I’ve decided I would like to jump on the Python bandwagon.  I’ve been living the Ubuntu life for a while now, so I figured I should make myself at home…

Whenever I learn a new language, I need a pet project.  I’m not one that can learn just by doing a Hello World, so I came up with this idea.

At work, I deal mainly with kiosks in the field.  They leave the factory and exist in a Toys R’ Us, Walmart, even BMW showrooms (check my company:  http://www.realityi.com).  When they go out, they have a certain version of content on them.  By content, I mean usually .swf, .xml, etc.  These are files that can easily be updated and are in a predictable file structure (seeming as I made it).  We’ve begun to finally use version control, using subversion as our drug of choice.  After much googling, I wasn’t able to find a viable way to create an update package.  It seems that most applications of subversion are connected and can use rsync/svn checkout to get the most update to date content, but machines in my situation are either completely disconnected and updated via USB, or connected to a network but behind a hefty firewall (eg: bmw).

What I needed was a way to find what files have been added or modified between a certain revision and the current content to build an update package (no removals, tell you why in a second).

Enter: SVNUpdateBuilder

I’ve taken on a small, linux-based (for now) project that does just what I need.  It uses the pysvn library, and creates a .tgz file with a directory tree of files that have been added or modified.  I’m learning how to use Python, but also Glade User Interface Builder to create a GTK application.  Check out the website for more information.

You may be asking: “Why is it a compiled python file?”  Well, I’ll tell you.  This is still my learning tool.  I have a few more items on my wishlist that I want to complete before I release it to the masses.  Like I said on the website, this isn’t a difficult project for someone more skilled than I to build, but I would like to be selfish with it until I figure I’ve learned all I care to.  Then I definitely plan to release it on Sourceforge.

You may also be asking “What about files that have been removed?”  In my line of work, with how fickle clients are, it’s better, for now, for us to leave content on the machines and just remove the link to the file in the xml (read: send a modified file).  That way, if a client wants a video relinked on a kiosk, we just have to relink it, not send it out again.  Disk space, for this current project, isn’t a concern as much as bandwidth, so we chose to leave the files out there.  Plans for this project include having output methods for bash scripts or batch files to clean up the target machine, but they haven’t been implemented yet.

So, I will continue to code…  I’ll keep you posted.

WARNING!!!

I’m assuming you’re going to use this for indie/underground music.  This is in NO WAY TO EVER BE USED TO DOWNLOAD LICENSED OR ILLEGAL MATERIALS.  You’ve been warned….

That’s right, it’s so important, that I used the <blink> tag… *shudder…

Setup
For clarity, let’s call my two machines “home” and “remote”.  “Home” is an ubuntu box in my home office.  “Remote” can be any web browser, for example, my laptop at work.

Registration
For this example, go to www.mininova.org and sign up for an account.  Once you are logged in, in the top right, point at your username, and select My Bookmarks.  You will need this RSS URL during installation.

Installation

1. I’m using KTorrent on my home machine.  Install that by opening a terminal and typing:

   sudo apt-get install ktorrent

2. Set it up to auto-launch when the system boots by
   1. Go to System > Preferences > Sessions
   2. Click Add
   3. Name: KTorrent
   4. Command: ktorrent
   5. Comment: <whatever you want>
3. Run ktorrent by either clicking Applications > Internet > KTorrent, type ktorrent at the command line, or reboot your machine.
4. Click on Settings > Configure KTorrent
5. Select Plugins
   1. Click on RSS Feeds and click the Load button in the top right.
   2. [OPTIONAL] You may want to enable/configure Bandwidth Scheduler as well to not piss off people in on your “Home” machine’s connection from slowing it down during heavy use hours, but that is outside the scope of this tutorial.
   3. ClickApply and OK to exit the window.
6. Back in the Application, you should now see a RSS Feeds tab, click that.  On that tab [Figure 1 Below]:
   1. Click New in the bottom left to add a new feed.
   2. Name it whatever you want.
   3. Copy/Paste the RSS Feed URL you got from your Mininova.org site into the URL line.
   4. Change Keep Articles (days) to something smaller, like 7 days
   5. Click Ignore TTL and enter something more reasonable like 10 minutes (it is in the format HH:MM:SS)
   6. Click the Active checkbox in the top left.
   7. Set up the AutoDownload Filter [Figure 2 Below].
      1. In the top left of the RSS tab, click the tab that says Filters*.
      2. Under Accept Filters, click New
      3. Type in a title
      4. Under Regular Expressions, type .*    (period asterisk, no spaces before, after, or in-between) and click Add
      5. In the top right, click the Active Checkbox.

