Blog
Spotify for Linux media keys with DBUS
- Details
- Category: Blog
- Published on Wednesday, 11 May 2011 13:44
- Written by Mike Houston
- Hits: 1190
Now that Spotify has discontinued the free account, and restricted me to an 'open' account with only 10 hours of music a month, I've ended up paying for an 'unlimited' account.
While I'm a little disappointed with this turn of events, it does mean I am now able to use the Linux client. It seems pretty decent so far, but I wanted to map some keys to do things like play/pause and next.
Lock-Free IPC
- Details
- Category: Blog
- Published on Wednesday, 16 March 2011 12:27
- Written by Mike Houston
- Hits: 724
I was doing some reading a while back into lock-free algorithms for multi-threaded communication using buffers. The general idea is to use a circular buffer in shared memory to allow one process (or thread) to write data into a buffer so that another process can read it. The algorithm relies on atomic compare-and-swap instructions, which are part of the x86 instruction set and also present in several other architectures which have features designed to assist with concurrency.
It turns out that one of my colleagues has already written about this on the Rapita blog - it's a useful approach, and used in many systems.
Shorter Bash Prompts
- Details
- Category: Blog
- Published on Friday, 05 June 2009 14:10
- Written by Mike Houston
- Hits: 1348
I use Java a lot, and the common practice of naming java packages with long URI-derived namespaces often leads to my bash prompt becoming extremely long. Here\'s a script to display an abbreviated path on the bash prompt.
Enabling IMAP SSL and TLS encryption for mail-notifier under Ubuntu
- Details
- Category: Blog
- Published on Monday, 14 December 2009 12:30
- Written by Mike Houston
- Hits: 1162
After struggling all morning to find or compile a mail notification applet that supports TLS encryption under Ubuntu, I finally read all the way to the end of the Launchpad bug for mail-notifier (all 119 comments) and found David Jurenka's time-saving PPA with SSL support enabled. Thanks David!
Distributed Computing Projects
- Details
- Category: Blog
- Published on Thursday, 29 January 2009 17:09
- Written by Mike Houston
- Hits: 1232
I\'ve been participating in the ABC@Home (maths) project for a while now, and this week I\'ve also started contributing to Rosetta@Home (biology). Here are my stats! :)
