As Joel Spolsky put it: “Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby”. If you’ve read Joel’s stuff, you know he has a way of making sense — a quality of writing which can be tough to find on the Internet. As a Git user, I can’t say Joel converted me, but he did get me thinking about why I too hung on to familiar ol’ Subversion long after it’s obsolescence. Rather than boring you with that, herein lies a minimalist guide to getting started with distributed version control. Continue reading »
Oct 062007
I finally built a red box, not the phone phreak device that generates coin tones for pay phones, but rather a Linux PBX which gives me the power and flexibility of a commercial grade phone system at a fraction of the cost. I call it a red box because the primary VoIP number I chose suggests [1]June 20, 1963– the day the “red telephone” went live between Washington and Moscow. Once I painted the side panels a nice, shiny red, I decided that in keeping with the metallic network naming I use (cobalt, tungsten, strontium, etc.) the best name for my new PBX would be ‘copper’. Continue reading »
S.A.R.E. Ninjas are the folks over at SpamAssassin Rules Emporium who act as sort of an arms dealer in the Spam War: they publish custom rules and plugins for SpamAssassin, the Open Source world’s powerful anti-spam software. This article is about an imminent software release that promises big trouble for spammers. Continue reading »
The first Ogg-friendly music player I purchased was a Neuros II; 
this was late in 2004 and hardware support was fairly new as the Vorbis codec didn’t reach 1.0 until 2002. Then, as now, the best place for information on Ogg-friendly devices was XiphWiki. I recall being quite impresssed with Neuros’ willingness to open up the device specifications and embrace the Open Source community, unfortunately the device suffered from a number of design flaws that no amount of firmware hacking could ever resolve. Ultimately the combination of charging problems, a design plagued by awkwardness and bulk, and the manufacturer’s shift to focus on newer devices doomed the Neuros II to my technology junk drawer. Continue reading »
Jul 062007
Summer in Peekskill has turned out to be quite nice and my wife and I have spent the last couple weeks refactoring our hardware configuration with procedures occasionally referred to as “foundation planting” and “buying porch furniture”. Naturally, porch life in the Hoffman home requires adequate wifi coverage, so I got to thinking about how to extend my router’s wireless signal. Continue reading »
Aug 222006
Today is sort of a birthday for Codefix: I first registered the codefix.net domain on August 22, 2003– eight days after the Great North American Blackout; however, wondering how people lived without electricity and meeting my Brooklyn neighbors weren’t the only things going on back then. Work as a Linux consultant was just starting to become steady, but incorporation was more than a year away and I was still moonlighting as a photographer.Later that year, Red Hat made waves by announcing that they would discontinue support for their (free as in beer) non-enterprise Linux distributions. Fortunately Open Source projects are particularly well suited for stepping in when another has dropped the torch; in this case, there were even a couple new contenders: Fedora and Gentoo. Fedora was Red Hat’s consolation prize to the Open Source community and early versions were not impressive; Gentoo, on the other hand, seemed like a genuine revolution in the Linux world. Continue reading »
Jun 052006
As I write this, Vim 7 is making waves as the next great thing in Open Source software; although it’s not yet available in most package management systems. Fortunately, Vim is easy to compile from source. I used the following to compile the source on my Ubuntu laptop:
sudo apt-get build-dep vim-gtk Continue reading »
sudo aptitude install xlibs-dev
svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vim/vim7
cd vim7
./configure --enable-gui --enable-perlinterp
--with-compiledby='Codefix Consulting <garrison@codefix.net>'
make && sudo make install
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