ch3mi0nix

How NOT to Use Twitter

2010-02-26T22:41:00.001-08:00

Stumbled across this today: it's a blog post describing 10 tools to "manage your followers" on Twitter--well you can see it for yourself (view on Google Sidewiki), however the practices and "tools" described there are exactly how you should NOT use Twitter. Ever. Number one says "mass unfollow those who are not following you back"... why? Unless you're a bot, a spammer, or running a pyramid/gifting scam, you would never want advice like this. Twitter is about following the people that interest...

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Mashable FAIL!

2010-02-23T23:32:00.000-08:00

In a recent article on Mashable, Ben Parr wrote: Which will eventually win out in the end: Adobe Flash or HTML5? Which is better for the future of the web?Wait, what? Why am I the only one that sees the problem with this statement? I'll let my response to Mashable explain it: This is a ridiculous and pointless discussion. You're comparing TVs to DVDs here. They both provide entertainment, but one is what all entertainment is viewed on, and the other is one form of specialized entertainment. Can...

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Google Buzz Tips & Tricks

2010-02-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to quickly share some tricks with the rest of you Buzz users out there that I've picked up since Buzz rolled out. Nothing too fancy, but useful nonetheless. First of all, you can format your text with bold, italics, and strike-through. Accomplishing this trick is simple, and most everyone has discovered the bold trick already, or if you're a regular on Google Talk, you may already know them all. To make text bold simply enclose the text in asterisks, *like so*. The words "like...

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Google Chrome OS "beta" a fraud

2009-10-28T10:18:00.000-07:00

Today I was nearly duped into installing a SUSE-based distribution claiming to be Google's Chrome OS. If you are sent a link that claims to be a beta download for Chrome OS, it's a fake, don't download it. This is not the first time "SUSE Studio" was used to pass their fake "Chrome OS" off as the real deal. They cleverly write "Google Chrome OS" all over it, and display official Google chrome icons, etc, yet in tiny font at the bottom they disclaim it as having nothing to do with...

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My position on Twitter

2009-09-26T10:40:00.001-07:00

I use Twitter to keep in touch with friends as well as share news and blog posts I found interesting. I recommend you go through my "following" list and add most of these users I follow. I don't follow-back bots or spammers, and in fact I don't follow back regular humans who aren't that interesting to me. It's not my way of being snobbish or elitist or anything like that, I just don't want my twitter feed cluttered with useless garbage, forcing me to wade through it to find the stuff I really...

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Boxee is teh pwn. (My new HTPC setup)

2009-08-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

I just set up a new Home Theater PC this weekend. I was actually just going to use XBMC, which is what I would normally use for just such a task, but I saw the link to "Boxee" on the xbmc.org website and curiosity got the better of me. I'm really glad I decided to check it out. Let me back up a little bit, though. For the HTPC, I dusted off my old AMD machine (I believe it's an Athlon XP 1500+ 1333MHz), which has an old ATI All-in-Wonder 9600 Pro video card. It has, between its two internal...

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Windows 7 Sins

2009-08-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

The Free Software Foundation launched its new anti-windows website and compaign entitled "Windows 7 Sins" (windows7sins.org) saying in their newsletter: The campaign outlines seven major areas where proprietary software in general and Microsoft Windows in particular hurt all computer users: invading privacy, poisoning education, locking users in, abusing standards, leveraging monopolistic behavior, enforcing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and threatening user security.These points are...

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How to enable digest authentication (Apache2)

2009-08-23T18:59:00.000-07:00

Want to secure your Apache web server? Digest authentication (mod_auth_digest) is a much more secure way to authenticate HTTP (versus basic authentication, which sends the authentication information plaintext to the client-- not secure at all, really). To start with, you need to create a password file. First figure out where you want this file stored. Probably it would be best not to store it anywhere in the wwwroot path. Create the password file with the following command (repeat as necessary...

