may have been HAK5’s episode 504 that demonstrated the tool, mubix has put the write up in at room362) ...
The Fuel gauge on the front of my MBWE is fairly useless, noone cares, so why not repurpose it as a speedometer? first, stop it displaying the “fuel” Stolen from http://kyyhkynen.net/stuff/mybook/reduce_disk_usage.php Disable the service that displays the disk usage with the leds in the front panel of your MBWE. Admit it, the feature is pretty much useless and because the service has to check the amount of free space on the disk(s), it is causing disk access. ...
Thru my work I’m thrown into alot of technologies that i dont nearly know enough about and as with alot of tech related things, the education scene is basic basic basic..GURU with little or no gradiation, so what I’m going to do is post what i learn when i learn it and where i learn it from and hopefully it’ll be useful for someone else, and I’ll also take the opportunity to rehash stuff I’ve already done. ...
If anyone is interested in Erlang B Calculations, very relevent to any communications or engineering students, I’ve written a little quick piece of code to calculate them. There are several levels of functionality in the code. Erlang B itself only has 2 variables, System load in Erlangs, and the number of “trunks” (read: servers/call center operators/phone lines), and its output is a blocking probability from 0 to 1 All three of these variables or none atall can be defined at runtime; ...
I’ve been folding for a while now, and I’d previously written a really very cobbled together way of parsing my unitinfo.txt files, but, searching for something to do other than revise, I’ve written a similarly cobbled together but much shorter way of parsing my folding progress and telling me (as in speech) how far its going. Required: Espeak, basic bash knowledge to adjust. note: the espeak adjustments are just personal preference, so change them at will. ...