Ubuntu 11.04 is almost here
In light of the fact that Natty is almost ready for release, I have added the countdown timer to the side panel. I will, as tradition demands, forget about it until many months after the release has happened and the image become some odd amalgamation of Ubuntu advertising and proselytization, either that or a broken image. Either way, I usually remember to take the image down before the next scheduled Ubuntu release. Usually..
With 11.04 moving to use both Wayland AND Unity this is setting up to be one of the biggest releases Ubuntu has ever seen. The move away from X.org is a monumental thing in itself, but then also replacing one of the mainstay Linux (Gnome,KDE,etc.) desktop environments with Unity is nothing less than playing software chicken. Either Ubuntu is going stay the course and the community will flinch and Unity/Weyland will become a standard, or Ubuntu will flinch and will have to backtrack with X.org and Gnome, or a worst-case scenario, neither flinch and we end up with a smoldering pile of rubbish on both ends.
(note: yes, I know Unity is built on Gnome, and works similar to Gnome3, but it isn’t Gnome3, so my statement stands)
Google CSE article
Posted by: jeffro in Programming, Technology, Web on April 9th, 2011
I just finished the Google CSE article I started a couple of weeks back. It was an interesting project, mostly due to the fact that I have never worked with the Google search API before and it was enjoyable to learn something new.
Hopefully you find it useful. When I was putting the code together, I found there to be a distinct lack of articles or documentation on the Custom Search Engines. Hopefully this helps someone. Then again, Google will probably EOL the JS CSE API in the next few months and I will have written the article for my own benefit. Ah well..
Wow, Gmail motion wrocks!
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web on April 1st, 2011
I logged into Gmail this morning and I was looking over my inbox when I just happened to scratch my nose. Oddly, a new message was created addressed to my top most mailed addresses. What an glitch I thought. Then I ran my fingers through my hair and Gmail created a new label “80′s Hair Bands” and applied it to the message I was reading. Wow! Gmail is behaving very strange this morning! Then I tried experimenting with other motions, and sure enough they produced other effects in Gmail. I found ways of forwarding all my junk mail to family members with only a flick of my wrist, and marking all my inbox messages as spam with a nod of my head. I found out that I was using Gmail Motion! This has got to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, no strike that, the greatest thing since AdBlock Freedom!
A solution of sorts
A reoccurring issue with web development has always been cross-browser checking. Does the site work and layout correctly in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera, blah blah. A huge problem with doing all my development on Linux is that I can’t easily check Internet Explorer on Windows. Most of the rest of my team also decline to use Windows and most of them use Apple (a whole other debate, but I will skip that for now). Our clients are totally Window’s shops so this presents a problem. We have tried running VM’s locally, but this has its own issues such as resource usage on your local machine. You start up a VM and watch all your RAM go bye bye.
The solution I have for this now, which seems to work alright, is to run another box with a decent amount of RAM and let everyone RDP into it for testing. This coupled with the virtual machines that Microsoft provides for testing has been working very well.
Internet comeback of the day
I usually don’t repost this sort of stuff, but this is a quality to the ridiculous rant by some UCLA undergrad..
Don’t blame me if this gets stuck in your head. Link to video
I love the internet, in all its highly unproductive glory. That and it pays the bills, yeah, thats important
Techno ducky!
If you know me you probably know that I like me some techno when I code. I dunno why, guilty pleasure I suppose, sort of like how I like to listen to hardcore when I drive. Yeah…don’t ask, I don’t have an answer for you.
Anyway, I like to listen to something on my headphones when I code since I am able to narrow down the number of distractions that way and really concentrate on what I am doing. Which is odd, its like I need one distraction rather than a bunch since I am able to ignore one thing as opposed to multiple. Anyway, again, I heard Ducktoy by Hampenberg, and had to laugh. They/he/she, bases a techno soung around a duck toy squeaker. Its annoying at first, but gets kinda catchy, then become annoying again. I found this YouTube music video for the song, not sure i like the idea of bikini clad women dancing in unison whilst squeezing duck toys, that is sure to give me some funky mental images in the days to come. Oh man, I have had too much coffee today..
Do you ever get the feeling?