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10 Linux distributions you may not have heard of

2009-08-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

I wanted to do a segment about some of the lesser-known (and arguably more interesting) Linux distros out there, for those of you who may be newer to Linux or maybe just aren't aware of just how many options you have with Linux distros. These are all, in my humble opinion, very nice distributions and have unique qualities that suit different people in different ways. Most of the distros you read about in this post will not be appropriate for you, but that's sort of the point: there's a Linux...

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E16 window manager

2009-08-19T15:45:00.000-07:00

I've been revisiting Enlightenment (E16) window manager recently. I haven't played around with E or WindowMaker or really anything but Gnome, KDE, and occasionally Xfce since 1998. Wow... Long time ago. I guess I just got comfortable with Gnome (mostly) since I first checked it out way back when, and it is a solid window manager, but I need to remind myself from time to time that there are other, potentially better window managers out there. Prior to Gnome, WindowMaker was my favorite, though...

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Troubleshooting VirtualBox mouse integration (Ubuntu 9.04 guest)

2009-08-17T23:07:00.000-07:00

Since many people have had issues getting the Guest Additions mouse integration to work, I decided to post a quick fix for this. Please refer to my previous post Troubleshooting VirtualBox 2.1.4 Guest Additions for help installing Guest Additions (then come back here if you are experiencing mouse integration problems).All you have to do is add the following lines to /etc/X11/xorg.confSection "InputDevice" ...

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Mini-review: Qik for Android

2009-08-05T22:34:00.001-07:00

I downloaded and installed Qik (qik.com) on Android yesterday to check it out. Qik is an app/service that allows you to broadcast video "live" from your Android phone (G1 in my case). The first thing I did, of course, was broadcast a quick video. The video quality was about as expected, a little grainy and a little too dark. These are all complaints about the G1's camera though, and not the app. The app itself performs quite well with what it has to work with. It hasn't had any noticeable...

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Google bookmarks goes social?

2009-08-05T08:42:00.000-07:00

Not yet, but it needs to. I love having all my bookmarks hosted in the cloud, but I never could get into del.icio.us or similar social bookmarking sites. They just didn't have the feel I was looking for. However, I feel naked without my Google Toolbar in Firefox, but the reason I'm so hooked on it is due to the bookmarks. I have countless bookmarks in there and I can't begin to describe how many times I've been thankful I can access these bookmarks and manage them so easily from any browser...

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My Google Voice "call me" button

2009-08-05T00:20:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to quickly mention that I added my Google Voice "call me" button to my sidebar (>>>) so that if anyone is interested they can click to call me if they have questions, comments, need assistance, or just want to say hello. When you call you should hear the voice of a lovely young lady. Just let her know whatever you called to say, and I'll get the message. I've also added my Crossloop badge for those who want remote assistance with a computer issue (Windows users only; Linux users...

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Bringing AI to Twitter

2009-08-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

So lately I have been thinking a bit about egg-fu; what direction I should go in or if I should even update the source at all. I had been thinking of different ways to implement egg-fu in today's cyberspace. The internet has changed, obviously, in a lot of ways since 8 years ago when the project first began, so I was pondering on ways to bring egg-fu back into the mainstream a bit. One possibility I thought of was porting egg-fu to Twitter. I figured (at least for the development instance of...

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Hit the jailbrakes!

2009-08-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

I got into a discussion with someone online about Apple's iPhone and about smart phones in general and during the course of this discussion it made me realize that people often talk about Jailbreaking as if it were the answer to everything. More specifically, we were debating which smart phone is "better" than the rest. I'm quite sure no one has ever covered this topic before. So, I expressed that I am of the opinion that iPhone is a piece of shit and severely over-hyped. I happen to own...

