Author Archive
Blogging with drivel
Posted by: jeffro in Uncategorized on June 30th, 2011
Well this is new. I was writing the previous post when i thought “I wonder if I can update my site without having to pop open a browser and go through the admin interface.” Well that was answered pretty quick with a search of the Ubu software center, it came up with Drivel. I have to say it appears to work alright. I originally tried BloGTK, but it was missing the python-gtkhtml2 lib, and I couldn’t figure out how to install it on Natty, so I never got a chance to try it out.
So far Drivel seems to do the basics well enough. posting, categories, tags, and basic syntax highlighting . Outside of that, you are on your own. No multiple categories, no tags assist, no sort of WYSIWYG editor for inserting images or the like. Looking at the website it seems that there is an ‘advanced journal editor’ but it doesn’t appear to be available in the version I am running (3.0.2). Oddly, I think the Unity interface is messing with it. Based on the screen shot here: http://drivel.sourceforge.net/drivel-4.png the buttons along the top ar at the bottom of the window, and I don’t have most of the advanced options.
This is fine for what I am going to be using it for though. Give it a shot..
How to do less
The title is a little misleading, but appropriate for the subject. I am a huge user of ‘less’ to view logs files. While most of the users in my office are chemically addicted to ‘tail -f’. They just can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of a basic text viewer that can tail (follow), search, mark, and insert line numbers if you want. If you want a full run-down on what you can do with less go here: http://linuxaria.com/howto/bash-linux-less?lang=en. It pretty much outlines all the really useful options for less.
If you aren’t using less, you should be.
Online man pages
Yes, online man pages is nothing new, but Dustin Kirkland has taken them a step simpler, by shortening the url and making it more like the actual command. So now you can enter ‘man grep‘ on the command line, or you can enter ‘manpg.es/grep‘ in your browser. I likee.. 
Rooted my droid
So I couldn’t resist the temptation to root my droid any longer. I have been running the stock ROM since I first got it around Christmas ’09. I was perfectly content to just use what was given to me on my phone, besides, with what I was paying Verizon, I didn’t want to chance bricking the phone and be left with an early term fee or having to buy a new phone.
So there I sat for 14 months content with mediocrity. Then I read this article on Lifehacker and my curiosity overwhelmed my better judgement. To say that the stock ROM on my droid was running slow was..to say, rather an understatement. I am not sure if I had installed too much stuff, or there were too many background programs running, all I knew is it routinely took more than 45 seconds when I switched from an application back to the desktop for me to be able to see the desktop icons…definitely not within my realm of patience.
So I took the dive and first rooted my phone with the SuperOneClick. I DID have to reboot into Windows for this, because the program only ran there and Wine couldn’t find my phone (again, fears of bricking made me err on side of caution). After NOT click the ‘Install Drivers’ button and spending a good 20 minute refusing to read the instructions, I realized my error and before I knew it SuperOneClick had rooter my phone.
Next I rebooted and installed ClockworkMom ROM manager. I downloaded the most recent MIUI zip and transferred it to the SD card. Selected the zip file in ROM Manger and rebooted. After a lengthy back-up of the stock ROM and install of the new MIUI ROM, it was done.
A couple of things I noticed immediately that were probably obvious to more experience rooters.. not sure what to call them. First off, HOLY JUMPING JELLY BEANS, this thing is screaming fast! Faster than I ever remember the stock ROM being, and the user interactions are really snappy. I spent a good 5 minutes just flipping between screen to watch how quick everything was, score.
Second, even though I backed up all my application settings with Titanium backup pro, and I reinstalled some of my original applications (installing a new ROM means re-installing all your apps again, FYI :-0 ) I couldn’t restore my previous settings, bummer, looks like I will have to redo all those Angry Birds levels.
Third, this should really be the default GUI for droid, it looks incredible, everything si extremely well polished, usually there are little things that escaped the programmers but I have only found 1 very minor graphical oops. No kidding, this ROM is really good looking, usage of transparencies and gradients really sets this apart.
I highly recommend people give MIUI a try, especially those with pokey first gen Droids that are waiting for their contracts to be up so they can get some new hotness of a phone (*cough Atrix *cough)
Ubunutu 11.04 initial impressions
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Technology on May 2nd, 2011
So I intstalled Natty over the weekend, I am usually able to hold off for a total of 24 hours after a new release comes out before I really want to upgrade something.
Well I have been using Natty for 24 hours with the new Unity desktop and all. Well I can officially weigh in on Unity now. and the word is…meh.. Yeah, talk about anti-climactic. I switched back to Gnome classic after about 4 hours with Unity because it was just taking too long to do things in my mind. It was driving me crazy. Its not a bad design, not at all, but its such a divergence from what I am used to using that there was A LOT of overhead where I was just staring at the screen trying to figure out how to do something. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of things I wasn’t able to do let me just point out a couple.
