I received an e-mail the other day about a Konfabulator project that I hadn’t even thought about since 2007: over five years ago! The widget in question was one developed for a “4k contest,” one in which coders try to make something interesting with a minimal amount of code. One of my submissions was a pseudo-3D rubik’s cube widget.

The person who contacted me had the submitted version of my code and was trying to use it as a basis for another project of his. Unfortunately, the submitted version was not designed to be human-readable, and was a bit annoying to work with.

Now, a lot has changed for me in five years. Back then, I was in a different career – freelance web development. Now I’m a computer science teacher. Back then, I used SVN to store and track changes for my work. Now, I use GitHub. Continue reading →

I decided it’s finally time that I learn to properly use a terminal-based editor other than nano, since nano is rather limited when it comes to editing source code. vim seemed like a good choice, but I was so daunted by it. Then I discovered vimtutor – it’s a tutorial that takes place entirely in vim, and it’s nicely paced!

If you’ve got vim installed on your machine, just run vimtutor at a command prompt and follow the instructions from there. Hello, cursor movement using letter keys!

UPDATE 2012-02-03: I realized I forgot about installing the certificate on the non-4S device. Fixed!

UPDATE 2012-02-04: amanpatel pointed out on the ArchLinuxArm forums that you need to make sure base-devel is installed. I’ve updated the prerequisites section to include this.

My wife got an iPhone 4S recently, which of course features Siri, the virtual assistant. I didn’t think I needed a 4S, but I was pretty jealous of Siri. Unfortunately, I don’t qualify for a discounted upgrade since I got my iPhone4 less than a year ago.

Enter Spire by @chpwn. Spire lets you install Siri on a jailbroken iPhone, but it requires the use of a proxy that lets non-4S devices pretend to be a 4S. I found lots of instructions for getting a proxy up and running as a virtual machine, but I don’t like leaving full computers running all the time. I decided to figure out what would be required to make it work with what we had: a PogoPlug server. Continue reading →