Software
I have an iPhone and iPod touch and recently bought Plants vs Zombies (again, I already finished the game on the PC) on both devices because I use them interchangeably and it’s just that good. A problem did quickly crop up, though, and the problem was “How can I quickly copy the game data from one device to the other?” I don’t want one device to be behind the other.
Initially, I tried to get AppBackup to backup both folders, copy the backup from the iPod to the desktop and then copy it to the iPhone and restore it in AppBackup, but that takes way too long.
After spending the better part of an hour trying to forward a port in Linux using iptables, here’s what you should do and what you should remember not to do.
This technique should work on any distro that has iptables, such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, RHEL, Gentoo, etc.
Today I had to write an assignment for my Evolutionary Algorithms course, which was to implement a genetic algorithm to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem. I wrote the Python code, it worked well but it took a while to find a good solution with 100 cities, and I realised it would be a few days before I could get a solution for the dataset with 3000 cities. I definitely needed to speed up my program somehow.
I decided to give Cython a try.
Well, I just got an Intel X25-M 160 GB SSD for my laptop (a MacBook), and I wanted to migrate all my partitions (I was triple-booting OS X, Ubuntu Linux and Windows 7) to the new disk.
This turned out to be less than a breeze, since there are a few caveats and the entire process takes time, but I will detail it here and maybe save some of you some time.
**WARNING: Don’t try any of this if you don’t know what you are doing!
As you are probably aware, there is a lot of Windows malware that makes your PC load more slowly, have annoying popup windows or even steal your data and files.
Recently, I discovered a fantastic program that can help you get rid of all this. It is Sandboxie. Sandboxie allows you to run programs in a protected area of your computer (a sandbox), so they can’t write anywhere.
I’m working on a new Django project at the moment, and it uses the ContentTypes framework to refer to any model in the project. The problem with doing this is that the ContentType objects that are created have random IDs, so if you dump your database objects into a fixture, the ContentType objects those refer to will not be what you initially expected.
After a few days of searching and finding no solution, I got suggestions from a few people that I can use signals to detect when the objects were being created.
These last few days I have been busy trying to install PyCuda for Windows, but Windows sucks a bit in these things, so it took quite a bit of time. This is a post documenting my Odyssey.
First of all, I had no luck at all with Python 2.6. After two days I got it to compile, but it couldn’t load the module, so I installed 2.5 again.
Today I needed to rescue the data on a hard disk brought to me, so I used GNU ddrescue (what else?) to create an image of the disk. As soon as the image was done, I discovered that the disk contained a FAT32 partition, which I wanted to mount.
After the amazingly successful omnisync, it is once again time to present you of another creation of the inimitable Poromenos Studios.
This time, it’s Dead Man’s Switch. As you’re probably aware, everyone carries valuable information in their heads. It might be about their work, financial information, etc. If anything were to happen to them, this information would be lost, unfortunately.
This is where Dead Man’s Switch comes in.
It is once again time to shake the world from its very foundations with my latest creation. I present to you… omnisync.
omnisync is a file synchroniser (something like rsync), only it’s not built to synchronise just files, but also anything else. It’s extensible through a simple plugin architecture, and you can have it synchronise anything to anything within a few hours.