Custom launchers. Yeah, in web development, the browser version matters. So I had to manually install FF3 in /opt and point to a special profile that I have all tuned for testing websites. Natty uses FF4, which not a lot of people are using yet. So I am flummoxed trying to figure out how to create a custom launcher for FF3 that is installed in a non-standard place.
Notification applets. They just don’t work in Unity. There are some that they custom build to work in Unity, but the standard Gnome applets and icons in the notification area don’t work, at all. You can’t click them and they are replicated when you have two screens. They just don’t seem very well thought out. There seems to be a lot of ‘not invented here’ syndrome going on.
I thought about trying Gnome 3 but I hear it totally breaks Unity. So I will probably hold off until a bit later, I will probably try Unity again at a later time. I needed to actually get some work done. 
Hollywood style code hacking
Posted by: jeffro in Programming, Web on April 28th, 2011
Hey kids! Have you ever wanted to pursue a career in programming? Checkout this site to see EXACTLY what its like! Just click the ‘Hack!’ button and start typing, you’ll be hacking Linux kernel code before you even realize what you are doing. Isn’t programming fun!
Happy Ubuntu 11.04 release day
Ubuntu 11.04 was released today and, as OMG! Ubuntu put it, “every man, wife, dog, child, elf, dwarf, sister, neighbour and cousin are downloading it right now”. OMG! Ubuntu has set up a cutomized landing page for people looking for Natty info. Head on over to http://omgubuntu.co.uk/hub/natty to see it
Robbinsweb lives…again
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, My Life, Technology on April 25th, 2011
Yeah, ok, so I know I already wrote about this, but the ole’ boy died again. This time I lost a drive. For once in my life i was glad I had mirrored drives on a home server. The down time was rather epic considering my complete lack of motivation to rebuild it, and its difficult to find an 80 GB drive any more. For the interested here are the steps I followed to restore the array:
1) Install the drive in place of the dead drive (like I needed to tell you that)
2) Boot the degraded array and go start up fdisk indicating the new drive (something to the effect of ‘fdisk /dev/sdb’) The reason I used fdisk rather than the far sexier cfdisk, is that cfdisk was having fits about the drive having an incorrect block count or something that made no sense on a new drive. Fdisk handled it perfectly.
3) Partition the drive EXACTLY like the current drive (size, order on disk, etc.)
4) Add the partitions back into the array one by one. So if you have three partitions in the array, say root, swap and home as sdb1, sdb2, and sdb3 respectively, add them into the array like this:
mdadm –add /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1
mdadm –add /dev/md1 /dev/sdb2
mdadm –add /dev/md2 /dev/sdb3
That is assuming your array partitions line up to your disk partitions that way.. Then you can watch the rsync updating the partitions by doing a ‘cat /proc/mdstat’
First full week (5 days) of bike commuting
Today marked the first full 5 days span of workdays that I have commuted to work via bike. I just beat the rain again today, last week I wasn’t so successful. I hit the hardest rain half way to work and vice-versa on the way home. I got soaked, and so did my bag, I am just glad I didn’t decide to pack my laptop.
I have been using a tiny Jansport biking bag to carry all my stuff to and from work, but I am finding it extremely tight to fit everything. I have been reading reviews and looking for a good biking pack that would 1) Fit everything I wanted to carry [laptop,work clothes,lunch,small woodland creatures]; 2) Be weather/water-proof since I am continually getting caught in the rain. After looking and reading reviews, this is the bag I decided to order. I will write a mini-review when I get it.
To alias or not to alias, that is the question
Posted by: jeffro in Technology, Web, Work on April 12th, 2011
I have a good number of servers I have to keep track of at work, and they all have rather long domain names, and I really haven’t gotten used to the subnetting at my job yet. So what is one to do? Well, I did what any concerned Linux user would do, I aliased all of then in my hosts file. Sort of like this:
192.168.125.133 dev1 192.168.125.137 dev2 10.6.8.201 uat1 10.6.8.202 uat2
I can hear you say already, “Jeff, just memorize them, there are only 4!”, yeah, ok, this is only about 1/16 of the aliases I have, so that becomes a bit more difficult. So here is my conundrum, do I continue with the aliases, or do I go cold-turkey and try to memorize them. The upside of aliasing is that I can fly when I am at my machine, its a no brainer to scp or ssh to a machine, but then I look like a total retard when I am at someone else’s computer, “What do you mean you don’t know the IP or domain name of your dev server!?”.
So therein lies the subject of my pondering..
