Only the Mac and Linux tells me when Daylight Savings Time Starts
Living on the West Coast has many weather advantages because after a big winter storm there is the beauty of the clear sky with warm days and the hint of Springtime. I love the winter, sitting next to the fire with your closest family and friends, playing in the snow, the rainy nights and the water it brings for the spring flowers.
When does spring time bring that wonderful change in time of year we call Daylight Savings? I could probably Google the question and get tens of thousands of web sites to check one at a time but I would rather just ask my local computer.
How do I ask my computer? Read more
A command to put my monitor to sleep is another reason to love Linux
All I wanted was my Gnome desktop to put my monitor to sleep while running Tvtime. I was going to bed for the night and I wanted the monitor off without pressing the monitor's power switch. There must be a software based way like the Power Management software works.
There must be some logic when playing video, either in the desktop software or media player application, to not let the monitor sleep using the power management service. Even in Windows, a running Media Player will never put the monitor to sleep. I understand the logic when video is playing, not audio only, but that is another discussion.
It was late, to simulate a burn-in, I wanted Tvtime to keep playing all night but without the monitor on. I wanted to be as green as I can be. Read more
Tvtime compiles on Fedora 8 with these changes
The current Tvtime v1.0.1 sourceforge project does not compile on Fedora 8, and probably other new kernel based Linux distributions as well. Taking a look at the Tvtime discussion group, I read a few comments about this which included part of the solution. This is what I did to get Tvtime to compile on Fedora 8.
There were two problems compiling Tvtime on Fedora 8. First, the include file 'linux/compiler.h' was removed causing the src/videoinput.c file from compiling. Second, the GNU C++ compiler has become more syntax strict causing the plugins/greedyh.cpp file to be first of many to fail. The GNU compiler reports an error when the class name is redundantly included in the method declaration. Read more
Getting My Google Pagerank without a Google Toolbar
After a major upgrade on my website, I wondered about how to get the word out, I wondered if the Google search engine would like my site, I wondered what my Google Pagerank value was. All this wondering led to creating a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for my website. Before getting ahead of myself, I wanted to first check my Google Pagerank.
Having left the dedicated Microsoft fray many years ago, I have surrounded myself with Linux and Macintosh computers mostly, thus I did not have the Google Toolbar installed on any browsers and frankly did not want to install it just for the Google Pagerank value. It was time for some quick research.
Just for kicks, I googled (when did 'googled' become a verb?) the 'Google Pagerank value' search string and started looking at the result websites. A few of the result websites had extensive doctorate thesis level analysis of the formulae behind the Google Pagerank algorithm. A few other result websites offered looking up any URL and retrieving the Google Pagerank value while viewing Google Ads. And, another set of results described how to query Google to retrieve an URL's Google Pagerank value. As an engineer, this caught me eye, time for some reverse engineering techniques.
C++ Language... as far as I know
Maybe this article is only a rational justification and why of my C++ programming style where I maintain the C++ class code with the declaration in the header file. It is my simple truth, I like my C++ source-code to look like my Java, Javascript, and PHP source-code. There are no separate class declarations; it is all together, it is where it should be.
I have to admit, my C++ code does look awkward to the purist, for there is only one main.cpp and many include files with inline coded methods as opposed the to the traditional method of one header file containing a class definition and one source file with the class implementation. Regrettably, the pursits remained unconvinced by my attempts to articulate the roots of the C language single, multi-pass compilers, or the use of pre-compiled headers. Perhaps, I will have more success by getting this on paper, so to speak. Read more