Bashed Up Bits

I usually shy away from predictions, but I think two new trends I am seeing more of recently are worth mentioning: post-materialism culture and self-navigating quadro/multi-copters . Post-materialism Since about three or four years ago, I've been seeing a slowly strengthening trickle of articles and personal stories on topics like the "tyranny of stuff" and "paying for experiences instead of things". The first well constructed expression of this trend I read was Bruce Sterling's "Last Viridian Note". While such a change in lifestyle in the past was driven by more external reasoning like "save the earth", this discourse has a more personal flavor to it. Up until the Great Recession (and a little after), there was in the U.S.A., and certain other emerging and developed economies, a relentless cultural drive to have luxurious things and, often, more than one of a particular luxurious thing. Doing so signaled high status. Today, howev...

A Brief Primer on LEAN © 2014, Adam S. Keck Based on: Chasing The Rabbit by Steven Spear Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production by Taiichi Ohno Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System by Durward K. Sobek II and Art Smalley Four Capabilities of Accelerating organizations Specify precise approach to every task with built-in tests to detect failure and stop on error. Swarm to solve problems – immediate RCA. Share new knowledge throughout organization. Leaders lead by developing above capabilities in every single employee. Work Flow and System Design LEAN is a framework for successfully designing complex systems and work flows. A system is a collection of related work flows. A company can be viewed as a single complex system that  provides value to customers in return for money. LEAN is a way of working: Every employee uses LEAN work flow every day to both follow and improve the processes for which ...

The article describes how to open video, audio, and other media files in the Raspberry Pi desktop (the LXDE file manager) using the GPU-based player program. Does double-clicking on a video file in Raspbian result in slow blocky playback in SMPlayer and VLC on your Raspberry Pi? The short answer is that those video players will not work because at this time (Nov. 2013), they do not make use of the GPU on the Raspberry Pi. You need to use the hardware accelerated player, omxplayer, that is used in XBMC Live and OpenELEC.  The problem is that omxplayer is a command line player that is designed to be embedded in the XBMC based distributions.  I present below a way to make it play videos, if you double-click them in the Raspbian Desktop. Others have presented this method, but I've added a little bit of abstraction to make management easier. To start, open LXTerminal and the follow the process below. Step One - Get rid of the CPU-based media players sudo aptitu...

Introduction PowerShell is Microsoft's shell for their product lines. It's now on version 3.0. If you miss the power of the command line while using Windows on either your laptop or servers, PowerShell provides that power. Important concepts: Almost all aspects of the Microsoft ecosystem are objects within an overarching structure. You query and manipulate this structure and its objects with PowerShell. This includes all aspects of SharePoint, Active Directory, and Exchange. Other companies, like VMware (see below) have also written PowerShell modules. This "object nature" means that PowerShell pipes pass objects and properties, not just text.  Variables store data-structures of objects.  One-liners Note: Unwrap the code lines before you use them. Get Help Get the usage of the command "Select-Object": Get-Help Select-Object Built-in examples for the command "Select-Object": Get-Help Select-Object -exam...

Suppose you wanted to do the following in bash: for label in a b c d e f do variable_${label}=${label} done This has the intended result of setting a series of variables: variable_a variable_b variable_c variable_d variable_e variable_f But if what if you want to dereference them programatically? for label in a b c d e f do echo ${variable_${label}} done is not acceptable bash syntax. But there is a way... We can abuse export and env . We set them with: for label in a b c d e f do export variable_${label}=${label} done We can then programmatically dereference the variables by searching for them in the output of env and using awk to get their value. for label in a b c d e f do echo "`env | grep variable_${label} | awk -F= '{print $2}'`" done How's that for bash abuse?

Note: I posted a version of this on Stack Overflow. Errors can occur when there is an underlying SSH authentication issue, like having the wrong public key on the git remote server or if the git remote server changed its SSH host key. Often the an SSH error will appear as: " Invalid remote: origin: Invalid remote: origin" Eclipse will use the .ssh directory you specify in Preferences -> General -> Network Connections -> SSH2 for its ssh configuration. Set it "{your default user directory}.ssh\" . To fix things, first you need to determine which ssh client you are using for Git. This is stored in the GIT_SSH environmental variable. Right-click on "Computer" (Windows 7), then choose Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables. If GIT_SSH contains a path to plink.exe, you are using the PuTTY stack. To get your public key, open PuTTYgen.exe and then load your private key file (*.ppk). The listed public key sho...