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review: The Mythical Man-Month

2012-05-26T13:05:00+01:00

I read one book this semester. I thought I’d be able to read three or four. I’ll need to make more time for it. Summer’s here now, so I made a last-minute effort to get it finished. I’ve been reading slowly, chapter-by-chapter, at the weekends.

The book, The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., was recommended as reading material for one of my modules, but I’d heard the name mentioned before, and that’s really why I chose that one. I decided to buy it from Amazon as I knew I’d never get it back to the library on time.

This book is really something peculiar, and in a way, spectacular. It’s a product of a very specific time and place and aimed at a very specific selection of people, yet, like the timeless illustrations prepending each chapter, the final product seems to cut across the bounds of the place from which it emerged.

It’s essentially a book about managing software development, structured around a small few central pillars or concepts. But it goes far beyond the managerial waffle you might see in other books on the topic. Each chapter starts with a quote and a central concept which is explored. The book gets you thinking, whether you have any interest in managing a team of developers or not. It’s enjoyable to read, and a wry sense of humour permeates the deep thinking. I can imagine it being of interest to managers and engineers in any field.

I have the Anniversary Edition which adds some new content at the end, bringing it up to almost the world of modern computing. It’s interesting, though, that these actually seem more dated and less timeless than the main meat of the book.

The book ends with a predictions that are by turns ominous and hopeful:

The tar pit of engineering will continue to be sticky for a long time to come.

Not only is the end not in sight, the pace is not slackening. We have many future joys.

For anyone doing anything slightly related, I’d recommend this as a weighty, intellectual read that’s also really enjoyable.

split an mkv file in two

2012-05-24T00:00:00+01:00

I found a handy little tool called mkvmerge. On Ubuntu and derivatives it’s in a package called mkvtoolnix.

It’s handy for when you need to split an mkv file up to get it onto a FAT32 filesytem such as on an iPod.

You can specify when you want the split to occur, or after how many gigs or whatever. This is how I used it to split a file roughly in half (after 3 GB).

mkvmerge -o output.mkv --split size:3g input.mkv

The tool works suprisingly fast and gives you two mkv files, which can then be transferred (albeit slowly on my system) to the storage device.

Zenithink C71

2012-05-14T00:00:00+01:00

Tablets. Do we need one? Do we want one? I think the answers for me are probably “not really”.

But I’d been thinking for a while about getting a new device just for reading feeds and e-books. The desktop gets tiring when all you want to do is churn through feeds. The couch beckons. But the netbook isn’t a great device for this by nature. You still have to be positioned in a certain way.

I thought about a Kindle. But the Kindle fire doesn’t seem to be coming out over here, and the other devices don’t properly support web browsing. Also, the Amazon devices are probably unacceptably locked down. I thought about a Galaxy tablet or something expensive like that, but in the end I couldn’t really justify the cost. I looked at budget tablets such as this Ainol, but after some research decided it was too much of a risk.

In the end I decided why not just go for that one tablet that’s been pushed out in front of me the last few months: the Vivaldi. Make Play Live’s tablet is actually a Zenithink C71 with KDE Plasma pre-loaded. If there is a tablet for me, it’s this one. Cheap, open to relentless hacking, and comes with Ice Cream Sandwich.

So I ordered it on Amazon, and it came to about €100. It was dispatched from Hong Kong yesterday and I hope to get it within a week. I’ll post a review then, and following that my experiences installing Plasma Active.

quote

2012-05-13T16:00:00+01:00

This is an unofficial, fan made remix album. No copyright infringement or offense intended. Just loving the music. (Don't sue me, I don't fucking have anything.)

queeroid

starting Midnight Commander in a terminal with Awesome WM

2012-05-13T00:00:00+01:00

I wanted a shortcut to launch a file manager using WIN-F, sort of like with Crunchbang. I’m slowly trying to get used to Midnight Commander as my file manager, instead of Nautilus. So I needed a terminal to launch with mc running. Sounds easy, right?

I was seeing a weird bug with mc not filling the terminal when running it as a parameter to a terminal command.

Examples:

terminator -e mc was giving me

while

gnome-terminal -e mc

gave me

xterm gave something similiar as well.

Seemed to work fine on Gnome, so it was something Awesome related, possiby to fo with Awesome resizing the window AFTER mc had sized itself, leaving it with the wrong size.

So I thought maybe there was some way to make it start after the window had been resized. Couldn’t find a way to do that, but found a simple solution - just make it wait a bit.

So for terminator the command became

terminator -e 'sleep 0.1; mc'

and for gnome-terminal

gnome-terminal -x bash -c 'sleep 0.1; mc'

This gives Awesome time to resize the window and Midnight Commander then can size itself to fill the terminal.

So then I just added

awful.key({ modkey,           }, "f", function () awful.util.spawn("terminator -e 'sleep 0.1; mc'") end),

to my key bindings section of rc.lua.

screenshots in Awesome WM

2012-05-12T00:00:00+01:00

Vanilla Awesome doesn’t do anything when you press the print screen key. It’s been one of those things that’s been a minor annoyance, but fixing it got left by the wayside because obviously if I was taking a screenshot I was doing something much more interesting…

Once again Lua and Awesome make this fun to fix.

In rc.lua, I went to the section with my keys (searching for awful.key), and added the following line:

awful.key({ }, "Print", function () awful.util.spawn("gnome-screenshot") end),

I like gnome-screenshot but that can be replaced with your screenshotter of choice.

Note that the label for your Print Screen key - “Print” here - may be different. You can find out by running xev and pressing your Print Screen key and checking the output.

excitement about proprietary games coming to Linux - misguided?

2012-05-10T00:00:00+01:00

There’s been a lot of rumblings recently about AAA games being released for Linux. I think the reasons for this can be traced back to the success of the Humble Indie Bundles and paid proprietary games being made available in the Ubuntu software center.

I admit, there’s a little boy inside me that thinks it would be awesome for big-budget new titles to be playable on Linux (this little boy has a lot more free time than me). But when the brief flash of excitement is gone after reading these headlines, I’m reminded what’s wrong: these games will all remain proprietary software.

