The offical website of Jason Charney and his services
FINALLY! SOME UPDATES! This website is being reconstructed. Some content will go away soon. If you want to see my new stuff, visit my github: https://github.com/jrcharney/.
FINALLY! the header is completely fixed! A nearly seamless header where the bottom of the banner and the top of the navigation bar meet such that they are perfectly aligned to look as one object even when the corners are rounded. The only think that could make me happier about this part of my webpage layout is if the header and the content were aligned. Nothing a little nudge to the right can't fix.
At any rate, I'm open for a new color scheme. A mouseover cyan might seem to be gaudy.
I'm hoping by the end of the day, I can start experimenting with menus in the header. This means in the near future, no more going o the Projects page to get to the New projects.
I'm also thinking about what I want my PHP MySQL requests to look like. I want the information here to be dynamic but at the same time I don't want strangers mucking up the database. I've held out so long for database usage and I am considering some modern design changes.
In other project news, I really wish I had taken up Ruby years ago. File creation seems so easy with it. Where as in C and C++ you go to make all these exceptions and open and close streams with detail. Ruby just make it so easy.
#!/usr/bin/ruby
file = File.new("#{ENV['HOME']}/demo.txt",'w');
file.puts("All your base are belong to us!");
file.close();
So very easy!
The C++ version of such a program would never be five lines long! (Well, four if you omit the blank line.) This has me thinking about some design plans for a text-based ncurses CMS that would be prototyped in Ruby then fleshed out in C++.
Burnt out on Minecraft and Angry Birds on your Android device? Why not try something old school?
The Google Play market has been a bit on-again-off-again with having emulators and ported games on the market. But id Software seems to be OK with what Jack Nui has been doing for Doom, Quake, and now Wolfenstein. At at any rate, here's a few apps that I have on my tablet may be of interest to Android gamers.
Sixaxis Controller - Use Bluetooth to connect a Playstation 3 Sixaxis controller (sold separately) to your tablet or smartphone. (Requires Root!)
Emulators for Droid - This app provides resouces and ROM links for old games.
Super Crunchers - And educational and exciting game for both kids and the kids at heart.
Still searching for emulators for Playstation, SNK, Neo-Geo. But this list should give you plenty to play with. Anyway, back to business. Let's get tmux to do something cool.
Even if you still have a fan, tracking the temperatures of your CPU and whatever else gets hot is very important!
Most of the time, temperatures will spike if you use a program that requires a lot of processing power. The heat that is generated by the resistance of the electric current will heat up the central processing unit (CPU or Processor), graphics processing unit (GPU or Graphics Card), Graphics Memory Controller Hub (GMCH), and anything else that generates heat. Most new computers have built-in temperature detection. It's supposed to trigger the fan when it gets too hot and save energy. But if the fan keeps running, perhaps the people who develop these systems should redsign these machines to put the hot parts as close to the edge of the machine to vent out this heat. I'll talk more about that in a bit. But first lets install the software that allows us to read this information.
$ sudo http-proxy= apt-get install lm-sensors
$ sudo sensors-detect # say "y" (yes) to everything.
$ sudo service module-init-tools start # this should restart that service
$ sensors # You don't need to sudo to use this.
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +73.0°C (crit = +100.0°C)
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0: +58.0°C (crit = +90.0°C)
$
As you can see, we are fortunate enough to have a system set up that indicates what the critical temperature is. When any of these components reach critical temperature, the BIOS sets a shutdown message and the computer turns off.
When the fan does not work, or if the computers design does not consider where this heat needs to go, you are going to have a machine that malfunctions, which is why it is important to put the hot parts near the edge and use the fan to blow this hot air own and draw cool air in. Otherwise, you've signed a space heater with a hard drive.
At any rate, I plan on explaining how to put this information into the tmux status bar in the near future.
Compy is back! Well, sort of. At this time, I don't have the keyboard or top assembly ressembled to the machine and I doubt I want to put a fan back in, although I will consider keeping track of my computers thermal stats. (I'll explain how to do that shortly and how to have tmux do real-time updates in a post in the near future.)
Today, I'm dedicating this post to getting the serial numbers of all the parts that make up your computer. This is ideal if you didn't assemble it yourself. So if you build your own computers from separate sources, this post might not exactly be fore you.
Since Compy is still "topless", this give me an opporitunity to evaluate what parts are working and what parts could use replacement. In this case, Part Number 537614-001, the chip with the single USB Port with the Audio Jack next to it needs to be replaced. This part does not work anymore. The fan's ineffectiveness likely caused this part to get fried from the CPUs heat. This problem has left me to only having two USB ports available which at this time are currently be occupied by an external keyboard and mouse that are used to type up todays post. I could use the powered USB hub, but I recently bound the wires on it for use with my HP Touchpad.
And if you think I'm going to buy this replacement part at SparePartsWarehouse.com (SPW), you are mistaked. SPW does provide a plethera of parts information that is relevant to learning more about what parts make up your computer, but their prices aren't the lowest. And since I just can't go down the MicroCenter to pick up these parts (which would be cool if that were possible for things like fans and screws, which they have plenty of for desktops), any part that I need for a laptop, netbook, or tablet will have to be mail-ordered, in most cases from China, Hong Kong, or somewhere else in Southeast Asia. Which means any part that I do order, reguardless if shipping is free, will take at least a week to get here. It kind of makes you wonder why the manufactures don't have a warehouse of spare parts already here in North America. (Oh yeah, It's cause those "great economic leaders" exported our manufacturing base to maximize their profits but have never needed to go to a Radio Shack or auto parts store in their life. There will come a day they will be in a position where they need some kind of part that they just can't buy a replacement. Until that day comes, this is how ordering parts works.)
So what am I do to until then? I still have my Touchpad, and this set up seems to be working fine thus far, though I might need to get another USB multiplexer for my netbook if I want to plug in an external storage device. I can get a list of parts that make up my computer and find out where on the internet would be the cheapest to find these parts. (It's a shame there isn't a website that does this already. The price comparison part, that is.) Most importantly, I can just wait.
While I am interested in companies who are interested in hiring me for my services, today's news is of disappointment with one company: Canonical, the creators of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
Starting as of Ubuntu 12.10 Amazon ads will be inserted into local file searches. While this site, JRCharney.com does use Amazon to promote previous products I've used worthy of endorsement, it's one thing to see these ads on a website and see something that matches your interests, but it is another thing to embed these advertisements into Free Open Source Software.
Since my computer is kaput for probably the rest of the month (see previous post), it appears I won't be doing much involving making efforts to switch to another Linux distribution until (a) I find out it's OK to run the computer without a fan, especially since there is no heatpipe connected to it, (b) can replace the fan with one that doesn't make so much noise, (c) can replace the computer with something better (it's amazing how much computer you can get for about $200 these days), (d) can get a job that pays so I can replace the parts in my desktop. (You guys remember this site exists to show off my skills and doesn't mean I'm self employed, right?)
For everyone else who still has a computer and are using Ubuntu, there is something you can do to not be sold as a product for Canonical.
You might want to check with the first two parts of that command (everything before the pipe next to xargs) to make sure that all the lens and scope packages are unity packages. I'm not real sure if scrapping all the Ubuntu Unity packages would be be a good idea just yet especially if there are things still using them. I'll let you know later.
Meanwhile, this weekend programming project involves learning Ruby. I would have to say it is far more interesting than learning Python, and I'm hoping to include more Ruby stuff in the next version of the new projects. Don't worry, Python will be there too.
