FOB

We are holding a Linux Plumbers Conference [excuse the broken hyphenation] here in Portland a little less than a year from today. It should be a really nice event…

I've been dreading writing my essay for my scholarship application. I finally have it done, and I think it's a darned good essay…

Portland State has two ways of authenticating users of its 802.11 network. One is NoCat, about which the less said the better. The other is a somewhat idiosyncratic WPA setup. Jules Kongslie and I got a client working with it recently; here's how…

I don't know where the day went. I went to OSCON today to help out at the PSAS display, I was somewhat nervous since there was mostly a display of hardware of whose language I'm not fluent in. It was a good learning experience and I'm pretty sure I convinced several people to come to next week's Introductory PSAS meeting. I chatted with Ian a bit, I think it would nice at some point for me to learn about hardware. My extent of doing hardware was at the first little startup I worked for in Silicon Valley which went public a little over a year and a half ago and now supplies map info to mapquest. I learned how to solder and desolder from a colleague (even though I was doing software), and managed enough to fix my old beat up VCR (swapped the switches). I do like figuring out what part of devices don't work, taking them apart (carefully, theres always a trick), ordering replacement parts and successfully fixing them (been able to do that with a number of things, quite proud of myself actually that I can repair stuff on my own). Its quite cute too that my youngest daughter likes to do the same; she's quick to jump at fixing things when they break and seems to have a natural ability and desire to "figure it out".

Mike Vanier has a nice blog entry that for some reason got Reddit exposure today. It's entitled Why I Hate Programming Competitions. I coach the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) pretty often, and my criticisms of it are pretty much in line with Vanier's…