For years, I have been a big fan of the usenet newsgroups. I think it’s one of the best little niches left on the internet, and it has one of the best ranges in content…  On usenet, you can have civilized, academic conversation, or unruly flame-wars between fanatics. You can also find some of the coolest binaries available on the net…hard-to-find music, out of print books in e-text, and pictures ranging from serene wallpapers to…well just about anything.

When Ubuntu’s newest version, Karmic Koala, came out, I was very dismayed to find that the distribution of the Pan newsreader available via the Synaptic package manager was broken.  Basically, any image that was posted as multi-part refused to load in the default window.

With some help from the folks on the pan-users mailing list, I was finally able to compile the code from a source repository being kept up by K.Haley, pan’s volunteer coder.  But I thought it might be nice to provide a step-by-step guide for newer linux users, as the whole process of downloading source from a github repository, the tracking down of the necessary development libraries, and the entire compilation process can be daunting.  Therefore, I came up with the following list of commands to run to get a patched version of Pan running from a normal install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m starting to design a Amateur Radio Contest Logging program for Mac OS X.

So, in essence, this is a shout-out to any Amateur Radio Operators out there who use OS X…what features are important in a contest logger.  What features would be on your “nice to have” list?

I definitely will be working on features important for Field Day usage, but what other contests do Mac users participate in?

My intent is for this to be a no-cost, open-source program. Please keep in mind that I will be starting out slowly, then building in more complex features later.

The following graphic was taken off of a local Cincinnati news site.

Can YOU spot why this computer won’t get Conficker?  HINT:  It’s not because of an Anti-Virus program!

This coming Sunday is my favorite Sunday of the year: “Selection Sunday”, and that means that I’m tweaking my yearly NCAA Auto-Picker! It’s currently using generic teams, but all that will change when the committee announces their picks.

What is it?

It’s a webpage that auto-generates a bracket for the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament (also known as “March Madness”).

Why did you make this?

Picking a mediocre bracket is easy! For each game, pick the team with the lowest number (the lower seed, or the “better team”) as the winner. In later rounds, you might have equally-seeded teams up against one another (two #1 seeds might meet in the Final Four, for example). For those, you can either flip a coin or watch ESPN to get the conventional wisdom. However…every year there are teams that buck the conventional wisdom and beat teams with lower seeds. This makes it very very difficult to pick a GREAT bracket – one that will win your office tournament. I SUCK at picking great brackets, so I made this page to help figure out which upsets might be likely. Plus, I’m lazy…

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, isn’t this interesting? Google has decided to put the smackdown on Microsoft (and to a lesser extent to Firefox) by launching their own open-source browser, called Chrome

They even explain in an online comic-book why they’re doing this (to give back to the ‘net that made them, and to drive innovation – in short, to Not Be Evil), and how Chrome will be different…and better.

I’ll be downloading this today, and will post impressions later on.

Ok, it’s simple, but it’s an application that’s not just a “Hello World!” knockoff.

This is a mac implementation of the xkcd website’s geohashing spontaneous adventure generator. It runs on OSX 10.4 and above. It MAY run on pre-Tiger versions of OSX, but I provide no support, and don’t guarantee that it’ll run on those.

Download it!

So one of the things I’ve been trying to accomplish in my free time for the past few months has been learning to program my iMac. I’m capable of writing a script, a VB program, and I understand (most) basic Object-Oriented Programming concepts, but for some reason, Cocoa & Objective C are very hard to understand.

Topping it off, all of the books out there now are based around XCode 2, not the new XCode 3 that came with Leopard. XCode 3 changes some of the concepts that are used time and again throughout your development process: things like instantiating classes within Interface Builder. They’re all things that, given time, you figure out…but it’s just annoying enough to cause problems when going through a programming book for the first time.

This blog entry does a really good job of stepping through a basic program in XCode 3, using Cocoa & Objective C concepts.

Long Pointers » XCode 3.0 Tutorial

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