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TaYpworm - The Diary of a Super Villain

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"The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself." - Howard Roark

Hello World

taypworm — Tue, 12/30/2008 - 23:03

Hello and welcome to my personal website. My name is Sebastian Smith -- the patron saint of the Internet (don't be fooled by the imitations). I work as a graduate student in computer science in the Robotics Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno. You can find tons of interesting trivia about my life under the "about me" and other tabs at the top of the page.

It's taken me years to motivate myself into making taypworm.com more than an 'A' record. I've had a ton of creative ideas for content but, as you can see, none of them came to fruition. What you see before you is a work-in-progress used to hold my junk -- research, software and stuff. Posts will be erratic but check back often anyway because I like the company...

Have a long, enjoyable browse around my site. If you have any questions or comments please contact me.

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Kubuntu 9.04 and Madwifi

taypworm — Wed, 05/06/2009 - 21:49

I just updated my laptop to Kubuntu 9.04. I don't know why I bother upgrading, as every update leads to months of disabled features. This time I'm fighting with wifi and enabling third party hardware drivers.

The upgrade to Kubuntu 9.04 was uneventful. Qualitatively, I notice an increase in responsiveness and an overall nicer KDE GUI experience. Unfortunately, KDE has several broken components that have finally driven me to install the Ubuntu desktop packages. The most notable problems are with the KDE network manager -- after the upgrade I can no longer connect to WPA networks. Manual configuration of my device works, but somewhere in the works the network manager is borked. Excellent QA before a major release Kubuntu team! You've alienated me from your project. I hope you can polish the turd before the next major release... in time to release another.

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An Important Behavioral Change Since Childhood

taypworm — Thu, 03/12/2009 - 21:59

Today I realized that I will drink water from the bathroom faucet. This was taboo when I was a child because the water tasted bad.

This is progress...

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Increasing The Java Heap Size In Eclipse On Ubuntu

taypworm — Wed, 03/11/2009 - 00:04

To increase the Eclipse Java heap size on Ubuntu you must edit /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse.ini. Which can be done using vim as follows:

# sudo vim /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse.ini

To increase the Java heap size for a specific application in Eclipse open the run dialog by clicking on the Run Menu -> Run... -> Arguments Tab. Then, modify the VM arguments to meet your needs.

Increasing your application heap size in Eclipse

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Apache Commons Collection MultiValueMap Example

taypworm — Wed, 03/04/2009 - 08:45

There are not a great number of code examples for the Apache Commons Collection MultiValueMap (Java), so I put one together:

  1. import java.util.Collection;
  2. import java.util.HashMap;
  3. import java.util.Iterator;
  4. import java.util.Map;
  5.  
  6. import org.apache.commons.collections.MultiMap;
  7. import org.apache.commons.collections.map.MultiValueMap;
  8.  
  9.  
  10. public class MultiValueMapTest {
  11.  
  12.         public static void main(String[] args) {
  13.                 HashMap<Integer, Integer> hm = new HashMap<Integer, Integer>();
  14.                 MultiMap mvm = MultiValueMap.decorate(hm);
  15.                
  16.                 mvm.put(1, 1);
  17.                 mvm.put(1, 2);
  18.                 mvm.put(2, 1);
  19.                 mvm.put(2, 3);
  20.                 mvm.put(3, 1);
  21.                
  22.                 System.out.println("MultiValueMap: " + mvm);
  23.                
  24.                 for (Iterator iter = mvm.entrySet().iterator(); iter.hasNext(); ) {
  25.                         Map.Entry entry = (Map.Entry)iter.next();
  26.                         Integer key = (Integer) entry.getKey();
  27.                         System.out.format("Key: %d\n", key);
  28.                
  29.                         Collection vals = (Collection) entry.getValue();
  30.                         for (Iterator valIter = vals.iterator(); valIter.hasNext(); ) {
  31.                                 Integer num = (Integer) valIter.next();
  32.                                 System.out.format("\tVal: %d\n", num);
  33.                         }
  34.                 }
  35.         }
  36. }

Download Source

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Python Script To Determine Number Of Digits Required To Represent A Number

taypworm — Tue, 03/03/2009 - 23:50

I threw together a simple python script to determine the number of digits required to represent a number in any base:

