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Blog Details for "OffTheHill.org"
OffTheHill.orgOffTheHill.orgCars, Technology, and Art. Posts cover everything from amateur motorsports like autocross to Linux, software development, and art. Articles
A Fix for Broken Google Rich Snippets and Google+ Shares
2011-09-15 08:41:00 Recently I have been struggling with an issue where links to my website do not generate previews in Google +. Instead, the user gets the error “Could not load website. – Retry”. When they try and retry, the error does not … Continue reading → More About: Rich
Photos of the FIA GT1 Championship in Beijing
2011-09-12 21:01:00 The GT1 Championship this weekend was a pretty soggy affair, but I got to take some photos… Click here to see the whole album. More About: Photos , Beijing
Kata Bumblebee UL-222 Review
2011-08-30 05:32:00 I just wanted to write about my impression of the Kata Bumblebee UL-222 backpack, which I just bought and have had the chance to use a few times. This is a fantastic, well built, sturdy and light bag. It is … Continue reading → More About: Review
MacFUSE for OS X Lion
2011-07-22 01:23:00 I have previously posted about using MacFuse with Snow Leopard, but if you have already upgraded to OS X Lion , you may be having trouble finding a version of FUSE to use. Many people have commented that my Snow Leopard … Continue reading →
Java: Static Variables are WRONG (Almost Always)
2011-06-03 09:25:00 This topic came up at work recently, and I thought it might be useful to the wider internet audience… When doing code reviews, I often come across components which utilize static mutable objects. Typically these are static Maps and other … Continue reading → More About: Java , Variables , Wrong
Beware Chinese Electronics: Part 1
2011-03-24 04:21:00 Last September when I was in China, I needed a harddrive to store all the photos I was taking, plus I wanted to see what the electronics markets in Zhongguancun looked like. Zhongguancun can be pretty overwhelming, but it is … Continue reading → More About: Electronics , Chinese , Part , Beware
Mame Cabinets at Kro’s Nest
2011-03-18 07:58:00 We went to the Kro’s Nest restaurant yesterday and I noticed they had these custom arcade enclosures running what I am guessing is MAME under the covers. The games seem to rotate on a daily basis, and I think they … Continue reading →
Online China Resources
2011-03-14 14:04:00 I’m mostly posting this for my own future reference, but if you’d like to get a feeling for the Chinese expat experience, or how to do business in China in general, chinageeks.org has an awesome collection of blogs about China. … Continue reading → More About: Resources , Online
Check Out the Size of Chef Dong’s Braised Seacucumber
2011-03-14 05:52:00 No really, its a really big restaurant: I’ve got to apologize for the cultural insensitivity, because I know its inappropriate, but I find the name of this restaurant really, really funny. I admit it, I really like junior-high level humor. … Continue reading → More About: Check , Chef , Size
The Obligatory Smog Photo
2011-03-14 05:34:00 There’s nothing special about this photo, the smog level wasn’t particularly high Saturday (it was ‘320’ according to the US Embassy smog meter and their twitter feed, but it gives you an idea what the view down the street on … Continue reading → More About: Photo
My Personal Fears
2010-10-07 19:56:00 A government that keeps its citizens through hazy reports of violence by “outsiders” The rise of China and decline of the US Fanatical, Conspiracy Theorist Right-wingers Spiders Global Warming An unnoticed asteroid hitting the planet and destroying civilization The possibility of a major solar flare destroying the national power-grid, which could take months to years to repair, thereby destroying civilization Bears Nuclear terrorists Not saving enough for retirement More About: Personal
Use a Mac to Repair a Sansa Clip with the “Not enough space for Music
2010-09-29 04:45:00 First of all, the fact that you need to leave free space on your Clip is the most irritating issue I’ve ever seen on a modern electronics device. I’m sure there are thousands of people out there who have thrown their Clips in the garbage because of this. Anyway, here is the situation: You’ve got the “Not enough space for Music DB, please free 30 mb“ message on your Sansa Clip. You have a Mac Here is the fix: Open Disk Utility Click on the Sansa Clip listing on the left – Not the disk itself, the DEVICE. Click the ‘Partition’ tab Under Volume Scheme, choose ’1 Partition’ Click the ‘Options…’ button Choose ‘Master Boot Record’, then click ok (this is IMPORTANT!) Click the drop down next to ‘Format:’ and choose “MS-DOS (FAT)” Click Apply When this is complete, you can eject the disk if needed, and your clip should be back to normal. I found that by default the ... More About: Space
CrashPlan using too much memory on Mac OS X
2010-05-04 22:57:00 If you have noticed CrashPlan is using too much memory on your 64 bit Mac, one solution might be to run its server process in 32 bit mode. I’ve tried this, and so far it hasn’t caused any problems, and definitely seems to keep memory usage lower. This requires a bit of hacking, but its not too terrible. Start by opening your ‘Terminal’ program. You can find it in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal At the command prompt, type this (all on one line): sudo nano /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engi ne.plist Find these two lines: <string>-Dapp=CrashPlanService</ string> <string>-Xmn10m</string> And insert a line so that it now looks like this: <string>-Dapp=CrashPlanService</ string> <string>-d32</string> <string>-Xmn10m</string> Optional: A little further down the file, you will see this line: <string>-Xmx512m</string> You can change that line to be: <string>-Xmx... More About: Memory
Nook Update: Doctorow, Stross, and Gaiman
