Bitwise Evolution

Musings of a Seattle-area hacker with a bent on improving digital lifestyles.

Category: tech

Recovered Puzzles

I used to collect puzzles–back when I had a wiki to post them to–but that content was lost to me a few years ago when the system hosting my personal content had a slew of hard drive issues. I was lamenting that loss last week when a coworker suggested that I could possibly find [...]

Test-Driven XML Schema dev with xmlstarlet

Just to document how I do this:

Problem: I need a schema for FooTask

Solution:

Create a ‘tests’ directory. populate said directory with simple example xml files. Name those files valid-foo.xml or invalid-bar.xml (I use numbers for foo and bar). Create your xsd file in the same directory as ‘tests’. Lets call it foo.xsd Copy the following Makefile into the same location.

XSD=foo.xsd # [...]

Implications: Coding for Homomorphicly Encrypted Input

Craig Gentry (Stanford / IBM) recently published a paper that proves the existence of fully homomorphic crypto systems. This has caused quite a stir, since such a system would allow an untrusted party to perform computations on encrypted data, returning an encrypted result, without ever knowing anything about the input or output. I’m [...]

Cleaning up my browser.

I’m done with firefox — Opera 10 now plays flash well, has adblock via. urifilters, a cleaner UI (no menubar, a menu button!) vertical tabs are supported natively, etc… I don’t really like the widget toolkit used in the file open/save dialog, but that’s much better than the horrid performance/stability/bizarre bugs of Firefox.

The minimal UI [...]

Maven deployment issues

I’ve been building / porting various projects to maven lately, and pushing them to our in-house maven server. For a while, I was doing this from my laptop at home. However, at work, I’m pushing to localhost (it’s a temporary thing while we determine if maven will actually work long-term.)

The following error had [...]

Bitten by dependency management

I’ve started using Maven to manage my java projects, and overall I’m very happy with it. It seems to be more mature than ivy, with better documentation, and the vast majority of tasks that I need “just work” (just don’t ask me about jni–that’s another post).

Today, (and yesterday, and a good portion of the [...]

Fixing the key repeat in Ubuntu 9.04

I just upgraded my workstation to Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) and the key repeat delay and speed dropped to a frustrating level.

gnome-control-center can be used to fix this, but it requires that the gnome-settings-daemon be running, which forces it’s opinions on many other aspects of my environment (I run Enlightenment dr17).

Poking around a bit, and help [...]

Things are a little messy…

I’ve had some minor upgrade issues with the blog lately, and I am only about halfway through updating everything. In the meantime, I’m afraid things will look a bit messy. (Syntax highlighting is currently broken, and there are probably other formatting / data issues as well. I think I have to restore [...]

The Linux Tablet: Wacom rotations – waking up on the wrong side

Update: updated the script with improved (functional) error output. added notes about xhost.

There is an annoying bug in the sequence of code that manages the wacom rotation / sleep / resume and stylus calibration right now. (Where “right now” is Ubuntu Intrepid, with the 0.8.2-1 wacom drivers.)

This is a document bug over at the [...]

The Linux Tablet: Wacom drivers

Ubuntu 8.10 configured most everything properly, as mentioned in the previous post in this series, but it did not result in a functional pen.

The tablet screen is a wacom digitizer with a pen that has two buttons (eraser and a finger button), and the tablet can differentiate between touching and hovering. The linux wacom [...]