ther Pages of Rages

When listening to mp3 on my IBM X31, the CD drive would spin up and read some data, then slow down, then spin up again. Annoying. The fix is to use the ‘eject’ command:


$ eject -x 1


This sets the speed to “1X”. Much quieter. Probably conserves battery power too.

Melody Joy is growing quickly!

At work today, I was needing to print some Code 128 barcodes. GNU Barcode is the normal choice for this, but it generates Postscript output, where I wanted raster output to get nice sharp lines on my printer (which doesn’t have super high resolution).

So I found the Code 128 Specification Page and wrote a little Python script to make the codes. It uses the Python Imaging Library.

The code is over here.

Thanks to Python’s interactive shell, this only took forty five minutes to throw together. I just cut and pasted the code table from the webpage directly into my code as a big ol’ string, then parsed it out with Python. I do this kind of thing a lot nowadays. It is nearly always a huge time win over carefully prepared data structures to represent the data. And it removes opportunities for typos.

I’ve made a Wiki to document my work supporting the PICkit 1 and 2.

Also a mailing list “pickit-devel” on Google groups.