moving parts of the kasper clan

When I won my PSP from a raffle at LinuxWorld, I honestly didn’t think that highly of it. In fact, my first thought was “I wonder if Linux would run on this.” It’s not worth it, IIRC, but what’s truly surprised me is the coolness of the PSP. It has built-in WIFI, which is pretty slicque on its own, but this makes it a truly portable online multiplayer gaming platform (think Xbox Live, but small enough to carry everywhere you go). Forget about the built-in web browser, by the way, really–it is horrible!!

So, the first game that I bought (and felt really stupid doing, thinking that I’d just wasted $35 on a used game for a console that I’d never really use that much) was SOCOM, Fireteam Bravo. I bought it because it looked a little bit like Splinter Cell, which I have an absolute blast playing on the Xbox. Well, anyway, it’s not quite like Splinter Cell, but SOCOM is a pretty decent little you-against-the-computer game anyway.

What I didn’t know until I happened to be discussing it with a guy at work (the “nanofire” in the title) was that it is actually an online multi-player game on the PSP. This changes everything! It’s actually a WHOLE lot of fun to play against other people wirelessly from wherever you feel like it.

Of course, I am not all that good with it yet and don’t have tremendously great ambitions of getting all that great with it (… major time investment, anyone?…), but it is very fun to play when the mood strikes me and time allows.

Oh, and the title… the only guy I know who plays it (nanofire–the guy from my work) happened to get a VERY lucky shot in on me last night with an RPG and felt obliged to send me an e-mail this morning with that text in it. It was funny enough to post about. =;)

The Finished Product, originally uploaded by vanRijn.

Or, possibly titled “How to hang that pesky, 50-pound window air conditioner unit in those purty little vinyl windows that you can’t stick screws into.”

We have beautiful, wonderful double-hung vinyl windows, yay us. They’re very pretty, very functional, operate very smoothly, etc., etc. HOWEVER, they do NOT play nicely with window-unit air conditioners (you can’t screw the air conditioner into the vinyl window parts). So after getting a brilliant idea from a newsgroup post, and not willing to pay $40 for a metal air conditioner brace that I can’t really use anyway (again, vinyl window sill), I set out to make my own air conditioner brace out of a 2×4, some white paint, and a little sweat. Turned out purty nice too, I must say.

I was really pleased with the final outcome of this little product. What started out as a crazy idea with me looking (to my bride, at any rate, who pointed it out several times) like I was just trying to not pay $40 for an air conditioner brace turned out to be a really nice solution. First, I didn’t have to drill any holes into the nice vinyl window frames or sill (they wouldn’t have held anyway). Second, the air conditioner is MUCH more stable by mounting it from above to the window sill than below to the frame. And third, there is no way this air conditioner is going anywhere, unless the entire window frame decides to exit my house. =:)

I’ve put up a little pictorial/tutorial on flickr here….

I had need to convert some files today from being newline-separated (one line per file, key-value pairs) to ‘###’-separated. In other words, instead of this:

foo=bar
smith=wibble
neo=smith

I needed this:

foo=bar###smith=wibble###neo=smith

My first inclination was to try using tr solely like this:

cat $file | tr “\n” “###”

This resulted, however, in only one “#” being used to join the lines. Not quite what I wanted. My next thought was sed:

cat $file | sed ’s,\n,###,g’

But that didn’t work at all. So, my good friend Mr. Google and I were just starting to look into the deeper mysteries of sed when I found this little newsgroup posting which opened my eyes to some of the magic of awk:

cat $file | awk ‘{printf(”%s###”, $0);} END {printf(”\n”)}’

That’s just sweet! Incidentally, I did figure out how to do it with a combination of tr and sed (convoluted because of the missing \n at the end):

F=$(cat $f | tr “\n” “_” ); echo $F | sed ’s,_,###,g’

But it’s not nearly as pretty. =;)

A, Burying K & J, originally uploaded by vanRijn.

We had an absolutely fantastical time today. I decided that we needed to find a beach to go to and go… to… it. Yah. So, we found a really, really nice beach here in RI that reminded me of both Mission Beach and La Jolla Shores from my back-home town of sunny San Diego. I had the best day I could have wanted with my little family, hopping over the waves, diving through them, eating sand on occasion as I took a wave in too close to shore, teaching my kids a little about body-surfing, and taking a nice walk with my beautiful bride along the beach.

Oh. Along the way, we decided to bury some of our children, which is shown here… =;)

I was extremely happy with the day, though, and I only hope my beautiful kiddies will remember it as fondly as I do. Season-long passes forthcoming, I am certain.

100_3311.JPG, originally uploaded by vanRijn.

We had a fun day at church a couple of weeks ago, doing a “Father/Buddy Day”. J & I decorated our own shirts (spiffy, eh?), and participated in a series of grueling events designed specifically for the enjoyment of the mothers and other family members in attendance. But that didn’t stop us gallant warriors, no sir. We came home with smiles on our faces, sun-screen in our pores, the perfume of victory in our flaring nostrils, second-place and third-place ribbons, and wet bellies (a leaking water balloon, travelling at high velocity between son and Father cannot be cajoled into a soft landing, no matter how great the skill, sadly).

Just had to say… it certainly feels great to get into the midst of code I’ve never seen before, debug a problem, find the solution, test it, and submit a patch to the author. Man I wish I had more time for coding at home. Maybe God will let me code in heaven for Him! =:)

So, anyway, what prompted this post is that I’ve been trying to use kflickr to upload my photos to my flickr account and kept getting stopped by an annoying error. So I donned my Superman outfit, pulled on my hip-huggers, dove in, found what looks to be the problem, fixed it, and am now happily uploading my pictures to my flickr account.

Cool!

This is what’s fantastic about Open Source, you see.

Now, granted, the author hasn’t seen my patch yet, and I’ve not heard back, but I’m happy since I can now use this nifty little utility which fits right into the rest of my KDE desktop.

And with that happy thought, I bid you adieu, guten aben, and sweet dreams, my pretties.