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Troubleshooting VirtualBox 2.1.4 Guest Additions (Ubuntu 9.04 guest)

2009-07-31T20:15:00.000-07:00

I had a little fun trying to figure this one out today and it seems as though there wasn't any updated instructions on how to get the Guest Additions running in an Ubuntu 9.04 VirtualBox (Kubuntu 9.04 more specifically, but these directions will apply to all flavors of Ubuntu 9.04). First of all, I'm running (as stated, but just for clarification) VirtualBox 2.1.4 on host: Ubuntu 9.04 and the guest is Kubuntu 9.04 (also verified it on Ubuntu Studio 9.04). Here are some of the errors you may be...

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Install guest additions on Ubuntu (VirtualBox)

2009-07-31T17:03:00.000-07:00

Just a quick how-to for installing the Guest Additions for VirtualBox in an Ubuntu 9.04 guest machine. These instructions are specifically for VirtualBox 2.1.4 but should also work with later versions of VirtualBox (and possibly earlier versions as well, with slight variation). First of all you need to have a fully installed copy of Ubuntu 9.04 (or any of it's variants) in VirtualBox. If you do not, please complete that before continuing. I recommend also letting your guest Ubu do a full update...

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What I've been up to lately

2009-07-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

So I moved into a house a few months ago, which gave us the room to set up an official "office" room. At this point I have my desktop in there and 1 server. My girlfriend has her desktop set up as well (though much more recently) as well as an extra monitor on her desk for her work laptop for when she works from home. Her iMac G4 (if I'm remembering that correctly) is currently out of commission because her boyfriend flipped a wrong switch causing the outlet it was plugged into to switch...

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A minor change

2009-07-23T02:53:00.000-07:00

Originally, this blog was meant to host my developer journal, but I decided I wanted to also post about broader subjects, also. So, from here on out, in addition to my developer entries, expect to see more posts about computer geekage and the lot with potentially an occasional, completely off-topic post. Oh and in case it's too cryptic, the new title is a mashup of me + *nix. Updates about what I've been up to are on the way.

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egg-fu Gets Listed on Softpedia.com

2008-10-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

Today I received an email from Softpedia.com notifying me that they have listed my egg-fu project on their site. They categorized it under "Mac OS" for some reason, and had the description slightly messed up, but I was glad to hear about it. I immediately emailed them back thanking them and asked them to categorize it appropriately under "Linux" instead and also asked them to fix the description. You can see the listing here: http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Communications/Chat/egg-fu-41815.shtml

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Ruby

2008-09-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

I've been interested in learning to program Ruby for quite some time now, but my life has been too hectic to find the time. Now that my life is starting to calm down more I will have the free time to start programming again and learn Ruby. Since I have a great deal of experience programming in general, it should be rather painless and quick to learn Ruby. I naturally learn pretty quickly anyway, so it should work out pretty well. The way I learn is by doing, so I need a project to work on as...

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About egg-fu

2008-09-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

egg-fu is a script for eggdrop IRC bots. In short it learns from what people in your channel talk about and progressively becomes more conversational. It started out pretty simple but as more ideas came to me it quickly became more complex. Because I was releasing it as a free, open source project I also made it completely configurable; every aspect can be configured, from the styles of responses to the native language. It's a fairly successful project considering how niche it is and it's been...

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Teh skillz

2008-09-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

Well, it's probably not as spectacular as you may have hoped, but here goes... I first started programming simple stuff in qwbasic back in the day. Then I got into VB for a while (not long enough for it to ruin my chances at being a good programmer, thank fuck). Then around 1992-1994 I started writing scripts for mIRC. From there I started programming Perl and TCL. TCL mainly, as you will soon see. I've also dabbled in a few others like Object Pascal a la Delphi, I do code BASH scripts as well,...

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Make your time

2008-09-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

As you can see, I've decided to start blogging about my software development (hence the "dev" in the address), as well as anything else geeky I feel like talking about, but mostly software development. This blog will be a lot less formal than my other blog. I will discuss future, past, and present projects, ideas, new releases, and also any interesting news along the way. Coming up... - A little background of my programming experience and goals - Overview of my favorite project: egg-fu - Ideas...

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