  1. #!/usr/bin/env python
  2.  
  3. import getopt
  4. import math
  5. import sys
  6.  
  7. def main():
  8.     try:
  9.         opts, args = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1:], "hb:n:", ["help", "base=", "number="])
  10.     except:
  11.         usage()
  12.         sys.exit(1)
  13.  
  14.     base = 0
  15.     num = 0
  16.  
  17.     for opt, arg in opts:
  18.         if opt == "-h":
  19.             usage()
  20.             sys.exit()
  21.         elif opt == "-b":
  22.             base = int(arg)
  23.         elif opt == "-n":
  24.             num = int(arg)
  25.         else:
  26.             usage()
  27.             sys.exit(1)
  28.  
  29.     if base == 0:
  30.         print "Must specify a base value"
  31.         sys.exit()
  32.  
  33.     print math.ceil(math.log(num, base))
  34.  
  35.  
  36. def usage():
  37.     print "Returns number of digits required to represent number in target base"
  38.     print "Usage:\tdigit_represent [-h] [-b <base> -n <number>]"
  39.     print "\t-h\tprint this message"
  40.     print "\t-b\tnumber base"
  41.     print "\t-n\tnumber for digit calculation"
  42.  
  43. if __name__ == "__main__":
  44.     main()

Download Script

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Making Life Simple

taypworm — Tue, 03/03/2009 - 19:37

I have a plan to simplify life for all of humanity: killer robots. Living with the daily threat to life and limb will result in a simple three stage routine consisting of sleeping, eating, and machine gunning. Dream with me: We'll finally be free from the shackles of "progress"; our minds can finally explore the finer points of "popping caps"; we can be smug.

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Kubuntu Suspend To RAM

taypworm — Mon, 03/02/2009 - 23:52

I pack around an old IBM Thinkpad T43. Lately I've been suspending to RAM rather than shutting down and restarting. After a recent system update the suspend options were removed from the application launcher menu. My initial thoughts were that this was a result of the upgraded kernel. Unfortunately, the options were still missing under an older kernel. Further investigation yielded that I was still able to suspend through the Guidance Power Manager. My conclusion was that the developers had moved the suspend options.

I understand the design principles behind the application launcher executing the KDE shutdown manager -- clean shutdown of the KDE session -- but why did they choose to pop up a shutdown confirmation dialog?! AND why did they choose to relocate the suspend option to a sub-menu of "Turn Off Computer" button?! AND why do they require a long-click to bring up the suspend sub-menu?! To suspend my laptop it now costs me a mouse-over, two clicks, and a long-click through the application launcher. Brilliant!

For those who didn't catch the location of the suspend options from the application launcher before: Application Launcher -> Leave -> Shutdown -> Long-click on "Turn off computer" -> Suspend to *. A more convenient option than this mess of clicking is to right-click the Guidance Power Manager and select "Suspend".

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The Best Tasting TV Dinner

taypworm — Fri, 02/20/2009 - 10:16

The most popular blog entry I've written was titled "The Best Tasting TV Dinner". The entry would attract about 35 people per week. This dwarfed the popularity of neighboring entries of the small-time blog on which it was posted. I'm going to use this entry as a sort of social experiment -- it has the same title, but I won't divulge the best tasting TV dinner. We'll see how many hits I receive. *muhahahaha*

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Kubuntu RAID Installation Woes

taypworm — Fri, 02/20/2009 - 09:54

For the last four years my workstation was configured to use Linux software RAID-1 ('/' directory) and RAID-5 ('/home' directory). The system ran Gentoo for several years. When I got tired of compilation times I was able to seamlessly transition to Kubuntu 7.10. A combination of limited disk space in '/boot' and hardware problems recently joined forces to leave my system in a state that would be time consuming to repair. Rather than waste time on the repair I decided a reinstall would be a quicker solution. Unfortunately, I found the Kubuntu 8.10 installer incapable of installing to software RAID.

First things first: I decided that I had all important bytes backed up and that I could completely wipe my disk partitions. My workstation was "hot" for it's day: 2x AMD Opteron 244s, 4GB RAM, 4x 160GB SATA 2.0 HDD, GeForce 6800GT. One of my hard disks houses Windows XP. The other three are dedicated to Linux. After much debate I decided to partition each disk into two partitions. The first would be 512MB and the second ~159.5GB. Redundancy of '/boot' was not a concern, so I decided to place it on one 512MB partition and make the other two swap. I joined the remaining 159.5GB of each disk into a RAID-5 and made it the '/' directory. The installation proceeded without a hitch. Upon reboot, the kernel was unable to find the MD devices.

Remembering that I had issues booting form Linux software RAID-5 back in the day I decided I would add another partition to each drive and join them into a RAID-1 for '/'. The remaining space would be joined into a RAID-5 for '/home'. Again, the installation went smoothly. Upon reboot I was again unable to find the MD devices. Having installed Kubuntu 7.10 without problem on Linux software RAIDs, I was left scratching my head. Rather than waste another day on the project, I removed the disks from their arrays and installed the OS to a single disk.

The moral of this pointless story is *buntu 8.10 does not install to software RAID properly.

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