Posted by Michael Schultz—
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Today at the Marquette Student ACM meeting, I gave a short presentation (PDF) about development on Linux. Specifically using Makefiles. As promised I have uploaded it to this site and I will give a little more information in this post.
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Posted by Michael Schultz—
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Well, I’m currently running under the assumption that I have a math test tomorrow. Therefore I should be studying, correct? I assure you I’ll get to the point of studying soon. First, however, I want to explain to you how I went from reading notes about birth-and-death processes to updating the ports collection on my FreeBSD box (it won’t take long).
So, I begin reading my notes from the beginning of the semester. Nothing looks too bad and I get to the third page in short time, then I start reading about birth-and-death processes. Nothing special, but it does mean a significant change in topics so I decide to take a brief mental break to check my email. No new messages. Back to studying. Wait, I want to start some music—great idea! Let me just load up iTunes. Hmmm, I’ve already listened to most of this. I know I have some more music on my file server but how to get it to my laptop…?
Well, the easy way would be to copy over the files using something like scp but I don’t want to use more disk space on my (already too full) laptop. Ok, I do have NFS set up so I can just mount the music directory and play it over the network. Nah, UDP traffic is for wimps besides it would leave ugly links in iTunes when I leave my network tomorrow. Thinking a few more seconds I realize I want to mount the music directory as if it were someone sharing their iTunes with me. How hard could that be for FreeBSD?
A quick Google brings up the Firefly Media Server that claims to have exactly what I’m looking for. I just need to cd /usr/ports/audio/mt-daapd && make install. D’oh! There is a vulnerability, I need to update the ports tree. So here I am, instead of studying I’m sitting here updating the FreeBSD ports tree. Then I get to build mt-daapd, configure it, and hope that iTunes recognizes it so I can study.
Posted by Michael Schultz—
Monday, February 4, 2008
I’ll begin with a story. Last week I was taking notes in my mathematics class when the graphite in my mechanical pencil broke. No big deal. Well, not quite, it turns out that the pencil had no more graphite left. So I fall back to my emergency pen with plans to replenish my graphite supply once I get home.
Naturally I forget.
So today when I went to class I decided to bring my computer along (so I could finish modifying my MSCS site). Once class begins I reach into my pocket to grab my pencil and realize that I never filled it up. So I think to myself: Should I take notes with my pen or try to go for it with the computer. Being a computer scientist I choose the computer.
The professor begins writing on the chalkboard. λp0 = μp1. Great. Doesn’t that just flow off the fingers. I frantically start trying the various Alt/Alt+Shift key strokes OS X features. No lambda. Alright, maybe someone has already figured this out for me. Nope. The common suggestions are OmniOutliner and NoteTaker. Neither of which flow as naturally as I wanted. Luckily for me I know LaTeX, so I ended up using writing the notes as close to LaTeX style as I could get. I ended up doing pretty well, but I was hoping for something a little easier had been developed. So for Wednesday, I’ll probably make myself some shorter commands to allow for a more natural flow when I’m typing my notes.
Anyone know of a decent WYSIWYG program for writing complex mathematical equations on the fly for OS X? I’m alright using LaTeX syntax, I would just like to be able to see the output quickly and on-the-fly.
Posted by Michael Schultz—
Saturday, October 6, 2007
This post is an import from a presentation I did in October of 2007. Since I’ve made this presentation, I’ve stopped using my own script and suggest you use another tool for backups. I hear rdiff-backup is good. However, I believe this is still a good introduction to bash scripting, cron, and tar.
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