Testing from Flock

Once again, I'm trying to use flock.  We shall see my friend!

Blogged with Flock

Wow, its been a while so there should be a lot here but unfortunately I'm just running around like a chicken with my head cut off so I really don't have time. Quickly here we go!
1. Tracks is awesome! I installed on my ubuntu server a few weeks ago and I love it. It is one of the very few applications that I enjoy using more than a desktop application.
2. Mediawiki install was painless and enjoyable, I recommend it for a personal notebook if you're looking for a web based solution.
3. I've been uh...beta testing Leopard and so far so good. Yes its still beta but I'm in love with spaces. However to be honest, thats pretty much the only thing that really excites me. Everything else is just icing on the cake really.
4. Ruby on rails....AWESOME...period. I dropped it for a while because I didn't have time for it and honestly I don't have time for it but I have a small project that I needed to do for work and ruby on rails fit the bill perfectly. I started the project in php, spent about 12 hours on it, then decided to try it with ROR. I literally have worked on it for about 8 hours now and I have about 6x as much done as I did in php. Wow, I need to learn this language from to back!

Anyway, must be on now.

Am I a trader to Web 2.0? I love web design, I love web programs and I think that there are lots of awesome things available but I'm just not ready to abandon my desktop applications yet. Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE to have all my notes available to me via a wiki no matter where I am, but I can I really just abandon Journier? I can't even manage to stray away from my mail client b/c after years of using web based mail, its just better on the client side! Now the other side to this is the problem I'm facing now is that I use way too many computers and I don't have my stuff everywhere I need it, the main thing being my journier files as I'm using this for my GTD setup, so I need someway to keep all that straight but even if I put it on a jump drive, it wouldn't work on linux or windows! Don't know what I'll do for that, but for now I'm going to attempt to use a wiki for my general notes and I've even installed a server based app called tracks for storing my gtd stuff so we shall see.

Flock Testing

So I just downloaded and started testing Flock . Its supposedly a "social" browser. Let me first of all say, I'm such a web 2.0 loser thats its unbelievable. I love this stuff but no one around me does so I feel like I'm blogging and jaikuing (is that a word?!) to myself. Anyway, this thing so far seems pretty nice. This blog is actually written from within flock. It also has flickr & delicious integration which is nice. Not to mention this thing has a GORGEOUS UI. Anyway, I'm gonna continue testing and give a full review later. Hope it works better than shirra....

technorati tags:browsers, flock, reviews

My Grandma Uses Linux

The subject says it all. My grandma finally signed up for DSL last week and as a result wanted me to clean up her computer. She has an old HP desktop, slow as can be and its been running Windows ME for a while now and because she barely used it, I never tried to make any improvements on it(I know, I’m a horrible geeky grandson and a traitor to my species). Anyway, when she asked me I immediately replied that we should just go ahead and put Linux on it and let her learn that. She has very simple needs, basically she needs a web browser, a word processor(VERY rarely), solitaire and something to mess around with pictures on occasion. Linux fit perfectly so I picked up my trusty t cd and went to town. Unfortunately due to the fact that I’m in the process of moving back from college, I had to leave early and barely finished the installation. This was a true test of its ease of use. My dad has been using ubuntu for maybe a month now and is very satisfied however he hasn’t truly explored it much, just using it for general purposes. I left him to set up her dsl and lead her around. IT WORKED PERFECTLY. After enabling the networking in the preferences, the dsl worked immediately and he showed her the general programs to start using. He also installed F-Spot using synaptic. She loves it. She’s thrilled that there are no more hang ups, no reboots, no spyware. Its wonderful. Anyway shes only had it for 3 days now so we’ll give it a little longer then see! For now, I’m off to study American Lit...

Post From MacJournal

So I’m thinking that I used this program a while back but I can’t remember, I think it was freeware then though. Anyway, I’m posting this from MacJournal as a test. I’m including links and a few other things to see what happens. This program now costs money which I’m not ok with(there are VERY few programs in my mind that are actually feature filled enough and useful enough to jusity payment for(CSSEdit & Textmate are about it..). So we shall see if this meets my requirements, if so, it may be used regularly but somehow I doubt it. I just don’t think that the ability to publish to my blog using an external client is really worth the $34.95. Now that is not to say that this isn’t an amazing application, I just don’t really need a journal(I have text files for that! lol!) so we shall see. HERE WE GO!

GTD? GTD? I know nothing of this. I've been reading 43 Folders on an off for a while now but I never really got the GTD stuff, never read on it much. I've recently started reading a bit on it. I don't want to use this system full blown mainly b/c I don't think I can really keep up with it. I am however trying to start. I bought a couple of moleskines from Barnes & Noble and I'm trying to start a simple system using a method that I saw on pigpod. I really haven't started much but I have to say, I LOVE THESE NOTEBOOKS. I bought a standard pocket size one and a large size. I did not buy the cahier version b/c I'm not sure how muhc of a beating it can take but these are awesome! I've been using the pocket for my system and just using the other for my general rambling and I love the paper, the leather, the whole works, this thing is awesome. Now if I could only find an external client to use to post to this blog. Oh well, give till Sept and I'm gonna put this whole blog into my own home-made php system on my radford site and just make my own external client!

Ruby on rails is so amazing. I have dealt with this language on and off now for about 6 months. It caught my attention early on but I just couldn't bring myself to TRULY learn it. Now thats not to say that I have truly learned it @ this point but I'm definitely getting there. I've finally completed an entire tutorial and have a decent home grown site that is actually useful to me. I'm going to start working on a bartending site soon. I started on in php a while back but after reading up on ruby on rails I have no reason not to use it. For anyone who needs to learn a web programming language I HIGHLY recommend it.

