Archive for posts tagged ‘linux’
Obligatory “got a new toy” post
Kevin Day, December 29th, 2007For Christmas I received a Nokia N800 internet tablet, which was at the top of my wish list. So far it’s been great to use. Couldn’t be happier.
My initial ideas for applications to write for it are (in increasing order of complexity):
- Digital picture frame that pulls images from Flickr based on tags supplied by the user.
- Fantasy football live stats calculator
- Grocery store helper that suggests what food to buy based on the food I have in my apartment, cost, and nutritional value.
I’m just starting with the Flickr-frame application for my desktop, and once it’s finished then I’ll try porting it to the N800. At the moment I’m using PyGTK for the GUI.
Boot dammit!
Kevin Day, December 9th, 2007The power went out earlier today, and when it came back on I was surprised to find that my server didn’t come back online with the power. There’s no monitor attached to it, so I checked the router and everything else first before I hauled the 20th-century cathode ray tube monitor out of the closet.
It turns out that I just left the install disk in the CD drive when I was installing a package some time ago and Ubuntu was booting from the CD instead of the hard drive. D’oh! Time to change the BIOS settings so that it doesn’t happen again.
Linux users will pay for downloads too
Kevin Day, November 15th, 2007Lately I’ve been listening to digital MP3 downloads from Amazon and watching streaming episodes of The Office from NBC.com (well, I did until I heard that the writers don’t earn anything from streamed episodes). Both Amazon and NBC have their own media players for certain downloads though, but of course there aren’t Linux versions. I wrote an email to Amazon asking if there was any chance of supporting Linux for full-album MP3 downloads, but we’ll see if that goes anywhere.
Debian’s Apache Tricks
Kevin Day, November 1st, 2007I’ve been moving this blog and other sites onto one Ubuntu box using Apache virtual hosts.
One problem I had was getting multiple sites to work properly with Debian’s setup of having a separate config file for each site. It wasn’t until I found this blog post about installing WordPress on Ubuntu that I found that you need to create a file named virtual.conf with one line: NameVirtualHost *.
If you’re running into the same problem, check out his blog post and also the Debian Administration article on virtual hosts.
Also, instead of using a .htaccess file to get pretty urls for WordPress, you can instead put them in the virtual host config file between <Directory></Directory> tags.
A few programming firsts
Kevin Day, September 15th, 2007This week I wrote my first shell script, C program, and desktop GUI. Having mainly done web programming with PHP and Javascript, it was fun to do all these within a few days. Besides getting more efficient with Linux, these will be useful because I’m leaning towards buying a used Nokia 770 tablet that runs on a moble distro of Linux. It looks like there’s great documentation for the development platform, so I think I could be hacking a tablet within a few months. I already have some ideas for applications to write for it. Also, there’s times when I want to surf the web without hauling around my 17″ laptop, so I should get good use out of it even if I don’t customize it.
Linux user at Best Buy
Kevin Day, June 10th, 2007I didn’t know that the xkcd guy followed me around…
