Philip O'Toole

Philip O'Toole

New Challenges

After almost 5 years at Riverbed Technology, it’s time for new challenges. I’ve started a new development position at Loggly in San Francisco, helping to build their Cloud-based Logging-as-a-Service platform. I spent significant time at building systems that needed comprehensive…

Eating your own dogfood

Dogfood testing is an effective way to increase testing, and get valuable feedback, on one’s products. It can be especially effective in the earlier stages of a product’s development, when the user base can be small. Having a forgiving —…

Kubuntu 11.04 on the Chembook 2370VA

My experience with Fedora 15 was not as I had hoped. The ATI graphics driver was particularly problematic (regular minute-long hangs due to spinlock issues) so I decided to try a completely different distribution. I decided to go with Kubuntu…

A simple host system for a 6502 emulator

CPU emulation, particularly of older processors, is an interesting topic. While emulation source code for various CPU cores is easily available, I wanted to better understand how to interface the emulated CPU with my host machine. Therefore I decided to…

Do you use expect? You should

expect is a tool built using Tcl which allows you to automate many tasks that would otherwise mean tedious repetition at the command line. While many tools come with a command line interface, they don’t lend themselves well to scripting…

Valgrind, blessed be its name

Valgrind comprises a bunch of very useful tools for detecting problems with your programs. I first came across it a couple of years back and find it to be excellent. In particular I use its memory profiler, which helps you…

My git workflow

I cannot praise the revision-control tool git highly enough, and often use it as a buffer between SVN and me. Much of my professional work flow involves fixing a bug here, fixing a bug there — lots and lots of…

php and EXIF data

A colleague at work gave me the idea of storing metadata for each photo on my brother’s site inside its EXIF data. I liked this idea as I originally thought I would need another text file on disk, which described…

Yahoo! Mail bans apostrophes

I am a Yahoo! Mail Plus subscriber and recently noticed that my outbound e-mail rewrote my name as Philip O'Toole. Seemingly it had been like this for weeks, but it only caught my attention when I sent an e-mail to…

Yellow Dog Linux 6.1 on the PS3

I got around to installing Yellow Dog 6.1 using a DVD of the full distro. The installation went OK, and the installer fired up in graphical mode. However it proceeded to create the swap partition almost immediately because of low-memory…

Fedora 12 on the PS3

In between bouts of Wipeout HD, I net-installed english-language 64-bit PowerPC Fedora Core 12 on my 80GB PS3. Installation with PetitBoot didn’t present any problems, though audio didn’t seem to work. However FC12 is quite slow on my PS3, so…