Jaiku, for those of us who missed the twitter phenomenon is a service that basically allows very short blog posts, not really a blog post but a "what I'm doing right now" kind of update. Whats nice about it is that if you have a blog, delicious acct, flickr, etc, you can integrate all that into your jaiku feed and everyone can watch EVERYTHING YOU DO. Kinda sad that we want to do but I'll all up for it! Now if there were only an external mac client...I'm just not a big fan of logging into a web app to do stuff, don't know why though...anyway, sign up @ then add me!!

Blogger apparently does not support the same type of posting that every other blogging software in the world supports therefore I can't use an external client(such as textmate), to add my posts. I'm going to try this and if I can actually make (semi)-regular posts for a month I'll setup a wordpress blog to use. My goal is one post every other day. Here's today!!

Ubuntu Fesity Pt 2

Now onto part 2 of my review of feisty fawn. After installing the ubuntu base system, the first thing I done was went about adding the restricted repos. After this I ran a sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop to install KDE. This worked great , took forever and a day b/c of my slow comcast cable. After installing I chose kdm as my standard login manager and logged back into kde. Everything seemed fine so I went about setting up beryl using the beryl wiki. After a few hiccups with modifying the xorg file, I had beryl up and running on this old laptop. VERY easy to configure, infact I think this may be the easiest to setup I've ever experienced. Once again, the install and setup of this laptop was absolutely amazing. I never once had anything that upset me. I can't say that I like the tap-to-click being enabled by default, but thats simple enough to change in the xorg(although there should really be a gui tool to change that by now). Anyway, once again if you are looking for a distro that is AMAZINGLY easy to get setup and running, at least with an ATI card, then def download an iso and check it out. As far as the actual final review of the distro itself, check back later b/c I haven't played with it and neither has Miranda.

Technorati: linux ubuntu kubuntu aiglx beryl

Installing Feisty - Part 1
Well I just got through my install of feisty fawn on this lovely Latitude D600. Its running 256mb ram w/ an ati radeon card and so far I'll have to say....I'm intrigued. Let me start at the beginning. I used bittorrent and downloaded the iso images for both kubuntu and ubuntu. My original intention was to install kubuntu and just use ubuntu as a backup. Well I burned my kubuntu cd and got an error message that the kernel could not be found. Well I assumed I got a bad ISO so I downloaded again and got the same thing again. Crap. So I went ahead and burned ubuntu. It booted nicely within a few seconds and prompted me with a full desktop. The wireless card worked fine, and even connected to my access point. I started the install and after the usual install procedure I was prompted with my wonderful new task of setting up ubuntu and getting kde running! This will be covered in another post, sorry I have class in the morning...

Linux or my girlfriend, which will kill me first?

Now time for a real post! Let me say up front that since my girlfriend and I met, she's been running linux. I got her on it about a month after we started dating and she's never looked back. During this time she has ran multiple distros, mainly ubuntu tho. Well when Edgy Eft came out, she had a fit. She did not like anything about. So I set about trying to find a decent replacement. This was when I went through the fiasco of trying Dreamlinux and no offense to any of those guys but I had nothing but problems with the distro so I gave up. The problems I won't go into b/c I don't have time, but suffice to say I won't try again. I ended up settiling on Linux Mint, it seemed somewhat promising and everything seemed to work out of the box(she's running a Dell Latitude laptop with the intel wireless and an ati radeon video card). So as a temporary stop, we ran linux mint. The only reason I say temporary is that I could never seem to get KDE, her desktop of choice, running properly without killiing openoffice. I setup about trying to find a distro to last a while. While playing with beryl in Knoppix I got curious about running beryl and ran across the Sabayon distro and it looked great. All the speed of gentoo w/o the 3 days spent installing? SIGN ME UP!! Well...ok...so I did end up spending 3 days even if it wasn't all installing. My first install went through fine, the only problem was that the synaptics touchpad was slow as the three day itch. Well, I fixed that in xorg.conf and went about updates emerge as best I knew how. I ran emerge --sync b/c I was told to and then ran emerge portage, b/c after the sync went through this was what I was instructed to do. I went about the process of updating the config files and tried my first big install openoffice. BIG NO NO. Something went wrong(once again not getting into details) but it managed to crash the network manager. I've personally never ran gentoo so I have no idea how to get that working again seeing as how I didn't even have the ifconfig command anymore, so I reinstalled the system. Anyway to make a long story short I went about this process about 3 times before I learned that I either A) Don't understand the gentoo portage system or B) Hate the gentoo portage system. Eventually I did manage to get the basic packages loaded I needed and handed the laptop to my girlfriend so quickly you would think it had a disease. Well not 10 min after I hand it to her...something crashes, its kopete. Well then openoffice crashes. Ok, linux doesn't crash, this distro has to go. Now during this time I did attempt @ installing Fedora but to be honest, the wireless didn't work out of the box and I'm too lazy to try and configure it so now I will try the newest version of Kubuntu. Feisty Fawn herd 5 is out so I'm downloading that tonight. I'll be installing it tommorow. I know its a beta release and thats understandable but it has to be better than the other stuff I've been through. Anyway, expect to see a full review in a day or so!

Technorati: linux ubuntu sabayon beryl

This is the first of many to come!!