Category Uncategorized

Fedora Core 15 on the Chembook 2370VA

It’s been almost 18 months since I installed Fedora Core 12, so I decided to move onto Fedora 15. While the install went OK, I am not (yet) convinced it was worth the hassle. While it’s nice to pick up…

The Power of the Cloud

I recently wrote a entry for the Riverbed Technology blog, describing an interesting collaborative development experience I had with the AWS EC2 Cloud. You can read it here.

My guidelines for reusable Django applications

I came to Django development from much lower-level development — embedded software, device drivers, and system software. What has impressed me most about Django (and python in general) is the manner in which it guides you to do the right…

gdb, inline source, and stepping through your code

I really like having inline source when using gdb. Code Complete, by Steve Mcconnell has an entire chapter explaining how you should proactively step through all code you write — and not just when you’re actively debugging an issue. Having…

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…

Installing Fedora Core 12 on Chembook 2370VA

After a good experience with Fedora Core 8, and a reasonable experience with Fedora Core 11, I decided to install Fedora Core 12 on my Chembook laptop. In summary, while FC8 and FC11 worked out of the box, FC12 failed…

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…