11
Oct
Coming to you live from my new HTC Hero. The onscreen keyboard is taking some getting used to and I had to turn off that psycho text prediction/correction crap but it’s not too bad. The calendar sync is about as nice as it gets and the HTC interface can change based on location. I am off to play with this thimg some more. While I won’t be typing novel length posts this one was posted using a cool free app from the Android Market. So far I was right: I love this phone and I haven’t even rooted it yet!
I dropped by my wholesaler the other day and they had a great deal on the Acer Aspire One I am typing this entry from. It’s the 751h: 11.6″ screen, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD and so on. It came with Windows XP installed and I have no reason to keep that around since everything I do for a living and most of my fun computer time is spent in Linux. So I set off to get the beta of Karmic Koala installed. While this snappy little netbook doesn’t have the fastest processor I am not looking to play Warcraft or anything and I know the proc will handle just about anything I need to do but the graphics chipset is another issue entirely. The 751h has the most common chipset in netbooks at the moment: the GMA500. The problem with this is that IBM doesn’t have good Linux support. I won’t go into the details here because they don’t really matter but I will say that if you are looking for a netbook running Linux and aren’t looking to tinker (I was) then order one that comes with Linux already as there are plenty of them out there. I don’t mind getting my hands dirty and wanted something to tinker with so I grabbed the deal because it was there and it was good.
Simply put it wasn’t exactly easy to get Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 running exactly right. It wasn’t hard either. The problem is that the information is not all in one place. So I decided that I would aggregate the work for anyone else. I didn’t come up with a single one of the solutions I present below. All I can take credit for is providing the instructions in a single place and a logical order. I hope I don’t miss anyone who deserves credit as there are quite a few. I will attempt to put a name with each piece of the puzzle but I forget anyone let me know and I will gladly add their name where it belongs. Due to the length of this entry I am going make you click to see the rest of it…
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I feel an apology is in order. For the first time since I started the three posts a week schedule I have completely blown it. But I have done so for good reasons. Monday was spent finishing the MixWidget Back End, Wednesday’s politics was pre-empted by actual interesting work and today’s life management post has been set aside due to managing some family medical needs. Well that last bit really isn’t accurate. This is the Friday life management post but it won’t be the in-depth analysis I usually try to produce. You see I am sitting in Doctor Edmunson’s office watching Seamus try his very best to sit still for an EEG. Which brings me to my life management advice for today.
Don’t sweat the medium stuff! What I mean by that is don’t let things like I did this week make you feel like your life is out of control. I made a commitment to myself to post three times a week and on specific topics. This week that didn’t happen and while I wish that it had I am alright with prevented it from happening. Sometimes life happens and you will just have to roll with it. I rolled with it this week and will when it happens again. I don’t say “if” because I have met me and I know it will. Make sure to acknowledge that life will throw you curve balls and don’t allow you happiness to rely on perfection because you ain’t perfect and don’t know anyone who is.
Since I am writing this on my cell phone I am going to end this missive here so I don’t get thumb cramps. I’ll toss up some pics of Seamus hooked into the EEG later on. Have a great weekend y’all.
Just a quick note about site updates. I have dropped in a gallery so I have a place to post pictures and an easy method of inserting them into posts. You can get to the gallery from the menu at the top of the site. There’s only one gallery and I am still messing with the display settings but it’s there and there’s going to be more pics soonish. I am most likely going to re-vamp the categories in the next week or so because while I like the ones I have they are confusing to anyone who is not me. I likely won’t re-categorize the existing posts and just use new categories going forward.
Thanks for dropping by and thanks for commenting…
I don’t have any life management tips today nor do I have any real updates on my struggle to manage my own life. I also missed the politics post on Wednesday so I suck. I have been busy at work on a project that firmly has my attention so nothing is wrong per se. I am learning PHP, well more PHP, for the purposes of adding to or recoding the web interface we use for Linux deployment. Of course learning a new programming/scripting language requires that you actually code so that’s what I am doing. I am writing a frontend for MixWidget (the tape thingy I use for mixes and intros). It’s not going to be something you can build a whole site with like the old MixWidget of Muxtape but something you can install on a site like this one and use to make your own compilations. There won’t be any multi-user functionality ever but it’s looking pretty slick so far. The obstacles I have to overcome are: file uploads, archive extraction, validating uploaded/extracted files, creation of XML files, and a couple of other little nagging bits. I also plan for this to be self-installing so it will be easy to use. I like mix tapes and think MixWidget is a cool interface for them but it’s damn annoying to use since it relies on text files for all of its configuration and that results in a lot of file editing to put a mix tape up on your site. I have a BASH script that does everything except create the playlist but that’s still not user friendly. So when the chance for me to learn PHP by working on whatever I wanted to work on came up I took it. I will likely toss in some AJAX as well but that’ll mostly be stuff other people have written. I did actually think about workflow and the UI before I started coding so it looks decent is easy to use. When I get a little more done I’ll put up a demo somewhere. Being focused on this as well as my other projects is why I haven’t been tweeting, updating FB, or posting here all that often. I did get the Monday Mixtape up on time so techincally I only missed one post this week. I guess that ain’t bad.
I seem to have lost around 90% of the regular blogs I used to read. Better yet they seem to have lost me. What I mean is that they have gone so far off the deep end since President Obama was elected I can’t stomach them any longer. About half of them are birthers, a bunch of others are pretty much hate filled racists at this point, and some of the others are simply doomsayers. I don’t have time for that lot any more. I have much better things to do with myself than follow around soft headed morons as a cheerleader. So my daily reads are now pretty much technology sites and few folks who haven’t had the koo-aid in the past year or so. I do miss being part of the conservative blogosphere like I was back in the minion days but I think I miss talking to people more than I miss the blog part of it. I am not welcome in many places I used to comment, and by not welcome I simply mean derided and ridiculed, so I don’t go there. It seems like reasonable thought has fled the general public and if you aren’t polarized to either extreme then niether side wants to hear your ideas or thoughts. That’s pretty sad actually but it’s also commentary on the current state of things. I am not sure what that commentary says but I am pretty sure it’s not good.
So here I sit, halfway through the last day before the weekend, surrounded by PHP books and a regex book, posting here in an attempt to pull back and not get forest-for-the-trees syndrome. I am not inspired and I don’t have any exceptional ideas but I do have a bunch of words that may have made sense in the order I spat them out from my fingers to the keyboard and eventually to your screen. I need to look into planning my weekend so it’s not like last weekend but other than that I think I am about done.
Have a great weekend everyone!
