Bitwise Evolution

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

Category: tech

The path to a Linux Tablet

I finally broke down and bought a Lenovo X61 tablet (with SXGA+ screen!), and it arrived this week. This is the first of a series of posts about getting it up and running with Linux.

First off, some specs:

Lenovo X61 Tablet PC with XSGA+ (1400×1050) screen (not multi-touch) 4 gigs of ram 200gb SATA hard disk WIFI (Intel [...]

Treat your mailing lists like reference documents, please.

I desperately needed to find out why the tutorials I’ve been following for an Eclipse PDE task today kept referencing a startup.jar file that I could not locate.

A couple google searches later turned up this link:

http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.platform/msg62159.html

The poster in that thread had the same problem (back in Feb. 2007), and found the answer, but none of [...]

Auto-documenting OSGi CommandProviders

(Edit: If you’re reading this after OSGi R4.2, then there is almost certainly a better way to accomplish the same thing)

I’ve been digging into OSGi a bit over the last week or so inorder to create some Eclipse plugins that will automatically discover eachother, and I’ve been generally impressed with the framework on the whole. The documentation [...]

It’s called a docking station, Joel :)

The venerable Joel Spolsky asked recently why someone hasn’t made a device that clips to the back of a desk and:

* It’s a power strip * It’s a network hub * It’s a USB hub * You clamp it onto the back [...]

StackOverflow: Endorsing(?) content theft from day one

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood just launched the public beta of Stackoverflow today, with the intent of building a community for high-quality technical questions and answers. I’ve been using the site for about three weeks now, during the closed beta, and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that was outlined in Joel’s announcement post today:

Want [...]

Breaking away from Visio

The ‘proper’ way to do user interface design is hotly contested in the OSS software development world, and the discussions usually boil down to three suggestions:

“Just write it — it’s not that hard” “Use [glade|qt designer|netbeans|...] — all the widgets are there” “Just use pencil/pen/whiteboard/etc — it’s faster”

I don’t agree with any of these — (1) is [...]

Wrestling Python

With the launch of the StackOverflow beta I posed a question about python static analysis tools, as I have been playing with python and django recently for some side projects. The responses at Stack Overflow quickly pointed to PyChecker, PyFlakes and PyLint.

Over all, it was a disappointing experience. My experiences are outlined below, [...]

Cracking down on application clutter (or: my ${HOME} is my castle!)

There was once a time when your home directory was treated as a nearly sacred place, a safe haven where you had near complete control. This trust was only breached for very special reasons: user specific settings and background storage for applications could go in “dot-files”–the hidden files or directories that begin with a [...]

Creating Wizards in Java

A recent project at work required building a multi-step dialog to manage the interface between a user and an expert system (and some fairly advanced NLP to boot). On the surface this looked like a fairly standard Wizard problem — design a bunch of screens with questions, and then collect the answers as the [...]

Day to day Memoization

Memoization (not memorization) is the process of remembering the results of a computation for use later. (I think of it as “making a memo” to look back on later.) Memoization is the core to any dynamic programming implementation, and allows many simple algorithms to run in linear or polynomial time when they would otherwise take an exponential number [...]