David Grant

We ordered a bunch of shoes online for my daughter, from various American companies. One of them was Preschoolians (I'm not going to link to their site. There is an entire blog devoted to how much Preschoolians sucks but the last post was from 2006 so I decided to give them a try anyways.

I'm just trying out Linux Mint Debian Edition and the best part about it is how fast it is. The desktop is super responsive, almost feels like a new fresh Windows machine in that respect. User switching is also super fast and works perfectly, something that Ubuntu had never quite mastered. Most importantly, however, is the fact that it is not using Canonical's Unity, but instead it is still using Gnome 2.

I just had a listen to this CBC interview with some writer about the housing situation in Vancouver: Young Adults Leaving Vancouver.

It turns out Yelp doesn't suck after all. Well, ok, it did suck when 5 out of 5 of my reviews were filtered out, essentially flagged as spam. I wrote a bunch more reviews, and I guess I have now become a trusted reviewer, so now all my reviews are no longer filtered. Yah!

I have been having a hell of a time with my new Nexus S. The battery life has been abysmal. I have finally paid close attention to the battery use screen and began removing applications. These are the applications so far that were using a lot my battery's charge:

• Google Latitude - Cannot be uninstalled on a stock Android phone, so just log out of it.
• Twitter

Some applications were suprisingly good about not using up much battery:

• Gmail
• Skype

I'll update this list as I find more applications that use up lots of battery.

Update: Yelp has now un-filtered all my reviews.

My resume template is now available on CTAN, the TeX archive. This will make it easier for LaTeX users to use to create a resume. It is called tucv and the style file was created by George Louthan. Check it out!

I've just created my first Android application. I was surprised how simple it was to create but most of all how easy it was to deploy. It was available on the Android marketplace immediately with no hassle. I'll provide another post about once the application is a bit more mature. It's basically just a simple calculator application for physicians.

I got my wife an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S (the "Captivate" variety) and had a few challenges getting it set up.

Configuring the Fido APN

There are at least two ways to configure the Fido APN although you find even more configurations if you search online. I ended up getting the Fido APN settings from Rogers directly. The instructions were for the Nexus One, but it doesn't matter to Rogers/Fido what device you are using, all Smartphones look alike to the carrier as far as I can tell.

Here they are as they appear on my phone:

On ubuntu systems, you'll need the following packages: genisoimage and dvd+rw-tools.

If you have a folder named "mydvd" in your home directory containing a VIDEO_TS folder, cd to your home folder mydvd, then run:

cd ~
mkisofs -dvd-video -o mydvd.iso mydvd

This will produce a mydvd.iso file. To verify, run

isoinfo -l -i mydvd.iso

At this point, you don't actually have to create a DVD, you mount the ISO to a mount point and play the DVD as if it were mounted from disc.

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/iso
sudo mount -o loop mydvd.iso /mnt/iso

Watching the short-track speed skating and figure skating at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver I was reminded of the sheer awesomeness that is Rod Black. Some love him, others want to strangle him (or maybe just hit the mute button). Throughout the Olympics I jotted down some of the most puke-worthy and groan-worthy things Rod Black said. Then I went to CTV's website and uncovered a few more gems. I'll leave the delivery up to you. Make sure to use lots of long pauses and think of Rod and his glorious mustache (which he unfortunately shaved off).

Short-version:
Use NX. VNC sucks.

So the other day the WiFi stopped working on my Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop so after a little bit of troubleshooting and assumed the mini-PCI express wireless card was fried and ordered a new one from Dell's website. The new one didn't work either. Then I suddenly remembered that there was some sort of WiFi switch on the side of the laptop. I felt the switch and moved it moved it in the direction of "On" and it clicked! So it had been turned off! We move our laptop around a lot and somehow the switch had been switched to the off position accidentally.

Doing development, or more specifically deployment in a Windows 64-bit environment can be a frustrating experience. Let's start with a simple example from MSDN about the File System Redirector:

The %windir%\System32 directory is reserved for 64-bit applications . . . Whenever a 32-bit application attempts to access %windir%\System32, the access is redirected to a new directory, %windir%\SysWOW64

I know there are lots of ways to do this. This is not a HOW-TO, but just sharing a script I made for doing this. It's a decent example of how to write a command-line utility in Python.

Since I write my cover letters and resumes in LaTeX I always need to concatenate the two together before sending it to an employer. This is very important so that the person on the other end prints out both and it makes their life easier by not having to worry about two files. For the longest time I just had a simple script that looked like this:

#!/bin/sh