Use Ruby to Clean out bad text files
How I deal with these will be the subject of a future post. Please let me know any pointers on any of this. “ read more
Engineering & Code
Engineering & Code explores the full stack of modern tech—from bits and transistors to cloud fleets and formal proofs. Here you’ll find clear, rigorous walk-throughs of software design, embedded hardware, security architecture, and the physics that underpins them, always paired with code, schematics, and reasoning you can put to work.
MacBook Local Link Address — can it be fixed?
I have a bad, bad networking problem with my wife’s MacBook. She can’t connect to the internet anywhere, but I am working with my Netgear WNDR3300 for this problem. Our wireless router is dd-wrt based (open source router firmware), and works fine for about 20 other nodes (other laptops, guests, mobile devices, etc). A couple […] read more
Building Plots in Visio
I like to automate Microsoft Visio to draw plots. They look so much more professional and I don’t have to fuss with Excel to figure out how to make plots look like I want. Again, this is me practicing my theory of being in control, not letting software control us. Please let me know if […] read more
April 2011 Server Setup with Rails, Ubuntu, Nginx, RVM, Capistrano, Git
There are other blogs out there telling you how to set up a ruby server install with ubuntu, nginx, passenger, linode ubuntu 10.10, and rvm, but I couldn’t find one that put it all together, so I decided to share my setup from beginning to end. I hope it helps you, but I’m also hoping […] read more
Congressional District GIS Exploration
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [[‘$’,’$’], [‘(‘,’)’]]}}); I wanted to be able to do this with my ip address: I do development and consulting in two areas I really love: fitness and political engagement. For some work I’m doing on the latter, I needed to figure out the latitude and longitude of the geographic center for each of […] read more
Paperless Archive Makeover — ruby and unix to the rescue
I recently had to clean out my digital paperless archive — a task made much more difficult by encrypted PDFs and a bunch of lint in my directory. We have been paperless since 2001 and have many gigs of files in a hierarchical file structure that was becoming difficult to use and maintain. (i.e. Where […] read more
Thought piece on the mischaracterization of static radars
How is risk factored? Pr{Detect}? Essential Question: How bad of a mis-characterization is this? What specific scenarios create the greatest mis-characterization? What happens as you lengthen orbit? How much does directionality matter? How do speed and the various RF parameters matter? read more
pdf rtex
I love LaTeX and I love ruby/rails. I want to use rtex, it seems perfect for me. But, I am having trouble and am looking for help — once i get this working i’ll make a blog post for the world. First, do i have what it takes? tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which pdflatex /usr/bin/pdflatex tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which latex […] read more
getting git-svn up and running on ubuntu
tim@polycarp:~/web_apps$ git svn clone http://svn.fitwit.com Can't locate SVN/Core.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.0 /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.10.0 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.10 /usr/share/perl/5.10 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at /usr/local/libexec/git-core//git-svn line 29. so i realized i needed to install the perl git-svn libraries: sudo apt-get install git-core git-svn did the trick. enjoy. read more
Generating PDF files with RTeX
I love LaTeX and I love ruby/rails. I want to use rtex, it seems perfect for me. But, I am having trouble and am looking for help — once i get this working i’ll make a blog post for the world. First, do i have what it takes? tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which pdflatex /usr/bin/pdflatex tim@polycarp:~/test_rails$ which latex […] read more