Ira's Blog

I’m famous!

Ira Snyder — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:32:02 +0000

I’ve been doing lots of work with the Linux Kernel at work. Seems I’ve gotten some press with a couple of sensor drivers I wrote Pretty neat.

Independence Day in a small town

Ira Snyder — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:47:40 +0000

Independence Day in a small town is great. I’ll describe the scene today. Basically, everyone drove out to the airport, where the fireworks show is held. Then, since there is plenty of free space on the tarmac, everyone sets off tons of huge fireworks while waiting for the real show. Totally dangerous, but totally awesome. Also, other fun things like throwing/kicking a ball around, etc. And BBQing. Mmmmm.

Then, the main show started after it got dark. And it gets really dark, since there are no lights, and town doesn’t light up the area much. We were less than 500 feet back from where they were launched, so they felt really huge. There were no speakers, the local radio station played the music for the fireworks show, and everyone just cranked up their car radios. Totally different from back home in the big city.

I totally recommend it. I’m glad I was invited to tag along.

Burning Boards

Ira Snyder — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:16:57 +0000

Well, today was a fun day. I managed to burn up the CPLD on the Freescale evaluation board I’ve been using at work. I’m not sure if it was code that I wrote (though I don’t think so, I didn’t program the CPLD at all) or if I managed to shock it. My desk doesn’t have any electrostatic protection, so that is quite likely.

So, we’ve ordered a new one, so that I can continue to work. Still, I feel pretty bad that I burned up such an expensive piece of equipment. Better luck with the next one, I guess.

Moved Webhosts

Ira Snyder — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 04:53:14 +0000

Well, if you’re seeing this site, everything worked. Over the weekend, I migrated from the old TextDrive BSD Shared hosting to the new Joyent Shared Accelerators. It’s all the same company, just new and faster servers. Since they’re faster and have more software I need, I decided to move some stuff I hosted elsewhere onto this domain.

So, a quick rundown of what I have here:

I’m finally going to be able to shut down my webserver at home, saving power as well as maintenance headaches. Not that I didn’t like running the server, but I’d rather put it on better hosting for now.

Text Rendering

Ira Snyder — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 06:31:46 +0000

I’ve been doing quite a bit of messing around with text rendering on Linux recently. I’ve got a lovely setup which looks absolutely wonderful. It puts the font rendering on Windows to shame.

Interestingly, there is quite a performance difference between my laptop and my desktop, when using identical setups. Using gtkperf, the laptop takes ~2.28 seconds to complete the hardcore text test. The same test on my desktop takes ~22.4 seconds. So, it’s about 10 times slower. It turns out to be the subpixel smoothing that does it. With just grayscale smoothing, it takes <1 second for the test. A hell of a speedup, but the subpixel smoothing is oh so good.

I know nVidia has had some interesting problems with pre-6xxx cards, especially when rendering colored text (with the closed-source driver). My desktop uses such a card. My laptop uses an Intel i950, which so far has been a tremendously good card.

So, to Intel: start making some standalone AGP / PCIe graphics cards! I’ll buy at least two! (As long as they’re not terribly expensive)

End of an Era

Ira Snyder — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:35:07 +0000

My old cat is no more. He stayed out one night late last year, then got picked up by a coyote.

RIP Junior / Snowball / Petya / Farm on a Bun

Bringing in the new year

Ira Snyder — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:20:16 +0000

Well, 2007 was a good year for me. I did lots of things. Some were better than others, some really sucked, but overall, I’m happy with it. I’ll try to make 2008 even better. (And I have some things in mind for that )

I started off 2008 pretty badly, though. Instead of getting sick from partying too hard, I caught the flu (from Mom) and ended up throwing up all night, then stranded in bed on the 1st. Horrible. Oh well, I’m all good now.

Ruby On Rails

Ira Snyder — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:32:15 +0000

Over the past week, I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on a project for school. It was supposed to be an inventory / rental / customer management system for a video store, complete with changeable rental policies, bonus policies, rental limits, and the like. Quite a large project, especially for one towards the end of the quarter. Our group ended up with a pretty good implementation, which very largely met all of the requirements. A few groups have presented their project already, and most of them seem pretty buggy and feature incomplete. I’m proud of our work, even though it’s not great.

Now, what I really think helped us was our use of Ruby on Rails, which is an amazing web application development environment. Considering I didn’t know any ruby on Wednesday morning (6 days ago) and went ahead to write a fairly complex web application by Monday at midnight-ish. All I’ve got to say is: Ruby on Rails rocks! I’ve been avoiding writing web apps, and working with databases because of all the pain that comes along with them, but Rails made it pretty darn painless. I’d recommend it.

Musings About Cell Phones

Ira Snyder — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 22:58:50 +0000

I realized the other night, when I got a call on my cell phone long after I had gone to bed, that despite the fact that having bright blue lights everywhere in your cell phone may look cool, it is no good for the eyes.

Blue light is very close to the top of the visible light spectrum. It has a short wavelength, and high energy. Just what you don’t want when looking at something in the dark, because it ruins your night vision very quickly. Red light, being at the bottom of the spectrum, has a longer wavelength, and is lower in energy. Maybe we should convince cell phone makers to use red lights in the cell phones?

Crazy UPS Shipping

Ira Snyder — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:43:54 +0000

Well, I ordered a chumby about 2 weeks ago now. If you don’t know what it is, go check out their website. For now, let’s just say that I love it even more than I thought I would. The interesting part is how it arrived (via UPS) at my door:

So, the chumby was shipped from Shenzhen, China, presumably where it is manufactured. From there it went to Chep Lap Kok, Hong Kong, which is really close to Shenzhen. It is the closest large airport, according to google maps. From there, it goes to Incheon, Korea. I’m guessing this is the path that UPS flys things from China to the USA. From there, it goes to Anchorage, Alaska. So far so good. From there it goes to Louisville, Kentucky, which is a giant UPS hub.

Now, here is where it gets weird. From Louisville, it goes to Albequerque, New Mexico, then to Long Beach, California. Seems good, we’re in the general area of my house now. From Long Beach, it makes it’s way to Los Angeles. Not too bad. A little out of the way, but I figure that it has to stop at the LA hub on it’s way here. From LA, it makes it’s way to Ontario, CA, which is kinda weird. From Ontario, it flies back to Louisville, Kentucky! What the hell!! Seems they have a loop….

Then, from it’s second time in Louisville, it flies back to Ontario, CA, and then gets delivered the next day. How very weird. The Ontario, Louisville, Ontario thing really screws with my head. Seems like they need to hire a better software engineer to do their routing algorithms.

To UPS’s credit, though, the package did arrive quickly, 5 days after it was shipped, and undamaged. It was delivered exactly when their website estimated that it would be.