John’s Home Page

I got to travel to Anchorage, AK for work again, and took some pictures!

Cross-compiling Qt and Qt-based projects for the Raspberry Pi continues to be an error prone, complicated process.  It's even worse when doing it on CentOS because of the outdated tooling (GCC 4.8?!).  To lower the friction, I updated my cross-compilation Ansible playbooks to work with an Ubuntu 18.04 desktop instead of CentOS.

I built a new computer! JH helped and is now a master of the philips screw driver.

I had many contenders for "worst hike ever" until I hiked the Manitou Incline.  This is it.  This is the worst.

The Aleutian Islands! Volcanoes! Polar bears! Ice floes! Penguins!  I didn't see any of that!  But, I did get to see some other cool things.

Yes, really.  This time I'm accompanied by my brother Scott and by JTB.  We drove around the Sierra Nevada area to visit Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks.  We took many photos, why don't you look at some of them?  I also got pretty wordy, ick.

Have you ever wanted to cross-compile a Qt application on your Raspberry Pi but hate bash scripts because bash scripts are literal garbage?  Well now you can, with some handy Ansible playbooks that I wrote!

I completely re-jiggered my website again, like I do.

This week we celebrated jerky and crabs. By which I mean my brother's and my father's birthdays. I converted 20 pounds of meat into about 3, and we caught and cooked 45 blue crabs.

I was once again in California for two consecutive weeks.  I thought my brother needed to come see the West Coast and take in some of the scenery.

We were out in the greater Denver area for work last week, and we took the time to do some sightseeing.

We've begun planting the 2014 garden, come take a look at what we've finished so far.

WARNING: All of this is severely outdated and you will have a bad time if you follow these directions

Django includes a useful geographic services system called GeoDjango. Getting it up and running on CentOS can be a chore, particularly if you need packages newer than CentOS 6 provides. In this post, I'm going to list the steps I took install GeoDjango with PostgreSQL's PostGIS system. If you're reading this, then I'm going to assume you have at least a passing familiarity with Linux and Django.

A recent work project involved remote, unmanned computers set up to record weather data.  Every so often, we want to log in to the computers and download the data for processing.  The question is, if you are using off-the-shelf parts, can you make the remote computer reliably available?

Apple's Boot Camp does not officially support Windows XP on computers shipped with OS X 10.7 ("Lion"). Keep reading for instructions on installing Windows XP on a late 2011 MacBook Pro.

UPDATED: Read Steve's comment for more info on getting XP running on a 2011 13 inch MacBook Pro.