Nabaztag

I have been having some fun lately playing around with my old Nabaztag rabbit.  A little while ago I managed to get the compiler for the little VM running in the Nabaztag working under Mac OS X.  The compiler also comes with a simulator, and unfortunately the Linux version that I got running under OS X didn’t have much of a UI.  Last night I hacked together a little OpenGL based UI that shows the status of the LEDs.  The next thing to do is add on the ears 🙂
I have to say that my UI looks nicer than the Windows one 😉

FrontDoor

This weekend I built a simple little Linux program that scratches an particular itch of mine.  As part of my daily work I need to log in to various Linux VMs.  The problem is that the IP addresses of these VMs often changes due to them being configured to use DHCP.  I suppose I could have changed them to have static IP addresses, but that would be too easy 😉

Instead I have written a little program I call FrontDoor that gets loaded by getty and displays some basic information about the host, including things like the IP address and so on.  Now I can just look at the VM on my desktop and see the IP address at a glance 🙂

JRuby, Rails and Development mode

Well, that was fun…  I spent quite a bit of time today beating my head against a “memory leak” only to remember that JRuby + Rails + Development mode = very leaky.  Switch to production mode and the problem goes away.

A simple little Rails app with one controller and one model is all that is needed to exercise the problem.  Run rails in development mode, and hit it with requests, memory usage soon skyrockets and the app starts to fall over.  Switch to production mode and the same app runs really nicely 🙂

Sadness doesn’t even come close

My boy is going to die soon.  He has been diagnosed with a degenerative brain disorder.  He is almost 4 now and we will be “lucky” if he sees 6 years old.  There are is no cure.  All we can do is try to keep him comfortable.

I alternate between numbness and weeping.  He’s such a happy little guy and he doesn’t deserve this.  It is a horrible disease.
We’re thinking of getting him a Pleo to play with as he loves dinosaurs.  I would be interested in hearing from people who have one to see if it is worth getting one for a small child.