The inevitable will happen: these games will become available on Linux: it’s just good business. But they will be obnoxiously big binary blobs. A lot of people seem to be excited about this, and I wonder if people have forgotten that Linux support does not mean open-source. We’ve been eased into the idea with the fanfare around other proprietary games being released (they’re proprietary, but at least they’re DRM free and don’t ignore Linux!). Are we blinkered by the fact that Linux is ‘ready for the big-time’? Do we just love these games so much that it doesn’t matter they’re completely closed-source?

Or are games different? The medium is certainly different. Modern games are closer to blockbusters than pieces of software. We go to them for spectacle and story and fun. Most of us own a games console and happily buy silly plastic discs to put in it, while the idea of paying for software on a disc for our desktop has become laughable. There seems to be a feeling in the community that while proprietary software is distasteful, proprietary games are less so. I’m going to try to tune in more to this in future.

listening: Grimes - Visions

moved to Jekyll, and apologies about messing up feeds!

2012-05-09T00:00:00+01:00

So as you may or may not notice my site looks a little bit different. Behind the scenes it’s completely different. I’ve moved completely over to Jekyll, so what you’re looking at now is a static html page that has been ‘compiled’ by Jekyll.

The move was disastrous. It was the first time I’ve tried any kind of site migration. I don’t even have that much content here, and the site was already pretty new to begin with, but moving it was a real pain. I won’t go into details other than it was some of the most fruitless and dreary work I’ve ever done with web stuff. Still, I managed to keep most of the content, despite at least one accidental deletion (I’m going to start backing up soon, I swear! Is Rsync the way to go??).

So it didn’t go off without a hitch, (sorry if you got old posts in your feed!!) but some things seemed to work well such as Apache redirects from the old URLs.

I’m ok with the new look, and it’s a huge improvement being able to type posts in my editor of choice (vim), and have them saved as a simple text file. Markdown is even starting to feel more agreeable. The site feels more ‘fat-free’ now. We’ll see how it goes.

listening: RIP - Actress. Bright electronic stuff

spawn a web browser with a hotkey in Awesome

2012-05-06T17:30:45+01:00

As I’m getting the hang of Awesome’s config file and Lua, I’m finding it to be really powerful. Yesterday I added a volume control widget, and today I’m doing something I’ve been meaning to do for a while - adding a hotkey for opening a browser.

To do this you need to find the key bindings section in rc.lua. I wanted to have mod key + w open Chromium. This is similiar to something I found really handy in Crunchbang. By default, mod key + w opens another Awesome menu at the cursor, which is something I haven’t used once and can’t imagine using, so I replaced that.

So in the callback function where it had said

mymainmenu:show({keygrabber=true})

I replaced with

awful.util.spawn("chromium-browser")

and restarted Awesome with mod + shift + r.

And voila, mod key and w spawns a Chromium.

'jekyll: command not found' in post-receive hook

2012-05-02T00:00:00+01:00

I’m trying to set up my server so that I can edit blog posts locally and push them to a bare Git repository on my server, which will auto-publish the changes with Jekyll. I’m using a post-receive hook to do this.

I was getting a weird error that I was stuck on for a couple of hours. Ruby is installed on the server under RVM, and Jekyll is installed as a Gem. I added RVM to my PATH in .bashrc and the jekyll command worked fine from the command line. So I added a post-receive script that would do some magic and run Jekyll to generate the new site from the updated Git repository after it receives a push. But when I pushed from my local machine, I was getting the error jekyll: command not found from the post-receive script.

The solution was to add the -l flag to #!bin/bash at the top of the script. I found this out here.

quote

2012-04-30T00:00:00+01:00

You shouldn't be trying to write an encyclopedia. Every post shouldn't be a special snowflake. Instead you should be letting it all hang out and letting the system do it's job.

Daniel Markham, Where the Net is Broken

Jekyll

2012-04-30T00:00:00+01:00

I decided that Drupal is too big and awkward for my blog, and I’ve been wanting to try something new. Drupal was eating up a lot of the RAM on my 512MB server, even after hours spent trying to optimise it. Also, the updates and module updates for Drupal 7 seem endless. Guillermo Garron pointed me towards blogging like a hacker. This post totally sold me on Jekyll. I’ve probably heard about Jekyll before more than once, but the name kind of blended into a mush of other quirkily-named new technologies trendy web developers rave about. This post really made it sound like something that would be useful to me, though.

Good points:

manage with Git, and host the source separately (this is maybe my favourite feature. Soon my whole life will be in Git!).
no need to write in a web browser, or write somewhere else and copy and paste into a web browser
write in vim or emacs, or any other more natural writing environment - supposedly this might bring me "closer" to my blog, and hopefully will encourage more posting! I want to be able to quickly post smaller posts (microblogs?) without a title and such, and using Layouts might be perfect for that
no more comments (this is a good thing for me as I think I've decided that comments shouldn't be on a blog in 2012 - blogs have a place but don't do social well)
lightweight. Faster loading pages (generated static html pages), less memory consumption
less to manage - eg. Drupal updates, modules

One of the downsides is that it’s written in Ruby, which I don’t know much about, and the posts are meant to be written in Markdown, which doesn’t really appeal to me, although I believe plain HTML works too, as long as you add the YAML Front Matter. See, I told you it was trendy. Just check out the site:

I’m currently trying it out, and this post will be on both the Drupal instance and the testing Jekyll site. Hopefully I’ll have it up and running soon. I’m currently working on styling it and making sure all the old posts ported over succesfully. Watch this space!

'I Wish' English trailer

2012-04-15T00:00:00+01:00

The English-language trailer for I Wish (Kiseki) has been released. This is the latest film from the extremely talented Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda

I’m not sure what the plot is (just what I got from the trailer) but going by Koreeda’s previous films, it isn’t going to be that important.

Koreeda’s Still Walking, released in 2008, is one of my favourite films. The story of that was essentially a man visits his parents. But the result was a textured, and gripping, masterpiece. Like films by Ozu, the stillness is sometimes the most important.

Koreeda followed Still Walking in 2009 with Air Doll, which was a more light-hearted affair. While I found it slightly disappointing, it was good fun overall, and presented some interesting ideas.

Possibly Koreeda’s most well-known film is 2004’s Nobody Knows, a disturbing true story following a group of children left alone by their mother in an apartment. I can’t recommend this as I found it slightly depressing, but it’s definitely the work of a great director.