2010-02-15 23:58:00 My Hanukah present has so far been a success. My hope was that an eBook reader would get me to read more. Although I’ve tapered off a bit, since it arrived in December, I’ve finished three books: Makers, by Cory Doctorow Saturn’s Children, by Charles Stross Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman I highly recommend all three, although Makers struck me a bit too much like a remake of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I find myself wishing there were graphic novels available in eBook format. More About: Update
A* in Clojure: Part Two
2010-01-25 05:56:00 Today, I decided to flush out and clean up my A* implementation in Clojure. I cleaned up the namespaces, removed some cruft, got the Java integration working (which required by-passing RT.loadResourceScript() since it seems to be broken), and moving my graph structure definition out of code and into a separate XML file (which is read and parsed directly in Clojure). I’m still not sold on functional programming, these minor changes took me more hours than I care to admit and gave me a crazy headache, but that could just be because I’m unfamiliar with the language. I also uploaded the code to GitHub, because I figured where’s the fun in learning a new algorithm in a new language without tossing in the risk of losing all your code to an silly mistake with an unfamiliar version control system? Luckily no data was lost, and if you have any interest in Clojure, Clojure-Java integration, or A-Star search, check it out here: http://github.com/jbcpollak/AStar-Clojur. .. More About: Part
Solved: Mac OS X Locks-Up When Waking from Screensaver
2010-01-16 18:48:00 The Problem Frequently, say, one out of 10 times, when I try and log back into my Mac from the screensaver, or when I wake it from sleeping, I will get a spinning beachball and be unable to type my password. Other times I will be able to log in, but I am prompted to enter my password multiple times for various applications, and invariably one of them (usually gconsync) will get stuck after I enter my password with a spinning beach ball. I can still use most applications, but application that needs keychain authorization locks up. I happen to be using a very handy tool called SSHKeychain, which turned out to be the culprit. If you are using SSHKeychain, this post will walk you through fixing the unstable-wake-from-screensaver, and also solves the problem of having to type your keychain password 3-5 times when I returned to my computer. The Solution On your Mac’s menubar, near the clock, look for SSHKeychain, it looks like a keyring with three keys. If you have ... More About: Screensaver
Strange Errors Compiling The Android Platform on Mac OS X 10.6? (Snow Leopa
2009-12-13 06:13:00 If you are having trouble compiling Android on Snow Leopard, first make sure you’ve installed the Leopard 10.5 Java 1.5 SDK, according to these instructions. Second, make sure you have the latest XCode installed, and make sure you have installed the optional 10.4 SDK. In my case, it appeared that the 10.4 sdk was installed, but it was either corrupt or out of date, resulting in many strange errors like the following: Issue 993 (out/target/common/obj/JAVA_LIBRARIES/fra mework_intermediates/javalib.jar) Docs droiddoc: out/target/common/docs/framework Could not load 'clearsilver-jni' java.library.path = out/host/darwin-x86/lib make: *** [out/target/common/docs/framework-timesta mp] Error 45 Issue 5000 host C: emulator <= external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/adler32. c host C: emulator <= external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/compress .c host C: emulator <= external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/crc32.c host C: emulator <= external/qemu/distrib/zlib-1.2.3/de... More About: Strange , Errors
A-Star Search in Clojure
2009-10-16 23:45:00 I wanted to refresh my knowledge of functional programming, A-Star search, and I figured learning Clojure at the same time couldn’t hurt. I figured I’d do all three at once, and throw in a health dose of Maven and Java at the same time. This project was intended to: Refresh myself on how to do functional programming Refresh my knowledge of A* search Help me learn Clojure Demonstrate Java interoperating with Clojure Demonstrate Maven as a viable build system for Clojure Download The Demo Here Once downloaded, unzip the zip file and open a terminal. You now have three options: Review the Source Code The meat of the code is all in Clojure, here: src/main/resources/com/example/clap/astar .clj There is a bit of boot-strap Java code in the following file, but I can’t say its all that interesting: src/main/java/com/example/clap/App.java Running from Source If you are on a Mac, or you already have Maven and Java installed, just run the following: ... More About: Search
Missing IMAP email on Snow Leopard
2009-10-03 01:08:00 If you are finding mail sometimes not appearing in your Mail inbox after upgrading to Snow Leopard , but then it appears again once you restart Mail, try shutting off the ‘Use IDLE command’ option in account settings. (Its at the bottom of the advanced tab). After upgrading to Snow Leopard on my Mac, I noticed this was happening with email in my Dreamhost IMAP account. I’ve been running with the ‘IDLE’ option turned off for a day, and it seems to be working correctly again. More About: Email , Missing
Using JOGL as a Dependency in Maven
2009-09-08 21:14:00 At work, we need to start using JOGL as a dependency of our project, which we build with Maven . JOGL, the Java OpenGL interface, uses platform specific binaries, which introduces some complexity to the build process. After a brief websearch, I found the appropriately titled using-jogl-as-dependency-in-maven, unfortunately, it appears to be a private blog, so I can’t see if the information is useful or not. I did find on mvnbrowser.com that jogl-1.1.1-rc6 (as of this writing) is on the dev.java.net Maven2 repository, but I couldn’t find a usage guide. Oh well, I’ll keep looking. For now its not a hugely pressing issue, so the one developer who is using has just hacked his Eclipse setup.
