Working Up

I have the MoinMoin wiki up and running on a Windows XP machine. I am running a local-only version – no server capability. This was pretty easy and took about 15 minutes. The source for all this is the MoinMoin site. I downloaded the 1.9 release from their download page. This docs page explains how […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Estimating budgets months and years into the future is difficult. I have yet to meet anyone who does it well enough to risk large amounts of anything valuable. The Excel spreadsheet calculates well enough, but it can provide a false sense of precision. Instead, I use a slide rule. The difficulty of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This past week I spent a day at the funeral of my Uncle Lawrence. We always called him L. O. Uncle L. O. was buried in the town of Jennings, Louisiana near Interstate 10 in the southwest corner of the state. He was born and raised there and met and married my […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I voted on Tuesday using a paper ballot where I filled an oval with ink to register my vote. This removed one computer from the voting system. I think that was a good thing. I voted on Tuesday. The voting place near my home in Northern Virginia used paper ballots. This felt […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Much has changed in computers in the past 30 years. Something that has not changed is that the input/output part of the computer is paramount. See, for example, the iPhone computer. It was in the dark ages of computing back in 1978. I was taking a class in assembly language programming for […]

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by Dwayne Phillips eBooks are taking over the world. Well, they won’t finish off the published paper books this weekend, but the trend is there. As with most things, I see some good and some bad in this. I think it is good that college textbooks are becoming available in digital form. Pay $10 for […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The guitar player and inventor Les Paul died on August 13th, 2009 at age 94. He influenced my life in several ways and continues to influence the lives of others in an American family. For information on Les Paul, start at the Wikipedia article. It was the summer of 1975. I was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips HP printers struggle to work under Linux if SELinux is “enforcing.” It seems that HP and others would have taken care of this foible by now. I have a new computer, actually two new computers. Well, they aren’t new and they aren’t really two, they are one. Now I have confused myself. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I return to some of my technical roots this week. I am experimenting with the OpenCV image processing and computer vision library. This is fun. This is a “techie” blog post. Many years ago I worked with image processing. I did this work in graduate school and then wrote a lot of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The computer has become the learning appliance. Don’t believe me? Just ask my six-year-old niece. So what do schools do now? “What are you searching?” That was a simple question. Last weekend I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee visiting with relatives. I was sitting in front of my portable computer studying and modifying […]

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