Tapdancing Goats

Puppet is an invaluable tool for managing a large number of Linux servers. By defining different classes for each service I deploy, I can easily define what runs on each server I control just by changing the site manifest.

A problem I ran into early when I was bringing services into Puppet was slightly different configurations [...]

A quick introduction to Puppet, a system for replicating configurations to many Linux servers.

Bear Grylls’s show is getting a little long in the tooth, and the staged “danger situations” are getting more and more ridiculous. I know exactly what Bear needs.

U.S. Marshals.

Every week Bear gets dropped in a wilderness location (like Les Stroud really did) and has to evade U.S. Marshals for seven days. The locals will be [...]

I was busy for awhile, now I’m back. I’m going to post a wider range of stuff. I imported my old LiveJournal posts.

The Papervision3D wiki has an example for making billboarded sprites with just three extra lines of code. Trouble is, it doesn’t really work. Anyone who’s tried it may have noticed that when the planes get too close to the camera, or if the camera rotates around it’s z-axis at all, the planes start rolling instead [...]

I use LaTeX for all my physics homework and lab reports, and I’ll be using it for a master’s thesis in the next few years, so I’m constantly adding to my library of LaTeX commands to save some typing. Here’s a good one when you need to use scientific or engineering notation. Put [...]

Vectors can be typeset in LaTeX with the command \vec, which decorates the argument with a little arrow. This was cute at first, but it doesn’t look very good, especially in fractions. Textbooks use bold face for vectors, so here’s how to do that in LaTeX.

\let\oldhat\hat \renewcommand{\vec}[1]{\mathbf{#1}} \renewcommand{\hat}[1]{\oldhat{\mathbf{#1}}}

This also makes unit vectors (typeset with \hat) [...]

I don’t get it, but my wife loves the celebrity gossip, so when all this stuff about Jessica Simpson started coming out I whipped up this little game to make her laugh. It’s an homage to an old Mac game I haven’t seen in years called “Slick Willie.” I’m also keeping track of [...]

wxCL is a GUI package for Common Lisp that uses wxWidgets, and it seems to look pretty good on Windows and Linux, and the code is sufficiently lispy. Exactly what I’m looking for, except it’s in alpha. Serious, seeping wound alpha. I haven’t gotten it working on Linux yet, but it works on Windows. [...]

The professor for my electricity and magnetism class wants me to use Mathcad instead of Maple, so I bought the student version. I’ve been using it on my Windows laptop for a week or so, but it would be nice to be able to run it on my desktop. The Wine compatibility lists [...]