Kyle Matthew Oliver

Category: The Hacker Within

  • The Hacker Within VIII

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    Today’s subject: Mozilla Thunderbird Templates Greg V. Wilson of the University of Toronto has a great talk on nanoHUB called “Software Carpentry: Essential Software Skills for Research Scientists.” In it, he makes the claim that any task that you need to perform more than once is worth automating. My computing life has improved in direct…

  • Special Combined Sunday Judgment/Hacker Within: March Madness

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    Today’s subject: the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. First, a couple of confessions. (1) It’s a bit of a stretch to throw the Hacker Within label on this post, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to integrate my two regular features in one post. (2) Since I have picks to make, and also fair number…

  • The Hacker Within VI

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    Today’s subject: another cool Emacs mode Just stumbled across an Emacs mode for editing input files for Los Alamos’s MCNP Monte Carlo radiation transport code. Since I’m now addicted to syntax highlighting, I definitely snatched this one up. Turns out it was written by Tim Bohm, who works right down the hall from me. Anyway,…

  • The Hacker Within: Baseball Edition

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    With a little help from geek and proud, I’m now able to listen to MLB.TV radio broadcast streams on Kermit, the Linux machine I work at. Using the MediaPlayerConnectivity plug-in Alan suggests and choosing Totem as the default player in the configuration wizard seems to do the trick on my system (“i686-redhat-linux-gnu” according to configure).…

  • The Hacker Within IV

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    Today’s subject: Emacs matlab-mode, THW III update Just a quick one right now. I needed to take a look at a MATLAB function today but didn’t want to have to look at it in MATLAB to get the syntax-highlighting right. Check out this link if you’ve had the same problem and want a matlab-mode customization…

  • The Hacker Within III

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    Today’s subject: SQLite I’m a novice programmer. As such, I often find that a lot of the sample code and documentation I find online goes over my head. I can’t be the only one for whom this is true. Thus, I thought I’d post a little sample application I wrote that demonstrates some of the…

  • The Hacker Within II

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    Another useful thing about tracking THW projects is that it’s so easy to forget about Linux commands, utilities, etc. that I’ve used in the past. THW posts can serve as a record of such commands. Today I needed to capture a screen shot of some web images of the nuclear fuel cycle for a memo…

  • The Hacker Within I

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    I only blog from the office when I have something work-related to share. Now is one of those times. Because code development is part and parcel of our work as computational researchers, my advisor encourages our group to unleash and cultivate “The Hacker Within” (THW). THW is always trying to improve his or her computing…