Posted by: jeffro in Programming, Rants, Work on March 8th, 2011
I have been working to implement a Google custom search engine into a clients website. I have had to pour through the documentation to fully understand how it works and I am both impressed and revolted simultaneously. I keep getting the feeling that this stuff was originally developed by people that are obscenely smarter than I am. Its obviously brilliant, but like any brilliance, its usually offset by some other glaring omission.
First off, the search API from Google. Why is the primary search API deprecated and the recommended replacement not even out of labs yet? So let me get this straight, I can either use the API that will EOL’d at some unknown time by Google without warning, or I can use the unstable labs API that could and most likely will change in the future. Sounds like a call from the client complaining that their site is broken just waiting to happen.
Second, the API is written in a way that leaves massive holes of undocumented functionality. Usually when you document an API you include ALL the functionality so people can fully utilize all the features. So I am continually finding blogs and other bastions of literary excellence revealing ‘hidden’ features of the Google search API. I have implemented a fair amount of the code I have found on these sites and I am still flabbergasted as to why Google would just leave this stuff out of their documentation.
I am going to be writing up an article on implementing a Google custom search engine over the next few days, one, so I can remember if I have to do it again in the future, good documentation is sparse on this subject, and two so others can refer to it and hopefully avoid some of the frustration I have gone through to get this to work.
Cairo dock
I just found this little nugget of desktop customization goodness. Its called Cairo-dock, or GLX-Dock, not sure where the name discrepancy came from. Its basically Apple’s dock on all sorts of funky pepsi. You can customize the heck out of it and it just does its thing. I used to use Docky and AWN but after messing with Cairo-dock for a while, I was hooked. It might not be for everyone since it has quite a breadth of features, if thats not your cup of tea, you might try AWN or even Docky for the ultimate in dock usage-ease.
Not only can it serve as a app launcher, it can completely replace the default OS menu bars. Check out the video on the main page of their site for a good example of what it can do. I will post some screen shots of my desktop once I have mine more customized.
These are not the same
I have been coding for over a decade now and one thing about other coders has never ceased to annoy me. In defense of my rant, I present two snippets of HTML code, see if you can pick out the difference and the source of my exasperation, I’ll leave it up to you to make the determination as to which is the good and which is bad:
<div id="content"> <div id="content-wrapper"> <h1 class="layout-indent">Page Title</h1> <div class="separator thick-separator"> <div class="thick-separator-cap thick-separator-left-cap"> </div> <div class="thick-separator-cap thick-separator-right-cap"> </div> </div> <div class="layout-indent"> <div class="yui3-g"> <div class="yui3-u-1-3"> <a href="#" class="link action-link ">Filler Text....<br /> <img class="link-arrow" src="img.png" alt="" /> </a> <div class="clear"> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div>
<div id="content"><div id="content-wrapper"> <h1 class="layout-indent">Page Title</h1> <div class="separator thick-separator"> <div class="thick-separator-cap thick-separator-left-cap"> </div> <div class="thick-separator-cap thick-separator-right-cap"> </div></div><div class="layout-indent"> <div class="yui3-g"><div class="yui3-u-1-3"> <a href="#" class="link action-link ">Filler Text.... <br /><img class="link-arrow" src="img.png" alt="" /></a> <div class="clear"> </div></div></div></div></div></div>
The structure of these snippets is identical, they probably layout the same between browsers too. I guarantee you that if anyone ever had to make a change, the first one would be far and away easier to change. So why do people still insist on editing spaghetti code? This isn’t just an HTML issue, it happens in every coding language I have ever encountered. I just want to say to people, “Would it kill you to use the tab and enter key from time to time?”, its as if not indenting their code will somehow make them work faster. “Look boss, I saved 2.78 seconds last week, by not formatting my code!!” In my opinion it really shows that someone [programmer] has pride in their work if they spend the extra few minutes documenting and formatting their code.
LibreOffice hot off the presses for Ubuntu and now in PPA!
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Software, Technology on March 1st, 2011
In case you haven’t heard, LibreOffice is available as a PPA. That means no more downloading individual .debs and auto updating! Found through OMG!Ubuntu here.
