the stupid keyboard is so annoying. the touch screen is super nice, but the keyboard was so hard to figure out. stupid sliding your finer/stylus up the keyboard from bottom to top changes it from lowercase, to uppercase, to puncuation, to numbers. took way too long to figure that out.

And now i’m also typing this on my new connection from comcast. after moving it took me a while to get the internet set up here. the neighbors are nice though, good ol’ open wifi points

I just got back from a 2 week break where my job is closed for the holidays. It was a nice break and was good timing with all that winter storm crap that we had this year.

Now that I am back to work, I’ll be updating my programs section with some new stuff that I have been working on. My pygame skills got a little more polished over this break, and the upcoming Dot Matrix video game should be pretty cool.

So if you haven’t already, you should go to this page to learn how you can get your own gmail stickers.

I completely agree that Linux is what it is because of the natural evolution of the OS from the ground up. Linux’s strength lies in the fact that it is open, has choices and does things it’s own way. As a user that came from a Windows background, I will be the first to admit that the learning curve is great, but entirely worth it.

One thing that I always ask myself when reading about Linux adoption is, "Is wide spread Linux adoption what we really want?" By this I mean, do we really want to put ourselves into the position that Microsoft currently holds? I for one am slightly concerned by this notion. The beauty of this is that if "Linux" becomes the number one OS for consumer desktops, it will not be controlled by a single corporation. This is a problem for end users though

If we really want Linux to become a widely used desktop OS, we need to remove the OS from the user experience. This is why the learning curve is so high, as every OS has a way that it does things. We will never be able to remove the OS from the user experience because each use is different. Again, here lies the beauty of Linux, as it can be customized to work exactly as the user wants it to.

I am not one to put Linux in a box and make it so that there are less choices, and thus less freedoms, but I am a supporter of the Linux Standard Base. I am also a supporter of a unified Package Management system. I don’t believe that they must become part of every distro though. Standardization makes things simple. If a platform is to be widely adopted, it needs to be able to be supported. If a distro chooses to opt out of a standard that is set in place, that is fine and more power to them! However, I would not expect them to be a major player in the desktop market.

As a user of a Debain based Linux distro (Sidux), I always feel much more comfortable doing things on Debian based systems. I’ve never felt comfortable on a system that uses rpms as packages, nor on a suse machine. I love the fact that they have grown so large (and PCLinuxOS is pretty cool, too). However, when a new person comes up to me and is finally ready to make the switch, I would be stupid to recommend something that I am not familiar with.

My little brother is a good example. I was very excited to set him up with a dual booting machine (Ubuntu and Vista) as I knew he would still want to play computer games and use software that isn’t available on Ubuntu (yet). After a few months, he called me up looking for help as his computer wouldn’t boot any longer. It turns out that he wasn’t using his linux partition at all, and had filled his 150G Vista partition. As Vista doesn’t include ext3 drivers, the other half of his 300G hard drive was sitting there without being used. So, the inexperienced user that he is, he decided to remove the linux partition so that he could use that hard disk space for more stuff. Unfortunately for him, this wiped his GRUB install and there went his boot.

How do we help users like my little brother? He doesn’t really care what he is using, as long as it works, and doesn’t mind paying for software. Luckily for him, he was broke enough that he didn’t go out and buy a new copy of vista (his machine was refurbished and didn’t come with disks) and instead decided to install gOS after my recommendation. There are many people though that only use their computer as a tool and don’t mind paying for the OS, Office Suite and more.

My question for you is, how will Linux fill the role in their lives if it isn’t standardized? Software will be hard to install, they will never touch a config file, and the system won’t be customized to work the way they want it to. They will use the default options and just click OK without reading any prompts that the computer puts in their way.

I guess a bigger question is, should we be pushing for such a user to be using Linux anyway?

Congrats america! This one is for the history books.

I am calling out for all websites to use tables for data and CSS for layout. Is that really so bad? Keeping everything tidy, your HTML separate from your CSS and your javascript, makes everything much easier to debug, restyle or add to. Tables should be used to store table data. That’s all.

sheesh. i feel like a grumpy old man.