I’m really excited to see I Wish. It has many of the same actors from Still Walking, but judging from the trailer it won’t be a similiar style. I’m hoping it will be just as good.

via: J-Film Pow-Wow

photo credit: Pabo76

listening: Themes for an Imaginary Film. Totally addicted to the Chromatics and that kind of stuff recently.

dialogue in Grail

2012-04-09T00:00:00+01:00

I had been thinking about how I wanted to get back into coding. I wanted to start committing regularly to Grail. But when? My week is already pretty full with work and college.

I’d been reading a lot about atypical coding hours on the likes of Hacker News. Apparently the best time to write code is in the early hours of the morning, when it’s quiet. I’d also read a bit about The Artist’s Way and morning pages. Apparently we’re more creative when we first wake up, or something.

The morning seemed like the perfect time to do this. I haven’t been able to get up every morning, but I’m getting better at it. Wake up at 4, write code for a couple of hours, then go to work, or sometimes back to bed for an hour or so.

I don’t know if I’m any better a programmer at this hour in the morning. Sometimes I feel pretty hazy until the coffee kicks in. But it gives me a set time to write code.

What I’ve been working on is the dialogue system. It’s designed to be pluggable so that a frontend for displaying characters’ dialogue can be easily changed. Multiple frontends can be used at once, for example a subtitle frontend displaying subs while a sound frontend plays the recorded dialogue audio.

The two frontends we have at the moment are:

speech bubbles

The characters’ dialogue appears floating above their heads in their own fonts and colours

subtitles

Displays the lines at the bottom of the screen, optionally prepending the speaker’s name and using the speakers font

Here’s an example of how dialog frontends are defined in a game’s Lua script: local subtitles = Subtitles() subtitles.position = VP(2000,2800) subtitles.font = Font("fonts/tommy_holloway.ttf", 45, 1) subtitles.centered = true subtitles.showSpeakersName = true subtitles.useActorsFont = false And here’s how they look in action:

quote of the week

2012-04-08T00:00:00+01:00

If you still need more motivation for writing, documenting, or promoting Free Software, you probably have not been at FOSDEM.

- FSFE March Newsletter

Grail

2012-04-08T00:00:00+01:00

I’ve been working on and off over the last few months on a really fun and interesting project called Grail by Droggl. It’s an open-source engine for writing point-and-click adventure games.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to find an engine for writing a 2D point-and-click adventure that’s open-source and cross-platform, but they’re hard to come by! Grail is going to fill that gap. It’s exactly what I was looking for.

When I found it I was surprised with how nice and high-quality the demo looked. At the moment there’re still some important features that haven’t been implemented such as items and inventories, but the code is really clean and extensible and these features aren’t far off.

The engine is written in C++ and uses SDL. The aim is to have a simple scripting interface for defining a game’s scenes, characters, music, and story. It’s being designed to be as flexible as possible, so the user interface and other things can be defined by the game creator in the Lua script. Further down the road there will be a GUI editor and tools.

There’s a simple demo at the moment, and you can play around with the script to see how it works. You can compile Grail from the code over at the Github repo.

Awesome WM and dual monitors

2012-04-07T00:00:00+01:00

I recently set up a second monitor on my machine.

Well really, I commandeered our Samsung tv. It seems to make sense to have both screens in the same place, since the couch is directly opposite both. The only small downside is that it might be distracting trying to work while your other half is playing Skyrim.

I was really surprised at how well Awesome works with two monitors.

After attaching the second monitor, I loaded into Gnome 3 (as girlfriend uses this it was the priority). I used the Nvidia config tool to set up the second monitor and save the results to the config. There was some setting up to do with Gnome as the defaults were a bit nonsensical; to reach the “sweet spot” (or whatever it’s called) in the top left corner I had to trawl the mouse all the way across two monitors. It was easy to fix with a small hack. There’s still some issues I have with it, such as the log out box appearing on the wrong screen.

Then I loaded Awesome. There was nothing to do. Just worked. Even stretched my wallpaper across the two monitors. I had to find some panoramic ones to cover the whole two desktops.

Awesome treats the second monitor as a second monitor. It gives you another top panel with another selection of tags on the other side, rather than trying to combine them into one.

Instead of dragging windows between monitors, you have the really cool shortcut of Win + o which shoots your current window across to the other monitor, automatically fitting it into the tiling scheme of the other. This is shockingly useful.

Can’t see myself leaving Awesome anytime soon.

Quote of the week: Fred Brooks

2012-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

There are many examples from other arts and crafts that lead one to believe that discipline is good for art. Indeed, an artist’s aphorism asserts, “Form is liberating.” The worst buildings are those whose budget was too great for the purposes to be served. Bach’s creative output hardly seems to have been squelched by the necessity of producing a limited-form cantata each week.

- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man Month

Awesome WM and WWII theme on Ubuntu or Linux Mint

2012-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve recently discovered the Awesome window manager and so far it’s really living up to its name. It’s one of those things that when you start using it you can’t imagine ever doing without it. It’s like the vim of window management - super fast, highly customisable, and just so… smart. I saw this on the Awesome themes page and thought it looked gorgeous:

It reminds me of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. After a bit of hacking I got my Awesome set up like that.

How to do it

I’ve put together this guide, like most of the stuff on this site, mostly for my own use, so when I distro-hop or bork my system, I can get Awesome back the way I like it. Maybe it will be of some use to someone. If you don’t have Awesome already, you can install it with apt, and select it as your session at log-in. To get your own config to play with you need to copy /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua to .config/awesome/.

The WWII theme

The first thing I did was copy and paste the code for the theme into a file called theme.lua in ~/.config/awesome/.

update: with Awesome 3.4.11 (Ubuntu 12.04) you need to change theme.wallpaper.cmd line to theme.wallpaper_cmd = { 42 } for this theme to work. More info here

Then I edited ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua to use the new theme I’d created, by changing the beautiful.init call: beautiful.init("/home/daniel/.config/awesome/theme.lua") You can restart Awesome to see the effects with Win + Ctrl + r.