How to Sync Exchange and Google Calendar with a Mac
2009-08-30 23:14:00 Since the latest Mac operating system Snow Leopard adds Exchange support to iCal, I thought maybe now I could reach the holy-grail: Sync ing my work calendar, in Exchange, to Google Calendar . This would effectively let me see my business meetings on my Android-based cell phone. I had tried various tricks and tools before, but nothing ever quite worked. But today I tried BusySync, and it seems to work great. All you need to do is setup iCal to access your Exchange server, then in BusySync’s Google tab, check the off the calendar you want to upload in the ‘Publish to Google’ list. There are two problems with this solution however: Changes made to the calendar on Google aren’t synced back to iCal, and worse, they seem to be lost from Google. The calendar name shown in Google is pretty awkward, its currently ‘Calendar[<user@exchangeserver&g t;]’. I was hoping to try out Spanning Sync and see if it’s similar features would handle Exc... More About: Google Calendar
What’s your Boss Like?
2009-08-22 20:35:00 Here’s an article about Mick Mountz, the CEO of my company, Kiva Systems. More About: Boss
Small Car + Hockey Gear = Not A Problem
2009-07-16 23:07:00 I used to skate with a guy who brought his gear on the back of a Goldwing… sweet! More About: Hockey , Small , Gear , Problem
Mozy for Mac: database locked!
2009-07-07 19:52:00 I’ve been using Mozy on my Mac for a while, but I’m strongly considering canceling my subscription. It took nearly a month to get the backup complete. Once it was, it ran successfully for about a month, but now I get errors like this in the logs, and the backup never finishes successfully: 2009-07-07 13:26:04.668 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:27:04.736 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:28:06.563 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:29:06.670 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked 2009-07-07 13:30:07.005 MozyBackup[7933:3603] WRN (updater) Error adding changes to scan cache: database is locked I found this blog post, but I seem to have a slightly different issue, even though the errors listed are the same.... More About: Locked , Database
Scrubbing Edit History and Metadata from Word and Office Documents
2009-07-07 17:08:00 Many people don’t realize, but Microsoft Office tracks the history of your documents, and can be configured to store hidden comments and other editing notes. Office documents also track what is called metadata, such as the author and organization where the document was created. It can sometimes be really embarrassing to share a document with someone, only to have them discover your previous comments. If you ever want to scrub your documents history, here are a few links that might be helpful: Try this if you have Office 2003/XP, or this if you have Office 2007. Unfortunately, I haven’t had to do this with OpenOffice yet, so I’m not sure how to do it there. More About: History , Word , Edit
Speck at Kiva
2009-07-07 03:36:00 Speck is styl’n with his new rollbar!SpeckAnother shot of specks good side More About: Kiva
Ice Racing!
2009-03-04 03:07:00 1996 Miata, originally uploaded by pardsbane. I went ice racing this weekend. It was my first motorsports event with the Miata. I uploaded a few pictures from the day to flickr as an experiment. More About: Racing
French Food In Seattle
2009-02-20 21:44:00 If you are ever in Seattle , I highly recommend Le Pichet. More About: Food , French , French food
Amazing Heavy Machinery Tricks…
2008-05-31 01:15:00 How to Load a Bobcat without Ramps…. And how to unload a backhoe without ramps: More About: Tricks , Amazing , Heavy , Machinery
Never Before…
More articles from this author:2008-05-31 00:42:00 … has something so beautiful been made out of something so awful… Kind of makes me nostalgic… almost… 1, 2, 3 |
