Since beginning work on my DNS Yogi site, I’ve had to do numerous regular expressions to matching all sorts of string bits. I quickly ran into problems when I realized that I need to add support for Unicode characters since certain TLD registrars support registrations with non-Latin characters.
The main issue is that there are multiple regular expression engines. PHP uses a flavor of the PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) engine. Each engine and varient of an engine has a slightly different way of handling regular expression syntax. I needed to find out exactly how the PHP regular expression engine worked, and finding that information was not easy.
A number of updates were installed on my machine yesterday. Ubuntu asked me to reboot, but I was busy, so I never ended up doing that yesterday. This morning, I booted my machine and was very surprised to find out that my headphone jacks no longer worked. Needless to say, I was upset.
As I discussed in a previous post, I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) on a Dell Studio 17 laptop and getting the headphones to work required some workarounds. Basically, you had to set up the headphones to be line outs which caused one of the jacks to function but failed to mute the speakers when headphones were plugged in. This resulted in needing to manually mute and unmute the Front audio channel when you used or removed headphones. It’s because of this workaround that I thought the jack no longer worked.
A while back, I posted about how I wanted to find an alternative to DNS Stuff. Since then, I haven’t found much to get excited about. In addition, I continue to get search traffic where people use terms like “free dnsstuff”, “dnsstuff alternative”, or “dnsstuff coupon code”. So, it seems that I’m not the only one that wants a real alternative to DNS Stuff.
Introducing DNS Yogi. My goal is to provide a set of tools that can compete with the quality of DNS Stuff while remaining free. Here is what I plan to launch the site with:
I received a comment from John asking about using a mic with Ubuntu on a Dell Studio. I hadn’t tried to use my mic before, so I thought that it was time to try it out. After playing around a bit, I figured it out.
WordPress may at its core be a blogging platform. I know that Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, wants to keep all development of WordPress focused on blogging. I also know that WordPress is and will always be primarily used for blogging. However, as I work more an more with WordPress, I’ve come to see WordPress in a different light.
There are those that want to use WordPress as a full web publishing platform and not just a blogging platform. With the right kind of theme and plugins, using WordPress in this way can produce great results. Again, I see WordPress in an even more abstract view than as just a web publishing platform.
How do I see WordPress then? Frankly, I see it as an incredibly-flexible web application framework that can be used to develop seemingly unlimited type of applications.
After working on a new theme off and on for over a month, I’ve finally settled on a look and decided to update the site.
My old theme was a slight modification of the fSpring theme by Fredrik Fahlstad. I still think that it’s a very nice design, but I decided that it was time for a change.
I’ve been running Woopra stats on this site since August 1, 2008. I got into the beta program really early since I was at WordCamp Dallas, where some of the initial beta codes were given out. I also had the pleasure of meeting John Pozadzides who is the founder of Woopra.
Since I’ve been using Woopra for half a year now, I’d like to give a review of what I like and dislike about it.
About Woopra
For those of you who don’t know anything about Woopra, here’s a bit of info. Woopra is a very new site statistics and visitor analytics tools. It is so new in fact, that it is still very much in beta.
Woopra aims to revolutionize the way we think of stats in relation to our site. Rather than being purely a historical tool, as most of the other stat gathering tools are, Woopra provides the ability to see what is happening on your site in real time. There is a Live tab that will show you visitors that are active on your site, where each visitor is located in the world, how each visitor got to the site, what pages they’ve navigated to, any external links they’ve clicked on, and even gives you the ability to open up a live chat with an individual visitor.
Google’s original capital G favicon was around for, I don’t know, forever. Around June, they changed it to a lowercase g. I know that many people threw up their hands in disgust, but I actually liked it. It looked very clean and neat. However, they recently changed the favicon yet again.
Now Google’s favicon is this very colorful icon with green, blue, yellow, and red colors from their logo. I don’t necessarily dislike this new favicon, but I simply don’t and can’t associate it with Google. Google has always been represented by clean simplicity. They don’t need wizbang fancy images because they are simply good and don’t need to be fancy to attract people.
I think that’s why I liked the simple blue and white icon, even when they changed it. It was simple, to the point, laconic even; It was, in a word: Google.
Now when I have numerous Google tabs open, I look up at my tabs and just can’t help but think, “what is that site and why do I so many tabs of it?” I tried getting used to it, but I simply cannot. So, I decided that I would find a way to do something about it.
Don’t you hate when you need to know and exact model of a specific hardware component but don’t want to open up the machine or find the original documentation on it? Never fear, Linux has you covered.
There are a variety of ways to find out what kind of hardware you’re running, but one of the easiest ways that gives you large amounts of valuable data is to use lshw (Hardware Lister). I’m running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), and lshw is installed by default. You can test if you have lshw installed on you system by running the following command:
sudo lshwIf you get a large listing spewed out on your terminal, you’re good to go. Skip down to the Using lshw section. If you run the lshw command and get a “bash: lshw: command not found” error, you should be able to install lshw using your system’s package manager easily.
This is part one of what will likely turn into a long running series of posts on Why I Love Linux (WILL). The idea of WILL is to share little bits of what makes me love working with Linux. These could be small simple things such as a little feature here or there, the design concept behind Linux, or some other random thing.
I hope that by sharing what it is that I love about Linux, readers can learn a thing or two along the way.
To kick off this new series, I’m going to talk about one of the first command line tools that you should familiarize yourself with in Linux: grep.