Next, the font

That gorgeous font in the image is called Profont. I followed the these instructions to install it. I increased the size by modifying ~/.config/awesome/theme.lua: theme.font = "Profont 15" Win + Ctrl + r to see the result. This made the menus too small to fit the text so I needed to double the width and height values in theme.lua like this: theme.menu_height = "30" theme.menu_width = "200"

Transparency

To get terminal transparency I needed to install the hsetroot package. Then setting the transparency in my terminator allowed me to see through to the wallpaper (note you’ll need to have set a wallpaper).

Windows not maximising fully?

I had the problem that maximising a window with Win + m left gaps at the bottom and on the right-hand side of the window. Finding the section awful.rules.rules section of your rc.lua and adding size_hints_honor = false fixes this. Again, you need to Win + Ctrl + r to see if it worked.

open learning: modern computing, first generation

2012-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

The first generation of modern computing history is said to have begun around the late 1930s. Zuse in Germany and Atanasoff in the USA developed basic computers. The work of neither was recognised widely.

Similarly, the world’s first digital computer, Colossus, was developed out of the public eye at Bletchley Park. The British built it in secret during World War 2, with the help of Alan Turing, to decode messages from the German ENIGMA machine.

ENIAC, however, the creation of John Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert, became famous when it was revealed in 1946. It was a giant machine, using over 17,000 vacuum tubes as binary switches (combined into racks so as to save time in searching for a single burnt out tube). Development had started in 1943 with US military funding. It was intended for calculating artillery firing trajectories but was Turing-complete and could be programmed to solve other problems. It was capable of holding a 10-digit number.

If the above interests you in any way I would highly recommend the 5-part BBC documentary series The Machine That Changed the World. It’s one of those really high quality, well-researched and thoughtfully-paced programmes that are likely to be entertaining regardless of the subject material. You can watch it in its entirety on Youtube.

Quote of the week: Bruce Byfield

2012-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

However, now that software like KDE development is outpacing proprietary choices like Windows, these basic advantages are more compelling than they have ever been. Increasingly, we are now in an era in which free-licensed software like KDE is not only an ethical choice, but a pragmatic one as well.

- Bruce Byfield

Vim keystrokes in Google+ and Google Reader

2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve recently been messing around with Mutt a lot on my server (I hope to post about that soon).

I got so used to using the Vim-style keybindings to browse my mail that when I finished hacking Mutt and switched to Google Plus, I automatically started using the j and k keys to scroll through posts - and it worked.

The / key also puts you in the search box. There’s a list of other keybindings here.

So then I tried it when I moved onto my Google reader, and j and k worked there, too. There are several other ones.

I think this is pretty cool and useful.

ssh connection freezing

2012-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

I’d noticed that when ssh’ed into my Media Temple server, if I left the terminal alone for a while (a minute or two), when I came back the connection would be frozen and I’d have to close the terminal.

I searched for a resolution and found it here.

I created a file in my ~/.ssh folder called config and added the following:


ServerAliveCountMax 3

ServerAliveInterval 10

Solved the problem for me.

Adding Android-x86 entry to grub2

2012-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

I decided I want to try Linux Mint 12 LXDE on my netbook, but keep Android for convenience.

I installed Mint and Android on separate partitions but of course Mint doesn’t show Grub at boot by default, and grub-update doesn’t detect Android.

First off, to show Grub at boot I had to follow the instructions on this thread.

Basically you need to edit /etc/default/grub and comment out the line that says GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 and then uncomment this: GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480 (and set your resolution) before running sudo update-grub.

Then, to add Android to the Grub choices, you need to edit /etc/grub.d/40_custom and add the following: (Which I found here)

menuentry "Android" { insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,HERE NUMBER OF PARTITION WITH YOUR ANDROID)' linux /android-4.0-RC1/kernel quiet root=/dev/ram0 androidboot.hardware=eeepc acpi_sleep=s3_bios,s3_mode SRC=/android-4.0-RC1 initrd /android-4.0-RC1/initrd.img }

(I changed hardware to eeepc from asus_laptop)

Then sudo update-grub and that should be it.

Android-x86 ICS RC1 review

2012-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been using Ice Cream Sandwich RC1 on my Samsung N110 netbook for a few days now, and would like to give a rundown of how it works.

The first thing to note, as I mentioned my first reaction, is that Android is snappy. While the boot time is comparable to the average Linux distro, the speed with which it loads apps and switches between apps is super-fast, and the animations look great.

The experience is identical to running Android on a phone or tablet. Emails pop up in notifications (I love this feature). Sound effects are the same as on a phone, including the satisfying clicks when browsing the web. I’m surprised that all of this stuff works out of the box. Navigation is of course done with a mouse instead of a touch screen, and this seems to work flawlessly. There’s a swift blue glowing cursor which, in conjunction with mouse clicks, replaces your finger swipes or taps. It even works well with the fruit-cutting game (albeit making it easier).

Wireless seems to work fine, and detecting and connecting to wireless networks causes no problems. One of those creepy but useful Google quirks is that your Google account remembers your wireless passwords, so you’ll have an uncomfortable moment when you start browsing the web in your mom’s house before realising you’ve never put in the wireless password.

Suspend and resume won’t work as you would expect it to. For me, opening up my netbook after closing it and pressing the power button does start it up again but the screen stays blank and I have to reboot. Double-clicking the power-button when turned on gives the option to shutdown which is what I use and works fine for me. I believe the kernel can be patched and re-compiled to fix this issue, but I’ll wait for the next RC or the full release.

Not all apps are available, but the ones I have used all seemed to work without any problems, including games. Chrome isn’t available, but this might be because it’s only out in select territories at the moment. Firefox isn’t there, but the standard browser works well for me, even getting my bookmarks and history from my Chrome sync account.

Android might be the best OS for your ageing netbook.

The battery life is phenomenal. From full charge I got 3.5 - 4 hrs of intense, continuous usage; two hours of Google Music listening, followed by an hour-long documentary, and about an hour of browsing the web. With average usage, you basically don’t have to worry about battery life at all throughout the day. This is a revolution for me in terms of actual daily netbook use, as before the battery life was a constant worry.

I carry the netbook with me for short spurts of RSS reading and using the Wordpress app. I use it on the train by using my Gingerbread phone as a wifi hotspot. I use it as a music player while I work on my desktop, keeping it running with a pair of headphones plugged into it. I use it to check emails in the morning. I basically use my netbook a lot more.

