Josh Perry - Curiously Nerdy (Page 2)

PuTTY, TMUX and NPM

I use PuTTY often when I'm on a Windows machine to connect to my Linux boxes to do work. I also use TMUX and NPM which both do line-drawings to display UI. NPM When listing a tree of installed modules, NPM uses lines to

Disable GUI on the BeagleBone Black

I've been using the BeagleBone Black [http://beagleboard.org/Products/BeagleBone%20Black] as a headless web application server. For this purpose I don't want X Windows or GDM slowing the boot process and taking up precious resources. I looked around for ways to disable

Node.js Sprinkler Controller - Part 1

Why is it that every spring there is something broken on my sprinkler system? This year my, supposedly waterproof, commercial-grade sprinkler controller ended up being non-responsive; leaving my whole sprinkler system as a useless, mindless, zombie moaning for brains. What does a software/hardware

jQuery Form Serialization Plugin

For a number of projects I've needed to serialize all of the values in a form on the client to JSON in order to post the data back to the server via AJAX. Here's a little jQuery plugin I wrote to help with this

Bitbucket Support for git and Attractive Pricing

I've been using github [http://github.com] for quite a while for working against open-source code bases, but continued to use my own git installation for private repositories; and I did this because of their pricing model. Their UI is very nice, and their

Why Use an Object Relational Mapper

I occasionally (still!) get in heated discussions with fellow developers on the finer points of writing -- or generating -- data access code versus using an O/RM. Usually this discussion is happening at a restaurant or some social gathering place (yes we socialize)

Hiding ReaderWriterLockSlim housekeeping in a using statement

Fredrik Mörk has an interesting post [http://softwareblog.alcedo.com/post/2010/03/07/Using-extension-methods-to-hide-infrastructure-code.aspx] on using extension methods to hide housekeeping code related to protecting access to a share resource using a ReaderWriterLockSlim. I recommend reading the article, but the short of

Exiting a Windows Phone Application

Turns out that the Application Certification Requirements [http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9730558] 4.2.5 expressly disallows calling any methods in the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game and .Graphics assemblies when your application uses any methods from the System.Windows.Controls namespace. So

Budgeting Cisco PoE for Aastra SIP Phones

I recently implemented a 45 phone FreeSWITCH [http://freeswitch.org/] system (if Asterisk is a mean and unforgiving Chef Ramsay, FreeSWITCH is Paula Deen, but that's for another post). With this number of handsets I definitely wanted to use a Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) switch feed

Using Git with Visual Studio C# and VB.NET projects

I just recently started using git for source control with some C++ projects and have been loving it! Naturally, I also wanted to start using it with some C# .NET projects in Visual Studio. There are a number git add-ons for Visual Studio but

Linq Aggregate Empty Sequence

Linq is great for its compact expressions, and for its -- usually efficient -- lazy-evaluation. These two virtues seem to be spit upon by the Aggregate function. Say you want to aggregate a list of ints. var s = new int[] {1, 2, 3}; int

Opera Mini on the iPhone, for now

So, today(2010-04-13) it was announced [http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2010/04/13/] that Opera Mini for the iPhone had been accepted by Apple and indeed it was revealed in the Appstore [http://itunes.apple.com/app/opera-mini-web-browser/id363729560?mt=8] within

Gentoo Installation Bullet-point List

I install Gentoo often enough that the Gentoo Handbook [http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml] is way too verbose, but not often enough to memorize the steps involved. This list is meant mainly for me, but also for anyone who is

C++/CLI Converting from String to wchar_t and to char*

I recently started working on a managed wrapper for the Terminal Services API, and as my C++/CLI is a bit rusty I ran into some issues which I'm sure are common when trying to handle the impedance mismatch between the managed and unmanaged

Using the GPL as a Dual-Licensing Monopolistic Haven

Can a company control the use of their software intellectual property more completely if they release it under the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL)? I hadn't really thought about it before, but while researching the OSS position of MySql I read an interesting

Modifying only directory permissions using find

I recently went through my web directories and updated the permissions to be more inline with recommended security practices. When setting web file permissions in Linux you want to set execute permissions on a directory to allow listing and traversal, but you don't want

Jeff Atwood of Borg-StackOverflow Careers Assimilation

[https://curiouslynerdy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Jeff_of_Borg.jpg] I've found StackOverflow to be a fun and vibrant community as well as an almost daily touchstone for programming and tech problems. Because of my enjoyment of the site I've started listening to

Subclipse for SVN on Eclipse CDT

Subversion is a great way to work on code in a collaborative fashion. There are a couple subversion plugins that work with Eclipse, one of them is called Subclipse. To install Subclipse in Eclipse goto the Help menu and choose "Software Updates...". Once the

USB Communications Device Class on 64-bit Windows

There is a class of device specified by the USB-IF as a Communication Device, this class was meant to to include devices such as modems, and network adapters. This specification is detailed as the Communications Device Class (CDC). Ever since USB has replaced RS-232

Palm Afraid of anti-"TiVoization"

Palm Inc. with the release of their Linux powered smartphone called the Pre, now has a vested interest in the group of manufacturers using Linux as their embedded OS. As opposed to companies like Apple and their BSD based OSX in the iPhone Linux

Windows 7 RC Fish

When the Win7 beta was released Microsoft had a witty default background greet new users. The background consisting of a Betta [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betta] (get it? beta, Betta?) fish and 7 bubbles was a well-done, light and colorful. Now that the

Qualcomm Gobi WWAN Card on Windows 7

The latest 64-bit version of most vendor's drivers now work fine without following these instructions or using GobiLoader. I updated my Thinkpad to Win7 Retail x64 using Lenovo System Update to install all the drivers and now my Gobi card works great even

Backing up local files on your Data Protection Management Server

When creating a new protection group in DPM 2007 RTM you are presented with a list of computers on your network that have the DPM client installed. The DPM server itself is in this list as it also runs the client for various reasons,