On a completely different note, I have been chosen as a beta tester for the upcoming game Atmosphir! I’m so stoked! I saw the announcement for the beta sign ups on Digg, and didn’t actually think I’d get chosen, but now I have a pretty sweet beta running on my thinkpad. I loved the way they got this working. Three download options, Windows, Mac and Universal Linux. I thought I would run into problems on my Sidux box, but to my surprise, run the bin file they give out and BAM, game time. (and people are saying it is too hard to program games for linux... to many distros... whatever)

I still have yet to make my first level and want some inspiration for level design. As I don’t know how many beta testers there are out there, I thought I would give a shout out to the community. If you haven’t been chosen but have some good ideas for level design, let me know in a comment below. I’ll totally reply to a serious request and as I get better at making the levels your idea WILL be implemented. Let me know!

So here is the story. I work at a tech savvy little office doing various little development projects (mostly PHP and a little bit of jQuery) and we have got a smoking fast connection to the internets. This however does not incline me to take advantage of this speed to grab all kinds of stuff off the web with bittorrent. I do however enjoy listening to a good book on tape while building things.

So I find a link to a torrent of Librivox Reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (it’s not the ogg files, but I can live with that) and want to listen. I could wait until I’m home, but why do that? I have my shell access open on my home machine and a CLI bittorrent client. SSH to the rescue!

lapubell@localMachine:~$ ssh lapubell@remoteMachine

lapubell@remoteMachine:~$ btdownloadheadless --url http://isohunt.com/download/23888711/librivox.torrent
(I know, i know, this is a server running older software, the newer version has a different command line name)

lapubell@localMachine:~$ sshfs lapubell@remoteMachine:PATHTOBTDOWNLOAD /media/server

If you followed all of that, you would now know that I now have my home machine downloading the audio book, but I have that folder mounted via SSH to a local folder. This way, I can still listen to the book as the files finish downloading, but not use up the company’s bandwidth on something I can download using this method.

Thank you to the strangers that took my digg submission and spread the word to stumbleupon.com, tuxmachines.org, boycottnovel.com and especially linuxtoday.com.

let’s keep spreading the linux love!

With the release of dolphin, the new KDE default file manager, I decided to give the default file manager a try again. Still couldn’t get it to do what I wanted, so it’s back to trusty ol’ thunar.

Why do I love it so much? Simple.

Edit > Configure Custom Actions

With this one simple dialog, I can turn my file manager into the script power house that I have grown to love. With a simple written script, and a quick configuration change to thunar, I have point and click execution. awesome.

Here is a screen shot of me right clicking on a folder to get the custom actions available to that item.

My ’chmod to 644’ option was really easy to set up and a huge time saver for all the files i create inside of my Virtual Box installation of Windows XP. As I am sure many of you know, any files created inside of my virtual machine that are located on a shared folder come out with permissions for read/write on the owner level only. This sucks when I have to ftp those files to a web server, and the permissions usually make it so that they are not even viewable. My solution, add a custom action to Thunar, then any files I want to can be selected, right clicked and chmodded to 644. Here is my thunar entry for this command:

All in all, I have never seen so much flexibility in a file manager with such ease of integration. Way to go XFCE devs, my hat is off to you.

This means that I have access to some of the earliest binary packages that come to Debian, getting me very new software. I also get a very fast running machine, as everything Sidux related is compiled for i686. The stock KDE 3 desktop is the fastest I have seen it run.

Check it out if you want to. It’s not as polished as Ubuntu (and it’s derivatives) and I think it is a little easier to set up than straight Debian. You can get to the site here. ]]> Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:26:34 -0700 kholsapple@gmail.com (Kurtis Holsapple) http://www.lapubell.com/index.php?page=comment&post=16 I finished getting my bike up and running, and it just needs a few more touches on the pain and brake cabling. So far I have ridden it to work 4 times, and it is taking it’s toll.

I’m sleepy.

On another note, my first batch of beer is finished and me and Vic bottled up ~36 22oz "bombers" of delicious homebrew. Soon we will have a party. Wanna come?

Database calls, multipe style sheets for different themes, and much much more.  Be prepared...

Brendon Small was front and center and was shredding like crazy. Gene Hoglan (the drummer for the tv show) was rocking and the other two guys (I couldn't make out their names)used to play with Steve Vai.  All while they were ricking, there were animated clips of the Five cartoon Dethklok members doing what they do best, killing and rocking.

 There were little breaks in the set where the story would come in, with the panel of observers talking about gassing the crowd and turning us all into mutants.  I loved it.

Click here to download this awesome game. Note, it runs in dos, so you will either need to get some dos emulator installed or pull that REALLY old computer out. I used DOSBOX and it ran like a champ. The game wants you to be using a joystick, but I figured out that when you are supposed to push the joystick button, you can press F10. Have fun world!