A ninja's favorite weapon

I finally did it.

shiruken — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 16:25:02 +0000

At first I started visiting the site every 15 minutes.

Then, I switched to visiting the site every hour.

It became a once at lunch and once at dinner type ritual.

Eventually, it was just an RSS feed.

Now, I have unsubscribed from the RSS feed.

Goodbye Slashdot, like Wired, you were good for a few years, then I held on until I couldn’t justify you anymore.

The direction of Mutt the email client.

shiruken — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:16:26 +0000

So, on a itch. I decided that I would start working with mutt more.

It appears that I started at an interesting time. The main developer changed to Mr. Brendan Cully, they moved from a CVS repository to a mercurial repository, new energy amongst people who had created out of source patches, etc…

Pretty exciting. So, I trudge head first into this and found a bug. I spent about 1.5 days solving this bug and submitted a patch. Then I asked my friend Kees to review it. He pointed out a better location for this and submitted his own patch.

When Brendan gave Kees primary credit, I felt a little slighted. I mean after all, I did spend a large chunk of my time isolating a problem and stepping through a fix. Also, I am sorta troubled that Brendan is applying other people’s patches and giving himself credit for the entire patch if he modifies it in some way.

Meanwhile, I thought that was just fixing a symptom, and not fixing the problem. So I submitted a better patch. Unfortunately, I think due to my earlier objections (see last paragraph), Brendan isn’t planning on applying it.

And I think I’m just going to give up on Mutt.

A year of being ignored by Google

shiruken — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:07:27 +0000

So, a year ago, I posted this in the Google help area:
How to fix the tab key in Gmail

You can see the replies are pretty positive. Sure, there are only 2 replies, but none of them flamed me. Anyhow, it seems like an easy fix, I did post a working proof of concept. Besides, behind the scenes, I have complained about this to every Google employee I know. Still, nada. I’m going to keep hope alive that one day, the tab key will work in a Gmail text area.

The Start of Gardening 2007

shiruken — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 02:02:59 +0000

So, this year, I decided to actually do a garden. I looked at the patch of dirt in the backyard and then hit the garden store.

Well, first, I visited the Oregon State University extension office, and looked at the vegetable growing guide. So that I knew which varieties to get. Then the family and I visited the garden store close to our house.

We got some tomatoes, onions, pickles, etc. We planted the onions, peas, lettuce, carrots, and radishes now. Then started the watermelon, pumpkins, tomatoes (4 kinds), jalepeno peppers, and red peppers in some starter trays. Btw, a quick hint is to re-use the seedling starter trays from the seedlings you bought at the store. So I’ll keep you guys posted on how that is going.

Running Day 2

shiruken — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:18:36 +0000

Last night, after basketball. My arches and heels were a little sore. When I got home I took off my socks and discovered a blister right across the arch of my foot. Ouch.

So, this morning, when I woke up. I could barely walk around without shoes. I still slapped on the Nike Frees and went out and ran the .6 miles again (similar route as yesterday). Albet, a little slower than yesterday.

I think with the exertion on the tired thighs and feet, I got a minor endorphin burst at the end. That really helped.

When I got back, I watched the first half of the USA v Ghana world cup game. That was a totally bogus Penalty Kick call. Then, when I hobbled into work, I watched the last part of the game. Weak.

I think the american soccer team performed pretty lousy this world cup. I was really expecting them to push the ball more. They seemed to just kinda lazy kick it around.

Running again

shiruken — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 02:31:39 +0000

So, after taking a large break (13 year) from running. I got a nice pair of red Nike Free 5.0 shoes. I also ended up with a long sleeve running shirt and some nice running shorts. Since most of my running clothes don't fit anymore.

I think I'll stick to the base schedule of waking up at 7am and then running for half a mile. I ran .6 miles this morning. I played basketball this evening with work folks as well.

At this rate, I should lose my extra 50 lbs in a year or so…

Editors

shiruken — Tue, 23 May 2006 19:50:44 +0000

A little story. Once upon a time ago in 1993, a young college student found the hidden Unix lab at school. There he created an account and found out about a text editor named 'vi'. He download a file that was posted to an ftp server called vilearn.uue. He uudecoded it and learned vi.

Then, he tried to forsake vi and learn other editors that should be "better". After years and years, he finally came to the conclusion that perhaps. Just maybe. He should be doing everything with vi.

That, rather than try to fit himself to other editors, he should just use the one he's the most comfortable with.

So, with that… My name is Ken and I'm a vi user.

my first ajax application

shiruken — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 19:12:36 +0000

So, I finally found something I could write in ajax. It's pretty cool. Basically, a friend of mine was having problems with a firewall.

I had already created a perl irc bot in the past (Hera). So, I thought, I could just have a bot that processed 2 files, an input and an output file.

It took me a little while, but I got the bot part working.

Then, I had to figure out how to get the web part working. I started off by downloading Dojo and wading through the documentation. I tried a few things, but wasn't able to grok it.

I then recalled this thing I had looked at in the past called Sajax. I moseyed over to the Sajax site and one of the demos was this "Graffiti wall" it looked close to what I wanted, so I copied it and tweaked it a little. So far it's working out great. I won't post the url to it today. I'm going to add logging in and some other features first, so it won't be abused.

Learning LaTeX

shiruken — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 19:22:46 +0000

So, I am finally tackling a project that I thought I would never get to. I am teaching myself how to markup text using LaTeX and then publish PDFs from said documents (HTML too, if I choose to).

Main motivation behind this has been preparing technical documents at where I work. I needed to write it in something that had the flexibility to italicize and bold, thus eliminating text as an option. Another requirement was that it wouldn't be tied to one architecture or program, thus eliminating stuff like nroff and word.

That left me with HTML or TeX. I already know HTML, so TeX is it. It's pretty cool, I can edit this stuff using vi or a TeX ide (like LyX or TeXnicCenter) and it's been pretty intuitive.