Obviously, Android isn’t a great OS for when you want to be productive. Similiarly, a netbook, like a tablet, is not a great device to code on, or type. But it is light and small and can be carried around in your bag like a book. You can open it and be doing what you want to do in seconds. If you want to do serious work, you’re not going to be using a netbook anyway. Android is the most fitting OS I’ve found for this device.

Even at release candidate stage I recommend Android-x86 be checked out on a live USB. I will definitely be sticking with it for now, and am very excited for the full release.

Quote of the week: Paul Graham

2012-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters

Android on my Samsung N110 netbook

2012-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

I'm writing this on what feels like my brand-spanking new Android netbook. Talk about breathing new life into old hardware - this is really awesome.

I found out about the Android-x86 project today via Free Software Magazine. At first I was a bit sceptical about it’s level of stability, but I’m always looking for ways to speed up my stubbornly sluggish (at least by my standards) Samsung N110 netbook. The project’s download page listed releases of Android 2.2 and 2.3 and an RC for Ice Cream Sandwich.

I grabbed 2.2 (eeepc) first of all, as I didn’t notice the others (I was kind of half-arsedly doing it while reading something else). I created a boot USB with UNetBootin and had lunch. Then I booted up my netbook. I was so surprised.

I had never seen my netbook work this fast before. The fluidity of the animations, the response times, the desktop switching; it was elating. This was twice as smooth as anything I’ve ever had on the netbook - from Ubuntu netbook remix, to Crunchbang, to Mint, this puts them all to shame. Just using the web browser was actually fun. It was really like having bought a new Android device. Everything seemed to work exactly as it should, including wireless. That’s when I noticed the Android version I had - 2.2.

I quickly downloaded the release candidate for Ice Cream Sandwich and booted it up. I’ve never used ICS before and it’s like a whole new OS. But it’s gorgeous on the netbook. Most things just work (there seems to be a problem with suspend and resume but I don’t use that much).

I’m sure I’ll find a lot of bugs quite soon. I wonder about the battery life too. But there’s no doubt about how awesome this is. I reckon anyone with an old netbook should at least try this.

Thanks to the Android-x86 team for turbo-powering my Sammy. Really looking forward to just sitting on the couch with this to read my Google reader.

Quote of the week: Andrei Alexandrescu

2012-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Meh, advice-shmadvice. Who am I to give advice? What’s experience good for in our field? I used to know how to write a keyboard driver and floppy disc formatters with non-standard densities. I’d be all but obsolete today if I hadn’t learned continuously.

Andrei Alexandrescu, Facebook research engineer

open learning: finite state machines

2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

What I understand of finite state machines is that they are graphical representations used to represent states in computing.

States are represented by circles. Arrows are drawn between states that represent the input symbols received. One input symbol can be received per transaction.

A terminating state, or a state we can finish on, is represented by a double circle.

Aduni.org provides excellent free, creative commons-licensed lectures on finite state machines which I would highly recommend.

They’re also on YouTube.

Things I've noted about finite state machines

A program cannot be made which looks at code and sees if it can go into an infinite loop - it cannot be computed! What an FSM can do: anything that can be solved by remembering a finite amount of information. What an FSM can't do: anything that involves counting.

podcasts: Hacker Public Radio

2012-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

Hacker Public Radio is a lumbering beast of a podcast, dominating my feed most of the time. There are two feeds available - one going back two weeks and another with all of the episodes ever released, clocking in at over 16gb. HPR is epic, and it’s also a staple. Anyone who’s a consumer of Linux-related content should try to fit it in.

HPR is very regular, dropping an episode daily Monday to Friday, varying in length from around a quarter of an hour to an hour. The regularity is due to the tremendous effort of HPR’s proprietors. Ken Fallon recently relinquished the reigns to Pokey, and the enthusiasm and conviction these guys show to the project is really inspiring. Some of the best moments of the podcast come from the human element - the recent epic New Year’s marathon, still clogging up the first three or four slots on my podcast feed as I listen to them bit-by-bit, has already provided me with many laughs, moments of inspiration, and plenty of food for thought.

HPR claims to be a community-based podcast and that is more true for HPR than any other Linux or open source podcast I listen to. Anyone can contribute a show, on any topic of interest to hackers (you know the ones I mean). Some of the best recent episodes have sprung from the drive to encourage new podcasters to do something - anything - for an episode. The simplistic “How I got into Linux” topic has produced some real gems.

HPR can’t be described as just a tech podcast. It is more of another medium for hackers to express themselves. Hacker Public Radio is becoming a fitting title.

Quote of the week: Mark Shuttleworth

2012-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

So when you next see someone show up on a list and demand that they get what they want or they are going to use <*****> Linux, and how much we'll miss them because they are really very clever, just recognize that they are not someone who shares the value of the project, we will be better off without their anti-social demands, and look around and appreciate what a wonderful opportunity it is to work with the (fewer) smart people who are also practical, sensitive, and generous. We only need a small number of them to change the world, and we're doing just fine as it is in that regard.

- Mark Shuttleworth

why I use Duck Duck Go

2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Like a lot of others I’ve “switched” from using Google to using Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. I just want to mention what I think about it.

First off, I have to say that Duck Duck Go is slower than Google. Most of us “power users” can probably have something googled in a second or two at most after it pops into our heads. That’s why the fraction of a second it takes for Duck Duck Go to return a search is noticeable. Let’s be honest, Duck Duck Go is never going to be able to match Google for speed. But in the long run, that half a second is only a minor annoyance.

Duck Duck Go is constantly surprising me with it’s common sense usefulness (try “what is my ip”). But the major reason I use Duck Duck Go is the bang syntax. I find it so useful and it really does speed me up.

Searching Wikipedia is as simple as

!w beyonce 4

Rotten Tomatoes is

!rt Drive

and so on. I’m always discovering new ones that are handy.

But the one I use 90% of the time, and the reason I haven’t really switched to Duck Duck Go is !g to google something. Just as fast as a normal Google search.

However I highly recommend switching your browser’s default search engine to Duck Duck Go just to try it, and dive into the bang syntax.

open learning: beginnings of computing

2012-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

This is an idea I’ve had to try and cement ideas in my head as I study for college and to try and document my learning.

