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Readying for launch

To correct my earlier post, the kite festival is actually tomorrow, March 29, not March 28th. Our final count for # of kites between the two of us is 5. I couldn’t find a spar for #6. (Why do I have 6 kites?) Meanwhile, I still need to finish up my 10-kite rollup bag tonight.

On the programming front, I officially posted OMFS for kernel inclusion as I’m tired of having to make minor changes every time someone updates the VFS api. The #ifdef jungle was getting dense. So far the review hasn’t been overwhelmingly negative, so maybe this will encourage me to flesh out the remaining unimplemented features that the FUSE version has.

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Diebold: With a Vengance

If there was any doubt (who am I kidding) that election machine manufacturers are pure evil, check out the nastygram Ed Felten got from Sequoia. Incidentally, my home county election officials are batshit insane on this issue. Notice “[printable]” doesn’t mean “voter verifiable.” Just because they can print from it doesn’t mean they do.

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Brute force ftw

I write dumb scripts with git! Here’s how to (slowly / automatically) remove any @SuppressWarnings annotations that don’t do anything:

for i in `grep -rl @SuppressWarnings src` ; do
echo $i
cp $i $i.tmp
grep -v "@SuppressWarnings" $i.tmp > $i
rm $i.tmp
git-commit -a -m "Disable warning suppressions for $i"
ant compile > build.txt

res=`grep "[javac].*error" build.txt || 
grep "[javac].*warning" build.txt`

if [[ ! -z $res ]]; then
echo error!
git-reset --hard HEAD~1
fi
done

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cat

I updated my resume today. I’m still not sold on the “Other Experience” section, but on the other hand, I surely learned a lot more doing that stuff than doing the job that pays the bills. It could use a better title at least.

My brother-in-law was visiting this weekend, helping Ange study for an upcoming difficult medicine exam. So I had lots of time to kill. I released a new version of OMFS for kernel 2.6.25, and finished up the man-eating panda kite. (He enjoys human flesh, I assure you.)

And, I welcomed a new tool into the fold: a Steinel temperature controlled heat gun. This is ostensibly for pulling the tile off the wall in my bathroom, but I’m sure I can find additional uses for a hair dryer that hits 1200 degrees. I only got to spend a few minutes testing it on thinset adhesive in my bathroom, but they were an exciting few minutes. I look forward to a day or two of salvaging components from junk PCBs when I next get some free time.

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Panda Kite


Panda Kite Applique
Originally uploaded by bluesterror

Here’s my first kite since the Pokemon rok. The Smithsonian kite festival is on March 28 this year, and the theme is “China.” I tried, and more or less failed, to make a kite last year in time for the same event. But here we are a year on and I’ve learned a lot since then.

The hanzis supposedly say ‘China’ in simplified Chinese, but really I’m just guessing. I chose a “small” (3 feet by 4 feet) sail for this one because I wanted to be able to get it mostly done in a day, which I did. It still needs hemming and framing but otherwise it’s ready to go.

With a couple of store-bought kites and four homemade ones, my kite bag is going to be rather full this year, so take that as an invitation to head down to the Mall and fly one for me!