Author Archives: James Reuben Knowles

How to Reveal Hidden Files and Folders in a Mac OS X File Dialog

It turns out that there is an undocumented (or poorly documented) key combination to show and hide hidden folders and files. Press Command-Shift-Period (⌘⇧.) to toggle hidden files and folders on and off. Continue reading

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Cleaning Up Jammed Subversion Transactions

There was a very odd server failure while a big Subversion commit was in process. (The ISP hosting the server is kind of flaky.) To clean up the leftover files from the failed transaction, I did this: $ svnadmin lstxns … Continue reading

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DHCP Lease Time Optimization

Setting DHCP lease times is in practice pure voodoo. I ran across a paper presented in 2007 on research into DHCP lease times at Georgia Tech’s student network called Usage-Based DHCP Lease Time Optimization. While the paper on the whole … Continue reading

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Human Life Value

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Eliminating Multi-Threading Headaches

I first touched parallel processing as an undergrad. I was selected to for a summer research program that tackled different aspects of parallel processing using transputers. They broke us into teams and I was put on the parallel debugging team. … Continue reading

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Overriding DNS for Testing

Once in a while it’s handy to override DNS and associate a host name with a different IP address. Continue reading

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Old But Funny

Ah the 80′s… big hair, Dr. Demento, and the Frantics. Ran across an old skit from the 1980′s that brought back memories. Somebody synchronized clips from Naurto to give a little video to the skit.

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Sign of an Immature Programmer

There are stages of development that people seem to go through as a programmer. Continue reading

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看板 (Kanban) and Agile Software Development

Agile software development is an evolutionary practice rather than a process (implementation). An 2009 article Kanban Development Oversimplified has a nice overview of adapting 看板 (kanban) ideas into the development cycle.  

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Git Tutorial

For the uninitiated, here’s a nice git tutorial at progit.org. You can download the current stable version of git at the git home page.

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