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  • History meme

    Substantial content is in the pipes, but in the meantime here’s Arve Bersvendsen’s history meme: history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head In my cygwin: 52 python 44 ssh 33 exit 33 cd 18 ls 7 java 5 diff 4 nano 2 ping 1 svn And on a Linux…

  • An IDE for TeX

    TeXnicCenter is an excellent IDE for developing TeX documents on Windows. It follows the usual interface conventions and is quite helpful in getting started and debugging. TeX is the standard page layout language for writing mathematical and scientific papers. Here are some excellent tutorials for getting started with TeX. The IDE requires MikTeX for actually…

  • Unknown root password in SuSE Linux

    After I installed Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, I tried to update it. It prompted me for a root password even though the install hadn’t asked for one — it had only created a regular user. Sudo didn’t help. I tried booting in single-user mode, but that also prompted me for the root password. Finally,…

  • Repair table failed. Please run repair table.

    One of the tables of my MediaWiki installation crashed. When I tried to repair it, I got this less-than-helpful error message. So did the mysqlcheck utility when I SSHed to the server. However, the command has extra options that can be used to repair high levels of corruptions, such as when the MYI is missing.…

  • Jaxer

    John Resig writes very positively about Jaxer. It runs Javascript on the server while serving documents to the client, with seamless communication between JS on the client and JS on the server. Jaxer provides: Full DOM on the server Shared code between client and server Database, file, and socket access from JavaScript Familiar APIs Integration…

  • Dean

    Base2 has just come out in beta on Google Code. It’s hosted there and can be included straight off the Google Code server. I think it’s a really neat library because it basically fixes all browsers so that the built-in DOM, events, etc work the same way. Instead of providing an API of its own,…

  • How to enable logging in Python LDAP

    When writing Python scripts which rely on python-ldap and openLDAP, it is often useful to turn on debug messages as follows: import ldap; # enable python-ldap logging ldap.set_option(ldap.OPT_DEBUG_LEVEL, 4095) # enable openLDAP logging l = ldap.initialize(‘ldap://yourserver:port’, trace_level=2) This is also useful when debugging the LDAP Plugin for Trac.

  • ECMAScript 4

    John Resig has posted a whitepaper outlining the new features in ECMAScript4 (aka the Javascript standard), how it differs from ECMAScript3, and the rationale for any incompatibilities. Many of the features have already made their way into Opera and Firefox, which is at Javascript 1.7 level. ES3 is equivalent to JS1.3, and ES4 is the…

  • Some Facebook network stats

    I’m part of three Facebook networks, and I’ve been keeping track of their size since May of this year. Toronto has gone from 600k people in May to 800k people in September. That’s 32% of the municipality or 16% of the metropolitan area, which is an impressive proportion. University of Toronto has been stable at…

  • Array access and virtual memory

    (This applies to Java and C, but the code is given in Python for readability.) Is it faster to iterate over multiple separate arrays (tuples) of simple variables? for i in range(0, n): phone = phones[i]; # … email = emails[i]; Or over a single array of complex variables? for i in range(0, n): phone…