http://pigsflew.com Realization of a Dream Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:29:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I started working last week for TripAdvisor.com, an internet travel supersite company--it may be the best employment I could possibly have hoped for. The team is full of incredibly smart, very personable people, the workplace is like anyone's dream of the dotcom boom, and the work is high-visibility, with heavy ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/490 So I updated about three weeks ago to the latest Ubuntu version, Hardy Heron. For the first time ever, on my largely unsupported laptop, everything works completely, without even the most minor reservations. Previous problems were: BCM43xx Wireless (Didn't work until Edgy, had to use NDiswrapper until Gutsy) ATI 300M Graphics (unable to ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/489 Dear Senator, I read in the paper the other day, yet another voter remarking their impression that "A vote for Hillary is just another vote for Bill, and he's had his chance." This common logic must be absolutely infuriating for you. Over the years you have shown yourself an incredibly intelligent, ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/488 I wrote a script tonight to quickly and intelligently mount ISO images, so that I can treat them as cd's without having burned them to physical discs. Something like that already exists, in the form of Nautilus scripts. Some creative Googling found the ones from here, which is actually fairly basic. ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/483 Us. Television Viewers. Now in reality, I watch exactly two television shows that have not been cancelled, and two television shows besides. The two that aren't over yet are Heroes (NBC) and Battlestar: Galactica (Sci-Fi). The two that are were Firefly (FOX) and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (NBC). Given this ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/482 I want to walk you through something I read a while ago and have been stewing on since. From October 18th in Wired Magazine, a robotic cannon killed nine people and wounded fourteen others. They wrote that these machines are supposed to select and aim at a target, and "[wait] only ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/480 Don Reisinger of CNet News.com wrote an article appearing on Slashdot today that talks about linux and its place in the consumer market. He illustrates a dichotomy between two different types of linux developers, but his conclusions are off-base. According to Reisinger, linux has either three directions from here: 1. Become ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/479 When the day came, I went to the spot and waited. And I seriously pity anyone who didn't go. They had jugglers. Live music. The best jungle gym ever. There were playpen balls and random toys. There was a mattress that got signed by Randall and I jumped off the jungle gym ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/478 I've set my laptop up as a dual-boot system now, so that I can do cross-platform development. Usually when you hear things like "I wish [program] was available for [operating system]", it follows this pattern: "I wish [windows program] was available for [Open source operating system (or OSX)]". I wish there ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/469 I'm doing research this semester on the structure of the internet, specifically by studying bandwidth information between bittorrent users. In order to do this, I've been collecting packets this morning using WinDump.exe, a windows port of the unix tcpdump command. This program effectively spews out information for every packet, in or ... http://pigsflew.com/archives/467