Thinkpad X200 Unboxing I just got my hands on the Thinkpad X200 that I ordered nearly 2 months ago. I’m planning on writing a few posts on getting Ubuntu installed, but in the meantime I thought I’d be lame and do an unboxing since I’m so excited. The box was pretty small, I was worried that they just shipped the…

VirtualBox on Linux: my new workstation virtualization setup I just thought that I would make a quick note on a new virtualization solution that I have been using on Linux (and why I switched from VMware server). VirtualBox was created by a company called Innotek. Sun eventually bought the company and continued development of VirtualBox as a compliment to its…

Thoughts on the meaning of hacking There have always been many interpretations of the word hacking and the much maligned/revered hacker. In my childhood, I loved to take things apart. Anything that I found interesting, I would want to peek inside and see what I could see. In time I began getting a magazine called Radio Electronics, which would print…

Korg NanoPad under Ubuntu Linux I just got a Korg NanoPad for Christmas. I wasn’t sure how well it was going to work under Linux, but I’m happy to report that snd-usb-audio recognized it right away when I plugged it in. Even the Kontrol Editor software (Windows or Mac only) worked under WINE.

Installing Sproutcore on Ubuntu 7.04 I know, I know, 7.04 is old now, but I still haven’t upgraded my laptop. I tried the standard $ sudo gem install sproutcore but I had issues with nokogiri: Install required dependency nokogiri? [Yn] Y Select which gem to install for your platform (i486-linux) nokogiri 1.0.6 (ruby) nokogiri 1.0.6 (x86-mswin32-60) nokogiri 1.0.5 (x86-mswin32-60) nokogiri…

Silicon Valley Google Technology User’s Group I just got back yesterday from a trip out to Silicon Valley. Most of the trip was geared towards seeing some family and relaxing, but I checked around on meetup.com to see what kind of tech events I could crash during my trip. Well, it turns out that there was a meet up of…

Microsoft takes a page from the book of Emacs I recently downloaded the Microsoft Oslo SDK in order to check out where MS is heading in the world of domain specific languages. Before I really even dug into the M compiler or any of the other actual bits of the Oslo technology, I saw something in the installation called Intellipad.…

Writing Twitter Bots I’m in the middle of writing a Twitter bot, but Twitter just went down. Maybe some parts are working, but right now twitter.com points to some staging server of theirs, probably as a result of some misconfiguration on their part. Thus, I think maybe it is appropriate to blog about it since I don’t want to completely…

Tabbed Browsing is Useless Well, the idea of tabbed browsing is good, it’s just the implementation that sucks. Allow me to explain. The idea of having several open web pages within a single application window is a great idea. This solves the problem of having lots of browser application windows sucking up OS resources and cluttering the task bar with…

Thinkpad T61 Ultrabay Eject under Ubuntu Gutsy I was toying with the idea of adding a second hard disk to my Thinkpad recently, but I remember reading some time ago that ejecting the Ultrabay device was not supported under Linux. However, I was just reading here that eject should work with my configuration (2.6.22 kernel, ata_piix kernel module). I poked…