Google enticing more developers

A couple of recent developments with Google. Firstly, they have released their Javascript tools, collectively called Closure (not to be confused with Clojure). Secondly, they have released a Creative Commons-licensed compiled language called Go (watch the teaser video below).

I haven’t had time to play with either of these tools. It’s nice to see that Go can be compiled for Mac OS X (my platform of choice).

Minor CueCat hacking

I bought a CueCat from LibraryThing to make it easier to scan my books. However, by default, it outputs some weird encoding. This is OK for use with LibraryThing, since they can decode the CueCat output. However, not so great with Delicious Library, which can’t.

Fortunately, they must have gotten enough questions about it and they posted a simple solution. Basically, disconnect pin 5 of one of the chips on the circuit board. Beats the more complex solutions for some of the older models. And it works like a charm.

Anyway, what’s a bit ironic is that I got one of these for free right when they first came out. It was a promo with Wired magazine. I think I threw it away. It used a PS/2 interface rather than USB, anyway.

How Google Chrome stores passwords

Well, I’ve been a bit hesitant to save passwords when using Google Chrome because it does not ask for a “Master Password” like Firefox does. So, I didn’t know if it encrypted the stored passwords, or if it did encrypt them, where it got the encryption key from. Then I found this article which looks at the source code for Chrome on Windows to see that it uses a Windows system call to encrypt the password using the user’s Windows password. Nice.

Which means that this is one component that they have to keep re-writing on various platforms to use whatever is native. Which is probably why Mozilla went with their own scheme.

Python 3.0

Wow, I’ve really been out of the loop. My favorite language, Python, is now up to release 3.0. From the release notes: “Python 3.0 (a.k.a. "Python 3000" or "Py3k") is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases.”

Technorati Tags: bettie page, python, programming, language

Rip and encode

So, I got frustrated at the awkwardness of ripping a CD to MP3 on Linux (Fedora in particular), so I wrote this little Python script. It rips the current CD to the current directory using cdda2wav, and then calls LAME to encode to MP3, naming the files by track number and name. Requires: cdda2wav, LAME, and Python. Python and cdda2wav are available in the standard Fedora distribution. You will have to get LAME elsewhere, or download the source and build it yourself.

Geek out.

Technorati Tags: cd, cdda2wav, encode, lame, linux, mp3, programming

I say Tomato, you say DD-WRT

So, after being a bit frustrated at stability, and seemingly non-functioning Quality of Service (QoS) control with DD-WRT, I switched to Tomato. Specifically, the SpeedMod build by Rodney Chua (a Malaysian hacker) with some updates and improvements over the current Tomato build. Improvements include back-patched code from Linux 2.4.21 into the 2.4.20 of the Tomato firmware.

This is all running on my Buffalo WHR-HP-G54, which has a built-in amplifier and decent amount of RAM. Anyway, I had been running DD-WRT for well over a year with no serious issues. However, the router did have a tendency to hang about once a month. In addition, I never was sure if the QoS worked well. (DD-WRT and Tomato are open source firmware which runs on a popular wifi router chipset, first widely used in a Linksys WRT model wifi router. The firmware uses a Linux kernel, and makes a cheap home router into a serious bit of networking gear. See the Wikipedia entry.)

So, a month ago, I switched our apartment from Comcast to RCN. It was a no-brainer: faster net service (10 Mbps instead of 6 Mbps), no Torrent munging (I always saw my Torrents die), plus better cable TV service (HD, DVR, HBO), all at a lower price. Since then, I’ve been very satisfied with RCN. My Torrents do not die with odd errors, I don’t experience frequent outages of connectivity, and I get to record Dr. Who.

Anyway, doing a bit of Googling about QoS led me to a bunch of blog and forum posts where people said they liked Tomato better. As of yesterday, I’m running Tomato. So far, so good. I like the lightweight UI for configuration. I like the detailed QoS settings. And I love the bandwidth usage data.

Oh, and I’ve now had this blog for about 5 years.

Technorati Tags: buffalo, dd-wrt, firmware, tomato, whr-hp-g54, wifi, wrt

Gmailto

I use GMail and want to have mailto: links be handled by GMail’s web interface, rather than Mail.app. Jack Dorsey wrote a simple handler program called GMailto. It was nice: set it as the default email application, and any email links clicked would call up GMail’s new message composing page.

Then, it stopped working. Thankfully, source code is available, and I was able to make the little mods to get it working again. Here’s the hacked source. You’ll need to compile it yourself with XCode.

Technorati Tags: gmail, gmailto, google, mail

MorMortran

And, after looking at various major mode files, I’ve managed to hack up a rudimentary major mode for Mortran in Emacs. Here it is.

Technorati Tags: emacs, font lock, hacking, programming, mortran, syntax highlighting

Mortran

So, for work, I have to deal with this “language” called Mortran. Technically, it’s a macro pre-processor that converts Mortran code to Fortran. It does make for easier reading than vanilla Fortran77.

Anyway, I’m accustomed to having syntax coloring in my editors to help get a quick view of the “bones” of the code. Since Mortran is such an ancient and little-used language, none of the editors I used have a package to colorize Mortran code.

I tried hacking one up for Emacs, but my Elisp is quite a bit rusty, and I got nowhere after a couple of hours. So, I turned to Textmate, the editor I use on my Mac. It has a simpler syntax for writing colorizers. Et voilà, I now have a colorizer package for Mortran.

I do still want to hack something up for Emacs, though, since I still use it as my primary editor on Linux.

Technorati Tags: hacking, mortran, programming, syntax highlighting, textmate

The Joy of Coding Together

One thing about working as an academic researcher who does a lot of programming that I dislike is that I frequently work alone. Contrast this with a typical open source project with moderate levels of activity, for instance nmh, a command-line mail client (MUA for you geeks). (I’ve submitted a few fixes to exmh, a related project.) Anyway, I’ve been following the discussions on nmh-workers (like this one), and I love the collaborative work that happens.

Technorati Tags: coding, hacking, nmh-workers, open source, programming