I heard Kaputt Radio on WMBR last night, I loved it!

If you like vicious satire with an Australian slant, you might like it too.

I've started reading some advice on programming.

Today's tip is:

Experience what it's like to be stupid:

Next time you're really doped up on cold medication, try to design a recursive algorithm in your head. This is how some people feel all the time

Really, you should read everything this guy has written, it's all good.

This weekend's goal was to install Yellow Dog Linux on my Cell blades (those that have drives, at least). The winning solution was found by Bartek Kochan.

Ingredients:
QS20 blade(s) with drive and controller card.
PlayStation3
IDE to USB widget
Yellow Dog Linux DVD

Prerequisites: experience installing Yellow Dog Linux on a PlayStation3

Pull the drive out of the QS20 blade, attach that drive to the PlayStation3 with the usb<->ide widget. Install Yellow Dog Linux. When asked which drive to use for the install, select the ide drive. Once the install of Yellow Dog Linux is complete, stick the drive back into the QS20, put the QS20 back into your chassis, and repeat for all your blades.

Part 2 ... for those of us that have QS20 blades that do NOT have drives and/or controller cards.

Um..

I suspect I'll get to learn about PXE booting.

In any case, I should have three Cell blades up and running tomorrow.

At this point I need to order another voltage regulator so I can power the second pair of power supplies. Then I should be able to get six Cell blades running, possibly seven. Though it seems one of my blades has problems, won't talk to the chassis, so I may have only six that work.

I'm also going to ignore all the warnings about QS20s not working with any other type of blade, and see if I can get an HS21 running at the same time.

I'm pretty sure this is a bug in the advanced management module, I know the QS20 blades aren't well supported at this point.

In any case, I put in three of the QS20 blades with drives and powered them on, hoping one of them would just boot up and get a DHCP address... no such luck.

I took a glance at the power usage graph and immediately powered off the blades...

Like I said, I'm pretty sure this is a bug... I'm running this off a single 110 volt circuit, wouldn't it trip the fuse if this were real?

I got my BladeCenter E chassis booted with one HS21 blade. I installed Ubuntu, and uploaded some pictures. I also linked to the pictures on reddit, many amusing comments were added.

Microsoft Research Asia has cloned the GNU Universal Software Radio Peripheral, details at the USENIX NSDI 09 talk.

The USRP guys mentioned it briefly on their own list.

As long as the hardware can be used from Linux, this is a good thing. If it ends up being the standard proprietary gig, I don't think it'll fly. For once, Microsoft has to compete with an incumbent that they cannot flat out purchase, so they have to throw money at the problem.

Should be interesting to see how this turns out. I have some plans in mind for the GNU USRP that mix nicely with my Cell blades.

Today I'm learning to use IronPython to automate MS Office, I've hpasted my latest experiment.


Now that I've figured out how to load the DLLs, it's just a matter of discovering the Microsoft API for automation. Too bad it's not terribly consistent across the various applications.


The one thing I have not figured out is how to get the type signature of a function while in the Python REPL.

I've also not figured out if it's possible to use IronPython 2 inside Visual Studio 2008. I found IronPython studio, but its homepage says it doesn't work with IP2.



Has anyone used IronPython and has more thoughts or advice?

The Selenium IDE is a wonderful tool, you press the record button, do your thing, and save the recording as a test. But the Selenium IDE is a Firefox add-on, and does not work in Internet Explorer.

SharePoint does not work well with Firefox, or maybe that's just this client codebase.
The fix is another Firefox add-on called IETab, that loads the Internet Explorer rendering engine in a Firefox tab. Now I can record with the Selenium IDE, and SharePoint will still execute JavaScript that fails in Firefox.

As a bonus bit of information, the solution to working around https certificate problems with MSIE in Selenium is to use the "*iehta" browser instead of "*iexplore".

I'm on the Accela from Boston to New York City to meet Lemmih. I've never tried taking a train anywhere, this should be interesting.
Much of my choice of Amtrak comes from John Goerzen's blog entries. I'm looking forward to seeing how this compares.

So far, flight to NYC cost is $250, train to NYC is also $250.
Total travel times are 7.5 hours on Amtrak or 2.5 hours on the plane.
Of course, Amtrak didn't make me spend half an hour in a security check, I didn't have to take off my shoes, I'm able to use my cellphone, there's a standard power plug for my laptop and I'm now using my Verizon cell modem to post this entry.
Hm, let me think about this... I have lots more leg room and lots more luggage space on Amtrak, something like 250 pounds of luggage per passenger. The ambient noise is much lower on a train, though that may be from traveling in the quiet car? Actually, the existence of a quiet car is nice, no loud talking or cell phone conversations are allowed in this car. Trains offer lots more scenery than airplanes. Also, these trains appear to be electric, so I suspect they use less petroleum products than airplanes.

So the major disadvantage is that travel time is higher.

Since I'm such an impatient person, I'd probably stick with planes, but there's one personal difference, I study best while traveling. So perhaps this is the choice for me after all.

Perhaps I should take the train down to Kansas or Alabama to get the full experience.

I do lots of SharePoint development, and the standard Windows tools really rub me the wrong way.

I'd like to do all of my development in emacs, and remotely run msbuild and deployments on the vm via cygwin's ssh, but I don't know enough about msbuild and sharepoint to know how to make that happen.

Has anyone done this, or knows someone who has done this, or can point me to more information along these lines?