Whenever I spend a couple of hours studying a section of my course I’ll try and summarise it here, based on notes I’ve written. Might not be of use to anyone but me.

So this is what I’ve learned today, or at least formally learned:

Charles Babbage came up with the idea for the difference engine in the 20’s; a machine to calculate a series of values automatically. It was never completed by Babbage but he created a series of prototypes (two were recently constructed by the London Science Museum).

Babbage then began designing the analytical engine in the 30’s and worked on it until his death in 1871. This was a more complex machine; a design for a mechanical general-purpose computer, and different from the difference engine in that it received instructions from a series of punched cards. Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and the world’s first computer programmer, wrote an application for the machine.

The Entscheidungsproblem is a mathematical challenge posed by David Hilbert in 1928. It asks for an algorithm that will take as input a description of a formal language and a mathematical statement in the language and produce as output either “True” or “False” according to whether the statement is true or false.

Turing Machine An abstract machine described by Alan Turing in 1936. Reads symbols from a ticker tape. Can simulate the logic of any computer algorithm. Consists of: Tape with symbols on it A head which reads the symbols from tape A finite table of instruction sets executed depending on state (read or write to tape, go to another state) A state register which keeps track of which state the machine is in (starts in a default state)

Quote of the week: Richard M. Stallman

2012-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

I’m going to start trying to put these up weekly. Just quotes I’ve stumbled across during the week that have caught my attention.

They may not be from the week they were posted; I often have a bit of a backlog in my RSS reader and podcatcher.

Why is it bad to use an unauthorized copy of a proprietary program? Because it’s proprietary! So an unauthorized copy is almost as nasty as an authorized copy of the same program. They are both nasty because they are proprietary. The users don’t have control over them. If they pay the developer – that makes it worse, because they are rewarding this delinquency. That’s why the authorized copy is worse. But they are both bad because they are both proprietary software. If you want freedom, you have to get rid of them both, because they both control you. I don’t use that software. If you offered me an authorized copy and you wanted to pay me a million dollars to take it, I still wouldn’t take it, unless I could throw it away immediately. Yeah – if I could take the million dollars and throw away the program, then I would say yes.

Richard M. Stallman

ownCloud: symlink home directory to your ownCloud files

2012-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

This is a handy trick for if you really want to have your files in one place but accessible everywhere.

I did this on my server because I felt things were getting fragmented between my various home directories and files I had on my ownCloud.

So to keep everything in one place I created a symlink from the home directory on my server to to the /owncloud/$USER/files directory.

ln -s /home/$USER/ home

You need to grant apache access to the files so:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /home/$USER

and then add your user to the www-data group (for me on my server this was root):

sudo adduser $USER www-data

Run an application from the terminal but independent of the terminal

2012-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

This is something I discovered recently that I’d never known before but would have benefit greatly from knowing it a long time ago. I’ve realised recently that taking five minutes to learn something new can save you much time and effort in the long run. It’s kind of like a real-life implementation of the Don’t Repeat Yourself mantra.

For years it’s bugged me that starting applications from the terminal kind-of “pins” them to the terminal, so you need to keep this terminal open to keep the application open, but it’s tied up with running this one application.

To solve this, it’s as simple as adding an ampersand at the end of the command.

chromium-browser &

Edit: A much better way to do this which prevents the application receiving a terminate signal is to append &disown.

chromium-browser &disown

Linux games: Dead Cyborg Episode 1

2012-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

Endre Barath's Dead Cyborg is a first-person puzzle adventure game based on a free, donation-based model.

It’s not open-source, but it runs perfectly on Linux.

Dead Cyborg can be downloaded from the site (I recommend version 002 as it supports mouse look instead of just the arrow keys). To get it running you simply extract it and run one of the four bash scripts provided depending on which suits your needs. The game ran flawlessly for me on both Linux Mint and Arch (there is a package available in the AUR).

You start the game waking up in some sort of cryogenic freezer, not knowing who you are or how you got there. As you advance you read messages left behind by your colleagues who had ventured out of their capsules some time earlier, before their deaths at various stages along the way due to radiation posioning. Of course, they somehow managed to lock all the doors behind them and un-solve all of the puzzles. Ah well. The atmosphere is somewhere between quirky and grim.

It looks gorgeous. The graphics are detailed, there’s a consistent visual style, and there’s a nice big font for dialog. The animations are few but quite nice. You can tell a lot of time and care has gone into crafting the game world.

It doesn’t take long to notice that the gameplay in Dead Cyborg is quite simple and isn’t going to vary much. It is essentially a game about searching for objects to interact with, some of which are very well hidden. The majority of your time in the game is spent walking around trying to find objects you don’t even know you need. There’s not much logic involved in solving a lot of the puzzles. Items can be picked up, but not combined, so the combinations of actions that can be performed are severely limited. Often you find yourself moving around with an item active clicking everything else you see in the hope of getting a reaction other than the stock “I don’t think that’s a good idea” and an irritating beep sound.

This isn’t necessarily a bad dynamic, though. Since the first Resident Evil clones in the late 90’s, games of this type have been criticised as badly-designed because of the illogic of the puzzles. Games like Ico, and more recently the Uncharted series, wind the puzzles into the experience and game world so tightly that the player knows exactly what they have to do in a situation, and the gratification comes in finding a logical solution. But it’s a testament to Dead Cyborg’s “find keycard A to put in lock B” style of gameplay that it survives today and can still serve up an addictive and rewarding experience such as this.

Dead Cyborg is difficult, and advancement is limited to extremely small steps. As soon as one obstacle has been overcome, another one is presented almost immediately. But you don’t want to give up.

The game is nicely structured. It’s subdivided into a series of levels. There is no save system; you pass certain areas, you are locked out of the previous area and given a password to return to this point if you quit the game. It’s a clever system that works really well.

Dead Cyborg is a great experience. It’s free, and the artwork and atmosphere it offers are enough to make it worth checking out even if the gameplay doesn’t tickle your fantasy. It’s a weird, dark, technically interesting piece of software.

The ending which I won’t spoil is quite exciting and has me looking forward to episode 2. There’s a trailer out and it looks even better than episode 1.

