Writings
- Archiving Nebraska Legislature Videos
How to record sessions of the Nebraska Legislature and watch them later.
- Shouting in the data center
Remember, servers have feelings too.
- Clouds over campus
Photograph of a cold front as it rolls over UNL campus. Full-size image →
- Building the BACnet Stack on OS X
The open source BACnet stack written and maintained by Steve Karg doesn't build out of the box on OS X Yosemite. Here's how I got it working.
- Reelecting a mayor
Update: removed temporarily
- Voter precinct maps for Lancaster County
Mapping voting precincts in Lincoln and Lancaster County
- Learn about open government at Interface School
Open Nebraska has been invited back to lead another half-day Intro to Civic Hacking workshop on Saturday, February 22nd, 2015 at Interface Web School.
- Hack Lincoln: a new hope
It’s official, the first ever Hack Lincoln will be held on October 17th-19th, 2014. We’re still pounding out the exact schedule but it should be similar to the Omaha hackathons. The event will feature data from the City of Lincoln, the Lincoln Police Department, the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission, and several other agencies. If you or your company are interested in sponsoring, feel free to contact me. Registration for the event is free on Eventbrite.
- An Introduction to Civic Hacking
Open Nebraska held a half-day workshop on civic hacking at Interface Web School, here's and overview of what we covered.
- Omaha Transit Party
For Hack Omaha III, we decided to take a look at public transit in the city of Omaha. How long would it take to get from one point to another if you could only travel by walking or riding the bus?
- cameralistics
No, you’re awesome. Awesome Camp was a huge success again this year. Thanks to everyone who gave up their nights and weekends to get it off the ground. Writing I broke GitHub again. I was fortunate enough to coach several amazing teams at UNL’s first Startup Weekend event. Reading Javascript numbers can be funny, especially when you start shifting bits. NetBSD proves it’s still really hard to generate random numbers.
- avaricious
Don’t panic, winter is almost over. Lincoln’s own unconference, Awesome Camp, is coming up soon. Are you registered yet? I’ve been working with parsers a lot this past month. For fun, I implemented a forth interpreter in javascript. Reading Donald Knuth’s original paper on LR parsers - On the Translation of Languages from Left to Right. Frank DeRemer invented LALR parsers. His PhD dissertation, Practical Translators for LR(k) Languages, is fascinating and his later paper has some great information on optimizing lookup sets.
- cogitation
The Model A ran for the first time in forty years. Here’s a closeup of the engine, jumper wires and all. I wrote a tool that increases the size of PNG files without altering their appearance. You should read about BloatPNG and then visit the GitHub repository. UNL is back in full swing for the spring semester. I’m taking courses in heat transfer and math. Reading Ever wonder why you can’t design nice things on the internet?
©2010-2022 Nate Benes unless marked otherwise.