Dennis M. Ritchie

Thu 13 October 2011 by jillian

According to filesystem timestamps, I wrote this 4/9/1998. I know where I was seated when I wrote it, and it was definitely

spring, so that date is plausible.

It seemed apropos, given Dennis' passing, to post it now.

Hopefully, those who might be offended will remember that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.

DMR is my shepherd; I shall not want
He maketh me to write code sans disasters:
He leadeth me around the null pointers.

He restoreth my tapes: he leadeth me
In the paths of UNIX for its name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley
Of the shadow of Wintel, I will fear no evil:
The Source is with me; my root password and group staff
They comfort me.

He prepareth a server before me in
defiance of Slick Willy Gates:
He protecteth my filesystems from Usenet;
My Sun runneth faster.

Surely network and printer shall work for me
All the days of my life: and I will dwell
With my data intact for ever.

Two Turntables... and a Microcontroller - Part 1

Sun 28 November 2010 by jillian

My father is into HO railroading. He's got quite the layout in-progress in his garage. However, he's having trouble finding DCC turn-tables for his engine-yards. The ones he can find are expensive and back-ordered. My brother and I decided it would be a fun project for an Arduino (or three …

Rainy afternoon Robotics, or the "Frankentruck FT-5"

Mon 02 August 2010 by jillian

So, the day turned rainy and there is a somewhat rigorous moratorium here on desktop computing. I decided that didn't include supervised robotics. Full details, more pics and movie mayhem after the break.

The wee Lad and Lass contributed time, hands, materials and ideas. I "happened to have on hand …

Regex for Java in Unicode...

Sat 29 August 2009 by jillian

Think The Producers' "Springtime... in Germany" when reading the title, it might make slightly more sense...

A friend of mine was recently posed a challenge by hir instructor in an introductory Java class. The challenge was (sic.) "I was recently writing a program to generate usernames from the first seven …

A UNIX Wizard...

Sat 01 August 2009 by jillian

So, I heard "Pinball Wizard" on the radio the other day and it reminded me of a parody called "UNIX Wizard..." While googling for the text for all of you, I also ran across this "UNIX Heirarchy," which explains the difference between mere mortals and sucessive progress towards enlightenment.

Unix …

Integrated Gallery While You Post...

Wed 22 July 2009 by jillian

I wanted to use Drupal to post pictures, much as LiveJournal can. However, I already have... an image gallery. And, while it is a good and wondrous thing to have the gallery integrated with Drupal, what I really wanted was to be able to nicely choose images mid-post, without having …

USCGC Mackinaw

Mon 13 July 2009 by jillian

The USCGC Mackinaw pulled into the bay this afternoon, shortly after lunchtime. What she was doing, exactly, is anyone's guess, but she appears to be capable of tending buoys, and that seemed to be what she was doing. After work, she still hadn't left, so I lugged the telescope down …

Office 2007 / DOCX files got you down?

Thu 07 August 2008 by jillian

Recently a few people have asked me how to open DOCX files, which are created in Word 2007 / Office 2007. I have found 4 solutions so far:

Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is perhaps the canonical solution. It won't make new Office 2007 documents, but I …

You ain't all that.

Mon 10 October 2005 by jillian

Very few things amuse me more than insignificant wannabes who think they can own my box for more than a few minutes. My system paged me last night about 5 minutes after some dork exploited a hole in Drupal 4.6.1 and started laying down tracks all over /tmp …

Taming the beast - Part 3

Thu 02 June 2005 by jillian

As a brief follow-up to my experiences with the Tiger upgrade, I have some news about my iFruit. As you may recall, I had trouble syncing my PDA after updating to Tiger. The fine people at Mark Space made a valiant effort to walk me through isolating the issue, with …