Monthly Archives: September 2009

Balthasar Week 2 Report

Posted by Eric Shull on September 25, 2009 1 comments

In a post a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned setting up a new GoogleCode project. I’m happy to say that Balthasar is coming along nicely. For details on what Balthasar is and how to get involved, read on.

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I knew it! (bing!)

Posted by Tom Schultz on September 20, 2009 None comments

I knew there was something in the back of my mind that didn’t seem right about Bing.com!

Bing is a disease!

Myth of the Genius Programmer

Posted by Eric Shull on September 13, 2009 1 comments

While I was setting up a GoogleCode Project the other day, I stumbled across the video The Myth of the Genius Programmer, a presentation put on by a couple of guys from Google. They’ve got a lot of good stuff to say about open source projects, getting them underway, and making them successful. The most useful advice for me (at this point in time) is to get out there–nothing will happen if you never show anybody what you’re working on. What are your tips for working with open source?

(Kudos to Steve for actually having contributed to open source projects.)

3D Widget Library

Posted by Eric Shull on September 11, 2009 None comments

I’ve been mulling over a 3D widget library for some time. The trouble is: how does one create a widget library in the first place? I’ve found plenty of regular widget libraries (buttons, labels, drop-down menus, list boxes, etc.) but nothing with pizazz. I experimented with making my own using Pyglet and PyOpenGL, but those are mostly suited to making graphics, not interaction. PyMT has interaction with their widgets (as evidenced by the videos, I haven’t personally gotten the code to work since I don’t have a multi-touch interface), but judging from their source code, they use some simple 2D math to register whether an object was touched. I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to click 3D objects with the mouse.

To make a long story short, I’m calling for help. Does anyone know of a way to make 3D graphics that respond to mouse clicks? Any other thoughts on a 3D widget library? I’d love to hear your ideas!

Public IP

Posted by decoy on September 10, 2009 None comments

When you work with computers and networks, you often need to know the public-facing IP address of the device you’re working on.  There are tons of sites out there that can give you that information, but many of them are cluttered with ads or other HTML code you don’t really want to deal with if you want to get your external IP on the command line.

I used to use checkip.dyndns.org.

$ curl checkip.dyndns.org
<html><head><title>Current IP Check</title></head><body>Current IP Address: xx.xxx.xx.xxx</body></html>

It was pretty simple and straightforward, but it still had HTML code to strip out.

I came across a better site for this today, icanhazip.com.

$ curl icanhazip.com
xx.xxx.xx.xxx

Let me know what you think or if you know of one that’s better.  I’m betting you’ll have a hard time coming up with one that is more simple than icanhazip.com though.

Week in Links – 09/04/09

Posted by decoy on September 3, 2009 None comments

I didn’t have the patience for Friday to get here, so I had to start the Week in Links post early.  Here are a lot of sites that I’ve been looking at lately:

  1. Unclutterer
  2. Unclutterer Workspaces (Flickr Group)
  3. ghacks
  4. lifehacker
  5. Hack a Day
  6. IKEA Cable Management
  7. Linux Journal
  8. Linux Journal – Add desktop notifications in your scripts
  9. InterfaceLIFT
  10. The Onion
  11. milw0rm
  12. attrition.org
  13. L0phtcrack
  14. Snipplr
  15. Grooveshark
  16. Neatorama
  17. EPL Talk
  18. EPL Standings
  19. Server Fault
  20. Stack Overflow