The fire road to the swimming hole was quite steep, and I lost at least one beer along the way. Several large cities around the world blend tame and wild elements within the same boundaries. Portland, where I attended university, is certainly one of them. Its park, within a 15-minute bike ride of the city centre, covers more than 5,000 acres and offers some of Portland’s best cycling. Sydney, where I now live, has similarly impressive attractions. Yesterday, I visited Warragamba Park, just outside Penrith, after a morning of work at the Richmond campus, where I also caught up with Nathan.

For the last year YS and I have been studying French once a week (4.5hr on Saturday!) A few months ago I wrote some Python code to read the RSS feeds of the most popular French newspaper site, and then kept track of the count of each word. I repeated this every week for a few months. In the end I had a database of the top ~3000 words used on the site. Today I decided I wanted to play with Processing, so created this little word collage. It is 1680x1050, my monitor’s resolution. Two thumbs up for Processing!

The best balcony in Sydney for viewing the fireworks. I had always been very lucky on New Year’s Eve here in Sydney. The first year, I had a friend who owned an apartment on one of the piers beside the Harbour Bridge. The views were spectacular. Last year, I decided to be a little creative and boarded the train I estimated would cross the bridge just as the fireworks began, and it worked perfectly. This year, I decided to do something a little different and once again ended up being very, very lucky.

Alexandru T. and I have exchanged a few emails, and he sent through a few helpful suggestions that were provided from ICOP. I have included them below. Thanks Alexandru! Install Debian 5.0 on a normal PC (using a netinst image, for minimal install) After installation boot normally from the same PC Then, take the kernel from ftp://icop.com.tw/DIS_info/VDX/operating_system/VDX_Linux/linux-image-2.6.30-vortex86mx_1.0_i386.deb and then issue the following commands : # dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.30-vortex86mx_1.0_i386.deb # update-initramfs -k 2.6.30-vortex86mx -c # update-grub # restart Then take the hard-drive and install it on the Vortex86DX When GRUB menu appears, press “e” and modify the boot loader as …

As a preface, I take absolutely no credit for the below instructions. Stefan L kindly sent these through these instructions on installing Debian on the 3310A. I need to send a special thanks to Stefan, as I receive a lot of emails about the 3310 - but I don’t have one, so I can’t really do much: The only edit I’ve done is change out the links to my files on S3. If you find these helpful, or want to suggest an alteration, please leave a comment.

Nearly everyone on our team stayed up the entire night; most of us didn’t sleep at all. It had been years since I last pulled an all-nighter, but they had always been for good causes. I had just completed another one and had an immense amount of fun in the process. The reason? GovHack. GovHack aimed to encourage the Australian government to make as much information openly available as possible. The challenge was to take the scattered pieces of information already available and turn them into useful tools or visualisations for the public.

I’ve been using Atheros for quite some time, and I’ve always liked the madwifi drivers. They allowed really easy switching into monitor mode, and decent levels of packet injection. However, since I’m mostly in an office now, instead of writing web apps in cafes and trying to score free internet, I don’t really need anything fancy. My gentoo stage 1 (3?) days are over. I use Ubuntu, because I’m lazy, and it mostly works.

I’ve noticed my django-tagging install has been giving a lot of empty entries when doing a lookup on a tag. Tonight I finally got around to looking at what was causing this. This is surely not the best way to do this, but at 12:00am on a weekday, well, I shouldn’t be doing it in the first place… I first wanted to see what type of content was generating the error:

Status: ✅ I’m currently studying French, and if you’ve read any of this site, you’ll notice I’m a bit of a techie. Often several of my interests collide, which is what happened today. I was searching for the “most frequent french words,” and while I found some lists, nothing was exactly what I wanted. My desire was to have a PDF of the top few thousand most used French words. With the English translation next to it. In order. I’ve found some great resources, which I’ll list now

For one of my projects I’m testing an SMS gateway, and decided it would be fun to build a useful alarm clock out of it. For those of you who know Python, you may find this funny. /dev/ttyUSB0 is my Arduino with a temperature sensor. The gateway credentials and phone numbers below are fictional placeholders. import serial import urllib2 def check_temp(): ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB0', 9600) t = ser.readline().strip() return float(t) t = check_temp() if int(t) < 8: message = "It+is+now+%f+degrees;+time+to+get+moving." % t f = …