During the day I like to listen to various audio streams so I find myself switching back and forth between music and news.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could play streams for a given amount of time?  I couldn’t find anything that did it automatically so I wrote this quick Python program to do [...]

I haven’t written about procan in a while but I have been quietly working on it in the background.   This release brings UI improvements, namely an ncurses interface as well as some other small performance improvements and optimizations.  If you are not aware of it, ProcAn is an adaptive process analysis tool meant to [...]

I’ve been working on this project for a little while now, it involves a couple of products from Gumstix.  A Connex 400xm-bt, a WifiStix-CF, and a GPSstix (which includes audio, lcd hookups, and gps).  This project is actually intended for multiple purposes including a wearable computer and a car computer.   I chose Gumstix because [...]

Lately I have been so swamped with crap that I’m working on that I’m finding it difficult to prioritize what needs to be done, especially on the micro-scale.  As an engineer I like to break things down into small, easy to digest pieces that can be completed easily and whose existence can be combined with [...]

There’s a project that I’ve been helping out on lately.  Headed up by Meethune and Schick. Check it out here:   https://rssnewzbin.mercymachines.mine.nu It’s a Python program for Linux/BSD that uses saved Newzbin searches and Hellanzb to automatically download new releases based on the search criteria.

libkvm is a system for accessing kernel virtual memory via /dev/mem, it also has facilities for examining crashdumps..  It was introduced in SunOS but is also present in the BSDs.  In Procan I use kvm to analyze the kernel’s process tree in FreeBSD.  I had hoped that I could also do this in OSX.  It [...]

Finally, after two days of work, OS X is installed my Acer Aspire… though not without some issues. My wireless card doesn’t work and neither does the USB. The built-in 915 Graphics card does work very well, however, with both Quartz Extreme and Core-Image working beautifully. I think USB will be fixed with a BIOS [...]

ProcAn 0.7 Here’s a summary of the changes: * Added a Pipe/Plugin Mode (Suggested by Matt Schick) * Further cleanup of the collector and analyzer. * Provided some example plugins in ./plugins. * SIGUSR1 will reset ProcAn’s internal statistics counters. There is a known bug in OpenBSD that is causing periodic segfaults… I’m trying to [...]

Today I was hoping to make the next release of ProcAn however I had some trouble with my primary Arch repository. I had changed the permissions of my local project tree and I after checking in my changes it completely wiped out the repository. It looks like previous versions were unaffected, but several revisions on [...]

Designing effective and attractive applications for the web is pretty difficult. For me, developing these applications is pretty cumbersome because it is inherently different than developing host applications. Having recently started working on a web application I began to evaluate some options. I knew that I wanted to use PHP for the server-side code and [...]