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 S730Â 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.Â
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.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran gave a talk at Columbia University today, causing a lot of criticisms and protests. The President of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger, did the right thing at first, defending Columbia’s decision to host Ahmadinejad, and stressing the need for universities to be places where differing viewpoints and opinions are discussed. Bollinger, however, then went on a tirade, criticizing the president of Iran on a number of issues (mostly true or with merit), including his views on Israel, women and gays, nuclear enriching programs, and terrorism. While Bollinger had every right as a citizen as well as president of Columbia to make these comments, to me it appeared to be very unprofessional. Bollinger does not need to agree with Ahmadinejad or even like what he represents, but I don’t think there is any need to publicly denounce and humiliate a speaker before they give their invited talk. It appears almost that Bollinger invited Ahmadinejad to give a talk for the sole purpose of criticizing him prior to his speech; that would make Bollinger very petty indeed. Ahmadinejad responded in a graceful way, pointing out that it is not helpful to draw conclusions and “innoculate” the audience before the speech is even given.
 This is not to say the grievances and criticisms against Iran and Ahmadinejad are unwarranted. I believe though that there is no excuse not to be at least civil in our discourse. There is too much venom and vitriol being spewed forth within our country these days, democrats vs republicans, fundamentalists vs agnostics, etc. that there is very little room for debate or for finding a common ground. There seems to be a deep seated need for Americans to have a poster-child of evil to revile and hate, regardless of facts or political nuances. It is the very same demonization of Saddam Hussein (an erstwhile ally of Cheny, Rumsfeld, and other neo-cons) that has led us to this very messy juncture, where we keep putting money and lives in Iraq with no clear objectives (“winning” by itself is not an objective) or plan.
I am currently still in Japan, on vacation. While here I’ve picked up a Densha De Go  game, and have gotten back into this genre of rail/train sim games.
 The following are some games I’m thinking of ordering by mail
More about my trip in future posts once I get back home.
An update on my Stepnote. On the whole I’ve been pretty happy with this cheap laptop. I have XP installed on this, over the original Vista. I bought an XP SP2 upgrade CD and it installed fine. I have since heard about “slipstreaming” SP2 on a non-SP2 XP install CD. More details here: http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/winxp-sp2-bootcd.html
I wish I had found out about this before I bought the upgrade CD!
I’ve added another Yahoo component, Yahoo Answers to the right side.