Category Archives: open source

Replace text with jQuery and Regular Expressions

Today, I wanted to hide some text on a web­page I was work­ing on. It was a lot of text all through­out the doc­u­ment, but each instance was inside a span and within paren­the­sis inside that. I could have edited it all out, but it would have been really time consuming–the CMS I’m using had [...]
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Math Substitution in Vim

Today, I needed to change some our term codes into human read­able text. Because our codes oper­ate on fis­cal year, which rolls over in July, codes for the spring term include the actual cal­en­dar year they’re in. But the code for the fall term includes the cal­en­dar year plus one (ie. Fall 2011 is writ­ten [...]
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Linus Torvalds, Ethics and Forking

response to Linus' recent interview

A while ago, I read this inter­est­ing inter­view with Linus Tor­valds, the founder of the Linux ker­nel. I’m hardly smarter than Linus, but I’ll say a cou­ple things: His posi­tion on ethics is either stu­pid or poorly artic­u­lated. He says that ethics are pri­vate, but then imme­di­ately turns around and say [the shar­ing of code [...]
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Google Drops h.264 Support

Still a win for users

I found an arti­cle today via Jay Sitter’s Google Reader share about Chrome drop­ping h.264 sup­port. There seems to be a lot of con­fu­sion in this arti­cle as to: the dif­fer­ence between native sup­port and sup­port via a plu­gin (NOT the same thing!) the dif­fer­ence between video encoded via a par­tic­u­lar codec and deliv­ered via flash and [...]
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Strip Out GC Pocket Query Numbers

A Quick Bash Script

When I get pocket queries from Geocaching.com, I always tick the “include the name of the query” box, as it’s a lot eas­ier to keep files named 4497272_Decatur.gpx and 4858029_Springfield.gpx straight when they’re more than just numbers. Unfor­tu­nately, those pesky num­bers are a pain when it comes to using gps­ba­bel to load caches–it’d be alot [...]
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Labor in a Post-Scarcity World?

A few days ago, Tycho posed this ques­tion on his blog: What does labor look like in a mostly/quasi post-scarcity world? I don’t have the answer to this ques­tion, but I’m really curi­ous about the answer. As usual, this is what makes open source so fascinating–rather than fight or try to side­step the idea that [...]
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Announcing Open Source Drum Loops

for worship - a new blog

I’m launch­ing a new blog today–I’m finally tak­ing my own advice and cre­at­ing a blog that’s par­tic­u­larly niche. The new blog is Open Source Drum Loops for Wor­ship. Since our drum­mer at church moved on to other things, I decided it was time to start play­ing the lap­top and work­ing on the ten­sion between the [...]
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Solve Video Flicker on Jaunty with ATI X1250

I have a fairly new Acer Extensa 4420 that I run Linux on. The new ver­sion of Ubuntu, Jaunty, runs really well, except that the default ATI dri­ver for my Radeon X1250 card gives me weird flick­er­ing and poor performance. This is because ATI decided to drop sup­port (ie. stop updat­ing dri­vers) for these cards. This is [...]
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TYP03 and Christianity

Here’s an inter­est­ing, albeit brief, inter­view with TYPO3 lead dev Kasper Skårhøj, where he touches on open source soft­ware as a means towards ministry. It’s inter­est­ing, but there’s not quite enough con­tent to really dig into the issues, unfortunately. That said, TYPO3 is a pretty seri­ous CMS prod­uct I’ve looked at the in past, but have always [...]
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Jaunty Jackelope: best Ubuntu yet

Last night, I installed Jaunty Jack­e­lope, the newest ver­sion of Ubuntu Linux. Over­all, I think this is the best ver­sion of Ubuntu we’ve seen yet. There’s been talk­ing about how fast Jaunty boots. And I can vouch for it: it’s not­i­ca­bly faster than even my Crunch­bang install. There’s a cou­ple bug notices that flash up when the boot starts–if those [...]
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