My Podcast List

2012-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

** I intend to link each of these to a review/summary of each as I post them

Distrowatch Weekly - link
FLOSS Weekly - link
Free as in Freedom - link
Frostcast - link
GNU World Order - link
Hacker Public Radio - link
Linux Outlaws - link
Linuxbasix - link
mintCast - link
Security Now - link
Sitepoint Podcast - link
Sourcetrunk - link
The Command Line Podcast - link
The Java Posse - link
TuxRadar Podcast - link
Ubuntu UK Podcast - link

Changing the default browser in Gnome 3

2012-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes with Linux, and especially Arch, you get so into trying to find a solution to a small problem that’s annoying you that when you finally find the answer it can be so obvious it makes you feel a bit stupid. You’re usually in a forum somewhere on your 100th googling.

I’d spent about an hour altogether with my Arch box trying to make Chromium the default browser. For some reason links from the terminal were opening in Firefox. I was messing around with ~/.xinitrc, exports, xdg-open and all kinds of things, but to no avail. I finally found a short, self-answered post with the solution.

Changing the default browser in Arch was as simple as opening up the System Info application and clicking Default Browser. Admittedly, this is not the first place you would think to look when trying to change a major setting like this, but that’s where it is, and still made me feel like I’d wasted an hour hacking about.

ownCloud on TonidoPlug

2012-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

So I’d been hearing a lot about ownCloud. Really sounded like a way to become more independent as a netizen, and since I was already running my own mini server I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d have to install it. But what finally convinced me to do it soon was Klaatu’s super-enthusiastic appraisal on Gnu World Order (which reminds me, Klaatu’s also the reason I’m trying emacs instead of vim or gedit for this post).

Installing is really simple. I pulled the development version from the Gitorious repo to my web directory. I then had to change the permissions on the ownCloud folder

chown -R www-data:www-data owncloud/

After that I just had to navigate to the site and follow the ownCloud setup, basically involving just setting up a MySQL database and pointing ownCloud to it.

Really simple.

ownCloud is being quite actively developed at the moment, with commits being pushed by several different developers daily and an active IRC channel on freenode. One cool experience I had the day I set it up was finding a bug in the text editor and having a (temporary) fix applied within minutes (literally) by asking in the IRC.

I think one of the most exciting aspects of ownCloud is how easy it seems to extend functionality. In particular, I’m interested in the RSS aggregator that’s in the early stages of development. Time to start looking at the code and hopefully get involved with that.

Gnome: "oops, I ruined your life!"

2012-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Looks like Gnome have made their own attempt at a cutesy “oops” message, as seems to be the trend now.

While messing around with Gnome’s css style and using Alt-F2 and r to reset the decoration, “something went wrong” and I got a computer with a sad face on it saying “Oh no!”.

I don’t find it that annoying, though. It’s endearing as kind of failed attempt at being hip like a Google product or something. Gnome’s just not quite there yet.

Funny that I got this the day after reading this hilarious post.

Starting irssi automatically in a terminal at startup in Gnome

2012-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Most terminals can be launched with a command that is executed immediately by using the -e option followed by the command.

`    gnome-terminal -e irssi`

launches a terminal with irssi running in it.

This can be useful if you want to save yourself having to run irssi each time you log in. In Gnome you use the application gnome-session-properties to schedule commands to run at login.

Add the command

gnome-terminal -e irssi

and a title and description.

Now on login you will have a terminal running with irssi.

If you want to have the window maximized, you can append the option --maximize.

gnome-terminal -e irssi --maximize

Irssi and notifications in Gnome 3/Shell

2011-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

I decided to switch over full time to Irssi, as Xchat and Xchat-gnome on Gnome 3 had become too frustrating.

I installed the package from the Mint repos. Irssi is terminal-based IRC client, so the first thing I wanted was to enable notifications. Some Googling led me to this script.

To install an Irssi script you create a scripts directory in ~/.irssi/. You put the script in there. In Irssi you type

/script load notifiy.pl

If you want to make this load automatically each time you launch Irssi you create another directory inside scripts called autorun. Inside autorun you create a link to the script you want to load automatically.

ln -s ../notify.pl .

I wanted Irssi to notify all messages, not just ones highlighted for me. To do this I had to change the script a little bit. In the line

return if (!$server || !($dest->{level} & MSGLEVEL_HILIGHT));

I changed the message level (type /HELP levels in Irrsi to find out more about message levels)

return if (!$server || !($dest->{level} & MSGLEVEL_<mark>PUBLIC</mark>));

and reloaded the script. Every message was now notified.

There was an issue though with the notifications stacking up in the tray. To stop this I found the section

my $cmd = "EXEC - notify-send" . " -i " . Irssi::settings_get_str('notify_icon') . " -t " . Irssi::settings_get_str('notify_time') . " -- '" . $summary . "'" . " '" . $message . "'";

and added the line --hint=int:transient:1

my $cmd = "EXEC - notify-send" . " -i /usr/share/irssi/icons/icon.png" . " -t " . Irssi::settings_get_str('notify_time') . " --hint=int:transient:1" . " -- '" . $summary . "'" . " '" . $message . "'";

The last thing I wanted to do was change the icon that displayed in the notification area from the default Gnome light bulb. I got the Irssi logo from their site and whipped out the Gimp. By removing the text part of the logo and changing the colour of the flame (the black wasn’t showing up on the notification background) I was left with this

I created an icons directory in /user/share/irssi/ and put this in there as icon.png.

To set this as the icon used by the script I had to remove the line

Irssi::settings_add_str('notify', 'notify_icon', 'gtk-dialog-info');

and change

" -i " . Irssi::settings_get_str('notify_icon') .

to this

" -i /usr/share/irssi/icons/icon.png" .

The new icon looks really cool:

You can find more info on configuring Irssi at ArchWiki

Linux Mint 12

2011-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been using Mint 12 for a couple of weeks now.

It was exciting to install as I’d read a lot about how good it was, even if a lot of the news articles and “reviews” had started to sound a bit forced and repetitive. The general theme of these was “The Mint team have done it again” and “Mint 12 branches into new territory while retaining that polished Mint feel”.

I don’t agree with this. Mint 12, on first impression, doesn’t feel polished at all.

