I’m posting GPS data from a snowboarding trip to Mount Snow in Vermont captured with the Google My Tracks app for Android. The XML Google Maps plugin for WordPress is pretty useful here. The only disappointing thing is that there isn’t a parameter to set the granularity when producing the altitude and speed graphs when using the plugin, as far as I know. The My Tracks app claims a top speed of 35 MPH (!), which isn’t illustrated in the speed graph. It looks like the plugin does a simple downsampling of the data, so it misses some detail. Still pretty cool though! Make sure to check out the map using the Google Earth plugin for a 3D view of the mountain.

This is all of the snowboarding we did before lunch. In other news, the battery life of the HTC Incredible sucks, so there’s no data after lunch.

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The NextGEN Gallery plugin for wordpress is pretty useful, and it there are all sorts of plugins which extend its capabilities. I’ve used the XML Google Maps plugin for example to show photos in NextGEN albums on google maps. There’s also the NextGEN Polaroid plugin which makes the cool flash animation shown below. However, over the course of upgrading WordPress and the NextGEN gallery to the latest versions, the functionality broke. Here’s how to get it to work with the latest versions (assumes you’ve already downloaded, installed, and tested your NextGEN gallery plugin, and that you’ve already downloaded and installed the NextGEN Polaroid plugin from here):
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I’ve noticed recently that I had two mediocre computers when I really only needed one.  I took the best parts from both (which again, are mediocre at best, but are all I can afford at the moment) and combined them into one machine.  On this machine I installed Linux:  Ubuntu 8.04 to be exact.  Using the alternative install CD, I used two harddrives to create software RAID-0 and RAID-1 devices on which to place the /root and /home partitions respectively.  My goal is to completely ween myself from windows completely, at least on my home computers, and I’m still working towards this goal.

I am a graduate student after all, and I still need to be able to write papers on my home computer for publication in technical journals.  Standard procedure on my old windows computer was to use MikTex and TeXnicCenter.  MikTex is great because it automatically downloads and installs whatever latex packages it needs on the fly, and TeXnicCenter beats the snot out of notepad.  After switching to Ubuntu and Gnome specifically, I started tracking down replacements for these two pieces.  The most intriguing (and first) solution I came across was using the Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) development environment with the Texlipse plugin.  Eclipse is an extremely extendable platform that has great plugins and tools for developing in all sorts of languages, and I’ve been using a customized version at work to develop software which runs on some Texas Instruments fixed-point DSPs and Xilinx FPGAs.

The first step to getting a workable Eclipse-based LaTex environment working Read more

Due to a harddrive failure, I was forced to reinstall Linux on my aging laptop.  Previously, I had been running Gentoo which was built completely from source (if you want to learn about linux, building your own Gentoo installation from source is a great way).  Gentoo ran pretty fast on my old laptop since the only packages installed were the ones I had taken the time to build using Portage.  However, upgrades were always a pain since every package had to be built from source.  Yea yea yea, I know you can install pre-compiled packages from Portage, but what’s the fun in that, right?  Anyways, I’ve been running Debian on a home server and it’s pretty stable with no frills.  Ubuntu, being a quasi-derivative of Debian seemed like an attractive choice for a laptop.  Wow, is it ever.

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As my crappy 802.11b wireless router gasped its last breath, I started looking for a suitable replacement. My home network includes a web/email server, a dedicated MythBox, my standard desktop tower, and a laptop or two. Naturally, I wanted to upgrade from a just a simple router to a more full-featured firewall without spending a whole lot of money. An old AMD Athlon 900MHz computer with 512MB or ram would become an excellent base for a Smoothwall Express 3.0 installation.

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