Brian Pane

I updated my computer to Mac OS 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) last week. It worked well. This afternoon, though, I tried to compile a C program for the first time in a long time.

-bash: gcc: command not found

Hmmm….that’s not good. I found gcc living under /Developer/usr/bin, but problems remained:

$ /Developer/usr/bin/gcc -O -o ~/stream [...]

Recent ReCaptcha texts I’ve encountered:

Nixon’s vowels
indie rock so post-ironic that they wear their trucker hats backwards

10 Moors
the hottest new boy band on the Iberian Peninsula

graven krill
they play both kinds of music: gothic and industrial

I’ve just finished version 1.0-alpha2 of Assetbarista, my Greasemonkey script for Firefox that attempts to improve the discussion forum of the Achewood cartoon.

New in this version is the ability to preview one’s comments before posting. Assetbar, the system that powers the Achewood forum, supports the BBcode markup language. In the absence of a [...]

A long time ago, in grad school, my advisor taught me to use gprof, a tool that produced a report showing where all the CPU time was spent in one’s program. Gprof required recompiling the program with special instrumentation, and its instrumentation granularity wasn’t great, but it provided invaluable data about performance bottlenecks.  Ever [...]

My old place of employment wanted to promote a new “been there, done that” feature. They apparently wrote some code that picks a random question from their database and displays it to the visitor with a call to action:

Note the middle option: “Want to.” Huh?

Update, October 2, 2009: For OS X 10.6, please see the instructions here: http://www.wdream.com/2009/09/install-open-mq-4-4-on-mac-os-x-10-6-snow-leopard/. Thanks to Espen Schulstad for the tip.

I just installed Open MQ on Mac OS X.  The process required a few modifications to the out-of-the-box installation mechanism.  Starting with the generic OpenMQ 4.3 Unix binary download from java.net, I had to [...]

Dear search engines,

When I search for “<name of some ORM package> shard” I am looking for information on database partitioning.  While I appreciate the extra work you’ve done to include matches on “<name of some ORM package> shared” automatically, that wasn’t really what I was looking for.

I work at a company of ~200 people. We have an informal email list to which nearly everyone in the company subscribes. The list carries all manner of discussion, but perhaps the most common use of it is to sell things. I tried that today, listing miscellaneous gadgets that I’d otherwise have [...]

Version 0.9 of Assetbarista is now finished.  One feature that has been in Assetbarista for a long time is the removal of a mousemove event callback from all the avatar icons in the Assetbar discussion page. The removal of a callback counts as a feature because it fixes a race condition in Assetbar’s Ajax [...]

Assetbarista 0.8 is now available.  My ongoing exercise in GreaseMonkey-based development has gained one new feature in this release: when you post a new comment to Assetbar, Assetbarista applies Unicode formatting fixups so that you needn’t reload the page.

To make this feature work, I put wrappers around the JavaScript callback functions that Assetbar uses to [...]