I installed it fresh, having backed up my old home partition rather than migrate it or upgrade from Mint 11 (I’m always wary of upgrading like that). First impressions weren’t great. The Mint menu was there, and all the Mint extensions to make Gnome 3 look and function like Gnome 2. But it all felt clunky. The menu looked bad and felt slightly unresponsive. It was freezing regularly. The interface was vaguely confusing. It wasn’t Minty at all.

I remember how Mint 11 felt when I first installed it. It was familiar, but felt rock-solid and so fresh, and the ease of use and functionality were invigorating. Mint 12 felt more like when I installed Looking Glass in like 2007 as a bored teenager.

Turning off all the Mint extensions (admittedly due to frustration) gave me a supposedly vanilla Gnome 3 experience. I tried Gnome 3 on Fedora a few months ago and was horrified by how unfinished it looked. With Mint, Gnome 3 is quite nice. The swipe to the top left corner to switch applications feels really natural and quick. There are still some niggling annoyances resulting from the transition from Gnome 2.x. Most of these have to do with notifications. Xchat bubbles, for example, pile up at the bottom of the screen until you acknowledge them. Most of these problems can be worked around and will surely be fixed soon.

Overall Mint 12 has proven to be a bit disappointing. I think it should have been delayed a bit to make it more polished and stable, instead of what seems like a rushed release to ride the wave of hype generated by Unity deserters. Time will soon tell if it can be improved and match up to it’s predecessors.

I’ve started thinking about installing Arch on my desktop. Feels very daunting. Doing some reading.

Drake: Take Care

2011-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

This is a great album. The thing that strikes you most about Take Care is the confidence and the fresh style that compliments Drake’s flow, where before he sounded awkward and ropey. This sounds modern and REALLY cool.

It’s not throwaway either. It’s full of catchy, clever lyrics from the get-go. Then there’re monologues, from Drake himself and distant disembodied voices, which wouldn’t be out of place on one of the Manics’ bleaker records, but sonically giving the album a feel closer to something by Burial or Jamie XX.

The obligatory guests are in place. Nicki Minaj fails to shine but her presence is always welcome; the weight of her entrances is still at least slightly thrilling. These days Lil’ Wayne is a lot better guesting than he is on his own records, and HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right), one of the album’s high points, is no exception. Weezy drawls

 "confusing me with questions like
  do you love this shit?
  are you high right now?
  do you ever get nervous?
  and are you single? "

Reminds us of when he was great.

On Crew Love, The Weeknd fares a lot better than he did on his debut album this year, thanks to much better lyrics (“Take your nose off my keyboard, what you bothering me for? there’s a room full of niggers, what you following me for?”)

This time last year we had Kanye’s masterpiece and it’s hard not to draw comparisons. This doesn’t come close, but it’s a great album.

switched to Drupal 7

2011-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve changed over to Drupal 7. Wordpress just felt… boring. Also I don’t know if it could really provide everything I need as I want to experiment with hosting stuff.

I had forgotten how frustrating it can be trying to manage themes and modules on Drupal. I finally have the site looking/working the way I want it but it took a lot of messing around. I’m using the Corolla theme which is apparently a “sub-theme” of AdaptiveTheme which needs to be installed first. I didn’t read the readme to see this and ended up getting a php error on my main page after installing it. So I had to manually extract the AT Core theme into the themes folder. Corolla is nice though.

There’s a lot of options and settings with Drupal but it seems intuitive enough so far and the interface looks really slick. I’ll see how it goes.

refresh the page and restart the memory

2011-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

This is where I’m going to output everything I want to. Partially it’s to keep track of what I’m doing and thinking, and also because some of it could be interesting to someone. I’m also thinking about a project or two that I want to start and need a place to organise my thoughts.

So this is the first post of my new blog. I got it up and running about two days ago. It’s the latest stable version of WordPress (3.2.1). that’s running on top of a basic LAMP stack:

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

The stack is hosted on a TonidoPlug device plugged into the wall beside me. It’s a really awesome little thing – a super power-efficient, tiny little server.

The plug runs Ubuntu 9.04 out of the box (at least it did when I bought it earlier in the year) but will first try to boot into any OS you have on an external hard drive plugged into the USB. Apparently newer versions of Ubuntu support ARM chips, which is what the plug has, but I decided to give up and revert to the custom 9.04 images Tonido provides after spending most of a day trying to upgrade/install a newer Ubuntu version. The OS is located on a 1TB Seagate USB drive attached to the plug.

It looks like this:

but apparently there’s a TonidoPlug2 now, that looks a lot blacker and sleeker.

It’s perfect for hosting a small personal website or blog like this. It’s definitely preferable to remote hosting for what I want to do.

feedelli.org

review: The Mythical Man-Month

split an mkv file in two

Zenithink C71

quote

starting Midnight Commander in a terminal with Awesome WM

screenshots in Awesome WM

excitement about proprietary games coming to Linux - misguided?

moved to Jekyll, and apologies about messing up feeds!

spawn a web browser with a hotkey in Awesome

blogroll in Git

'jekyll: command not found' in post-receive hook

quote

Jekyll

'I Wish' English trailer

dialogue in Grail

quote of the week

Grail

Awesome WM and dual monitors

Quote of the week: Fred Brooks

Awesome WM and WWII theme on Ubuntu or Linux Mint

open learning: modern computing, first generation

Quote of the week: Bruce Byfield

Vim keystrokes in Google+ and Google Reader

ssh connection freezing

Adding Android-x86 entry to grub2

Android-x86 ICS RC1 review

Quote of the week: Paul Graham

Android on my Samsung N110 netbook

Quote of the week: Andrei Alexandrescu

open learning: finite state machines

podcasts: Hacker Public Radio

Quote of the week: Mark Shuttleworth

why I use Duck Duck Go

open learning: beginnings of computing

Quote of the week: Richard M. Stallman

ownCloud: symlink home directory to your ownCloud files

Run an application from the terminal but independent of the terminal

Linux games: Dead Cyborg Episode 1

My Podcast List

Changing the default browser in Gnome 3

ownCloud on TonidoPlug

Gnome: "oops, I ruined your life!"

Starting irssi automatically in a terminal at startup in Gnome

Irssi and notifications in Gnome 3/Shell

Linux Mint 12

Drake: Take Care

switched to Drupal 7

refresh the page and restart the memory