Tag Archives: tools

Systems Researchers Interview Series

14 March 2009 – 20:41

After my last post on implementing Chord, I thought it might be insightful and educational to examine how others are building research distributed systems. I have asked a number of colleagues who have built successful research systems to answer a few questions about their implementations. Here, successful roughly means that the system has [...]

By Emil Sit | Posted in Research | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

Web tools I wish I had at work

10 January 2009 – 17:29

Most companies keep resources associated with on-going but as-yet-unreleased projects hidden from public view. Working at a big company has made me realize that many tools for organizing various bits of data, that I took almost for granted as a grad student, are not available inside the firewall. Here are just a few:

delicious, for [...]

By Emil Sit | Posted in Technology | Also tagged , , , | Comments (2)

How to use the git protocol through a HTTP CONNECT proxy

9 December 2008 – 13:29

Many corporate firewalls prevent git from using its efficient binary protocol by blocking outbound network connections. Sometimes, you are lucky and are trying to clone a repository that is hosted on a site like github which exports their repositories over HTTP, which would enable you to get through the firewall using the http_proxy environment [...]

By Emil Sit | Posted in Technology | Also tagged , , | Comments (13)

How to securely delete files before returning a computer

8 December 2008 – 15:22

A friend of mine who is switching jobs has asked how to delete all personal information from the company computer before returning it. Simply deleting files can prevent the casual observer from finding your data, but file deletion typically does not (to make an analogy to paper) shred the file but merely throws away [...]

By Emil Sit | Posted in Technology | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Experiences with Mercurial and Git

15 August 2008 – 23:32

I have been a big fan of the Mercurial version control system since migrating the Chord project from CVS almost two years ago. Mercurial offers a comfortable command-line experience, good performance and a module based architecture for expansion. Since graduating, I have had to interface with Subversion and Perforce servers at work and [...]

By Emil Sit | Posted in Technology | Also tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Reduce your context switch delay

25 June 2008 – 22:47

Sometimes, simple shell scripts can save a lot of time. Recently, I noticed myself waiting for various unit tests to complete by surfing the web: a surefire way to be distracted for more than the time it takes for the tests to complete (or fail). Enter the following script, which I call notify:

#!/bin/sh “$@” status=$? xmessage [...]

By Emil Sit | Posted in Hacking | Also tagged , , | Comments (2)

Choosing a camera for your small business

1 April 2008 – 17:24

If you are in a small business that needs the occasional picture—for record-keeping, documenting events, or including in promotional material—having a digital camera on hand is definitely useful. A friend recently wrote:

We want something that isn’t too complex, but takes decent shots for print and web. Possibly with a good zoom [...]

By Emil Sit | Posted in Photography, Technology | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

Clean up a Twitter feed with a Yahoo Pipe

17 March 2008 – 14:01

Twitter provides RSS/Atom feeds of your posts; with these feeds, your posts can be easily tracked in news readers like Google Reader, monitored in aggregators like FriendFeed or SocialThing!, and cross-posted into other blog services such as Tumblr. This idea works fine, except for the fact that Twitter has been co-opted to be not only an ambient intimacy [...]

By Emil Sit | Posted in Hacking, Technology | Also tagged , , | Comments (3)