Reisun.org

I seem to be on a roll with reading about some inspiring, relevant quotes. This came by way of Robin Williams’ “Man of the Year” movie.

In the movie, Robin Williams’ character quotes Mark Twain as saying “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense.”

Mark Twain is known for his irreverence in his writings and his views, but now more than ever do we need insight such as his, when too many people, for different reasons, want to stifle irreverence, and really just plain thinking and questioning authority. That is really what makes the United States of America great (or used to), that we challenged everything, from conventional wisdom to authoritarian rulers. We now seem so cowered by “terrorism” that we would give up all our rights to be a free people (and the home of the brave) to an unjust and undeserving administration just for the illusion of safety.

I know I am not alone in revering Abraham Lincoln, and thinking he was the best president this nation has ever had. Each time I go to the Lincoln Memorial I read the Gettysburg Address and the 2nd Inauguration speech on the walls and get chills. I came across a quote database site (www.quotedb.com) and some of his quotes. This one struck me as particularly apt, in this day and age when our constitutional freedoms (that so many have died to protect throughout our history) are slowly being taken away in the guise of fighting terrorism (which is in itself odd, because terrorism’s main goal is to cower and intimidate the target into altering its behavior—precisely what we are doing)

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

As I start playing around with Visual Studio 2005, I would like to store my projects in SVN, but not the intermediate, generated files that VS2005 creates. To that end I set a global ignore in tortoisesvn:

*bin *obj RECYCLER Bin *.user *.suo *.dcu __history ModelSupport_* *.rsm thumbs.db

that prevents unnecessary files from being swept up in an Add operation.

I had a close call with CoLinux. I tried to change my shell as root to /bin/tcsh, but misspelled it to /bn/tcsh. Now I couldnt log in as root to fix it! The only solution, as I found out by googling, was to reboot the image in single user mode (run level 1) and edit the /etc/passwd file manually. The only trouble was, how to run colinux images in runlevel 1? The following is a snippet of code to put in the .conf file that is specified when colinux is started.

cobd0=”c:\coLinux\Debian.ext3″
# boot into single user mode
# cobd0=”c:\coLinux\Debian.ext3″ 1

whew! The lesson learned is to not change root’s default shell!

I recently switched to Cingular/AT&T so I could get the Cingular 3125 (HTC Star Trek) phone. I really like clam shell designs, as I dont have to worry about accidentally turning on something as with candy bar designs. However, in the short four months I have managed to beat up the 3125 a lot, and the battery cover keeps coming off at the most inopportune moments.

So, I am looking for another Windows Mobile smartphone, and since I am stuck with AT&T for another year and a half, I have decided I want either of the following:

• HTC S730 The second version of the S710 (see below), it is a dual keypad/sliding keyboard design. Upgrades include WM6, HSPDA (3G) and a faster processor, but with the same capacity battery (1050mAH), battery life should be lower.
• HTC S710 The original dual input device smartphone. WM5 and a 200Mhz processor. There has been a lot of discussion about the microphone dropping out after a few weeks of use, which has me concerned. 

In the meantime the 3125 is still working, so I will wait until reviews for the S730 come out before making a purchase.

I’ve programmed in Visual C++ 6.0/MFC before, quite a bit actually. I never really got into .Net programming, mostly because by the time it came out I no longer had access to free/cheap Visual Studio software. With free Express editions out for a while now, there is no excuse other than that I’ve been busy with other things. The only real programming I’ve done in the past years has been Python web programming and M8C assembly language hacking for the two courses that I teach.

Recently I’ve come to realize that if I want to get some technical jobs that involve programming I will need to learn one of the two dominant development environments, either .Net or Java. I will learn .Net first, then try Java (using Eclipse) for comparison.

In anycase, the following is my very first “Hello World” .Net application. It is very trivial (a timer object that updates a text box with the current time), but has made me realize that .Net isn’t all that different from MFC, and that C# is not much different from Java or even C++. I just need to take the time to learn some class libraries!

http://files.reisun.org/WindowsApplication1.exe

Through a tangled chain of steps, I have concluded that I need to have a Linux VM on my Windows XP Everex laptop. (Need to manage my side projects at home –> Found TaskJuggler–>Didn’t want to install Cygwin to run it in Windows –> Need to install it on Linux that is easily accessible by my laptop –> Checked out Virtual Machine solutions, like Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 and VMWare Player –> Remembered CoLinux from when I played with the gp2x devkit)

I thought CoLinux would be the easiest way to have a linux VM running on my laptop so that I can use TaskJuggler. Unfortunately for the latest pre-release version (0.7.1), the SLIRP method of accessing the internet through the laptop didn’t work. Neither really did the TAP method of connecting to the host. What did work was the WinPCap method, which creates a bridge between the host and colinux network interfaces and the internet connection.