Blog Entries

Since purchasing a NAS that supports DAAP streaming, I’ve been trying to get it to play to my Airport Express in the living room.  I also couldn’t get PulseAudio on my ubuntu laptop to find that device, so I knew something must be wrong.   Searching around, I found a quick script based on Net::Bonjour, which [...]

But Why? I’ve had my Nexus S for a while now, and I’ve wanted to root it since I got it. Rooting it will give me full control over my device, which will in turn let me save money and protect my privacy (firewall, anyone?). However, since it’s my primary phone, I’ve been putting off messing [...]

I can’t believe I hadn’t found this stackexchange site before – finally a source for information about android that isn’t a webforum! http://android.stackexchange.com

The other night I attempted to play some neverwinter nights multiplayer in linux, but ended up with a pile of segfaults and frustration.  Thinking it would somehow be easier, I went online and bought Neverwinter Nights 2.   Foolish me for thinking that a newer game running in Windows would be easier. Problems I encountered: mysterious [...]

Minecraft is a great game, and supports a linux client.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually ship with any sort of launcher script, just a .jar file.  Since getting java to run anything is a pain, here’s my launcher script: #!/bin/bash # from all appearances, this works with ubuntu openjvm packages, and with the Minecraft.jar file located [...]

After reading Todd Hoff’s list of scaling lessons learned, I decided to put together my own list of scaling tricks. These were all learned the hard way as well, and will scale you up to thousands of concurrent users.  It’s worth noting that many of these don’t cost anything beyond programmer-time, and take less time [...]

The current version of my website runs on a lightweight perl framework called Dancer. It’s easy to learn and avoids the massive weight of Catalyst, making it ideal for use in shared hosting (paying to get a VM just so you can install thousands of perl modules is not cool). Dancer runs under fastCGI, mod [...]

In Ubuntu Lucid, there is apparently an infrequent problem with NetworkManager not coming back properly when waking up a laptop from sleep/hibernate. Even though it seemed like the wireless driver was somehow no longer working, it was actually due to an inconsistent state being saved/restored. No amount of stopping/restarting services or reloading modules helped, since [...]

When I set up Kubuntu Lucid on my new laptop a month ago, I promised I would document what was needed to get the broadcom wireless driver working. As it turns out, that was incredibly simple so I never got around to it. However, I just had an issue with my laptop losing wireless after [...]

Apparently ubuntu removed the rather-old libstdc++5 library in Karmic Koala, and it’s still missing in Lucid Lynx. This leads to some 32-bit programs throwing errors like this: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory There is a ppa (personal package archive) you can add to re-enable [...]