I’ve had my aluminum iMac keyboard for quite some time now and the only real drawback to using it in windows is the lack of print screen and scroll lock, especially for someone who does a lot of remote work on *nix in their windows session.

Why Apple didn’t just whip up a fix themselves is beyond me,  as this keyboard really could have mass market appeal in much the same way iPods do.  For those new to the game, iPods such as mine had to be tricked into working with a Windows PC, and even then you had to have firewire.  Your reward was the best MP3 player at the time…no one said bleeding edge is easy.

The same holds true for the new iMac keyboards.  Is it too much to expect a keyboard to “just work”, considering the company behind it?  Apparently, yes.  Luckily, there are people around to sort these kind of things out and fix problems that manufacturers artificially create in a vain attempt to move product.  This goes against my methodology that if a person possesses “oppressed” hardware that is purposely crippled, that person will, with enough community and knowledge, un-cripple and enhance a product beyond the manufacturer’s wildest dreams.

References?  See:  RockBox Sansa e200R series (Crippled Real Rhapsody), PodZilla on early iPods (more formats, ogg support, etc.), WRT54G v5 (and the earlier versions, although the v5 was made to get buyers to fork over a premium for a router that could be hacked and have its warranty voided, the WRT54GL…the L stands for Linux, but ironically enough loading Linux onto it will void the warranty).

Worthy of honorable mention is Cisco, because what would the world come to if, lord forbid, you used a NON CISCO GBIC IN A CISCO ROUTER???  IOS has its chips on apocalypse.

But alas, slash rant.

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If you’re like me and easily forget exact syntax of commands and don’t really feel like dedicating the necessary block of brain space reserved for the root user to memorization of exact syntax, I offer you these simple bash functions.  Toss them into your ~/.bashrc file for instant fun (protip: type bash to reload bash after you have added these to load them up without re-logging) or put them into /etc/bash.bashrc to apply them to all users using bash on your system.

The first function searches through the text of all the files in your current directory.  Very useful for, say, debugging a PHP script you didn’t write and can’t track down where that damn MySQL connect string actually is.

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Let me qualify this by saying that lately I have been enjoying a lot of MSTRKRFT’s stuff espescially the remix of Death From Above 1979′s Sexy Results and Justice’s D.A.N.C.E, but I think I finally figured these guys out.  At live performances they just use a standard DJ set with two turntables, MacBook Pro for Serato Scratch Live, and a DJ mixer.  In the studio, they use probably a lot more stuff, but most notably:

• very similar drum beats that are usually a variation of, or exact replica of kick, hat, snare, hat with some occasional fills.  Don’t get me wrong, it usually fits in very nicely, but it is seriously used in just about all their songs.
• usually has a simple driving loop on an analog synth, usually Moog-ish in tone, sometimes arpeggiated, sometimes not.
• short clips of sampled vocals, if any.

And yes, I do realize the above describes a fairly large quantity of music, but damn if MSTRKRFT hasn’t taken this formula and ran with it.  In fact, I am currently planning a track based around this formula, however many times it has already been done.

Old Forever Ending fansite is up again over at seanp2k.com/fe.

Ahh, my first real site…brings back memmories.

If anyone needs anything from my old site (seanp2k.com), I have all of it still, or at least most of it, as my old hosting provider screwed me and deleted my account a few days after I didn’t renew a few years back, and I lost the MySQL database for the image gallery I had up there which a few people used quite a bit.  So, if you do need anything, shoot me an email (dot com [ÀT} seanp2k.end junk.c o m) or leave a comment here.

I just (hopefully) finished debugging my SqueezeCenter install somehow adding ~300,000 files to my library…symbolic links.  While usually they are awesome and save time as typing

cd /www

is much easier than

cd /usr/local/www/htdocs

ha.

So, to locate all symbolic links in the current directory and any directories under that:

find */* -type l

That should do it!  Note that that is a lowercase “L” and not a “one”.  This should make it easier if you have a terrible recursion problem with some script following links and don’t feel like fixing the actual script, or in this case, a fairly large perl program AKA slimserver.

This is from my ip2k.com wordpress that I forgot the password to and deleted.  For a while, I was #1 on google for ‘connection aggregation’ but not anymore.

This started off as an idea in the back of my mind and eventually turned into a few pages of text, then into a whitepaper used for a final project in my networking class (recieved A+ too)

first page is removed because you don’t need to know my name:

ccap.pdf

The Community Connection Aggregation Project

IntroductionCCAP is a logical CAN (community area network) topology intended for increasing internet connection speeds among communities by a factor of n at little or no additional cost.

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