Figure 1	Figure 2

* NOTE: Since you are setting up a personal RSS feed, I am assuming you want to download everything you mark for download. This Filter tool is very powerful.  You are able to watch the rss feed on any torrent site and filter out things that you want to download automatically such as episodes, new albums by bands, etc.  A handy tool to generate the regular expressions needed for the Filters page is called kregexpeditor and can be installed with apt-get.

Testing
Go to www.mininova.org and log in.  Search for anything you’re looking for, click on it, and at the top of the page you should see a button under the Download this Torrent link to Add to Bookmarks.  Clicking it adds this torrent to your RSS feed.  Your home machine will refresh your rss feed (at the period you set the TTL to, 10 minutes in this example) and mark that file for auto downloading.

Final Notes
I just got this working and I was rather excited to see how well it worked right off the bat.  I’ll edit/update this article as I find problems/fixes.

checking for intltool…
found intltool
checking for libtoolize…
found libtoolize
checking for automake…
found automake
checking for autoconf…
found autoconf
Running ‘autoreconf -v –install’…
autoreconf: Entering directory `.’
autoreconf: configure.in: not using Gettext
autoreconf: running: aclocal –output=aclocal.m4t
aclocal: configure.in: 28: macro `AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT’ not found in library
autoreconf: aclocal failed with exit status: 1

Any ideas/suggestions would be fantastic..

I still want to make the change over to Linux full time, but I just keep reverting to Windows due to the familiarity.  But not anymore.  I’ve instituted a “no windows in my house” rule.  So, while my machine is still dual boot, I refuse to go back into vista business.

So, I’m adjusting.  I wiped my linux partition and did a fresh install of Hardy Heron.  No complaints there.  I’ve gotten Zend Studio for Eclipse installed, so my PHP coding questions are covered…  Thunderbird takes care of my imap mail accounts and Firefox for my web broswing needs…  Then there’s Pidgin for IM.

So, again, the only thing I’m missing so far is NaviCat for remote mySQL connections (via http tunneling, wicked handy), but I might just have to suck it up and purchase a license for Linux.  I’ve tried installing via Wine, but the http tunneling feature doesn’t work, probably because it relies heavily on the windows network layer for communication.  I’ll have to research that some more.  So, so far, so good.

As always, I’ll keep you posted.

As I said in my Ubuntu post, I purchased a Dell XPS M1710 with a Core 2 Duo T2700 2GHz, 2gigs of RAM and a 150gb 7200 RPM SATA harddrive. It ain’t nothin to sneeze at, but I was disappointed at it’s performance running Vista Business (well, more than I expected to be). And don’t bother asking me why I didn’t revert to XP, I’m just going to play the “early adopter” card there.

Today’s Focus: Turn EVERYTHING off

Ok, while I don’t necessarily mean everything, here’s a bunch of stuff to turn off. Here’s things, in order of importance (or so I think):

1. Windows Sidebar
An analog clock? Rotating pictures from My Photos? No thanks. When I’m trying to get s#!t done, I don’t need to see windows default pics scrolling by. I shut that bad boy off as soon as I first booted into the OS. This is done by right-clicking the icon in the tray, going to properties, and turning off “Start Sidebar when Windows Starts”. You just saved yourself approximately 25 to 30mbs of ram right there, about the amount it takes to run Outlook in your task tray.

2. Windows Search
I don’t know about you (yeah, you, I’m talking to you) but I’m a rather organized guy when it comes to my computer. I formatted and partitioned my drive when I took the machine out of the box. The C drive is installed programs only (except for the desktop folder, obviously) and the D drive is my storage. I know where things are and I never open search and just blankly search my entire system for something. When I got this beastly laptop, I noticed it would just sit there with the hard drive spinning and spinning, and thought “well, that ain’t right…” Turns out it was the Windows Search indexing my life for me. Well, we can’t have that, it’s actually turning out to make me less productive.

To turn off this hindrance, go to start > run and type “services.msc” (without the quotes) and hit enter. Scroll down to the bottom and you should see Windows Search. Right-click it and hit Properties. Change the Startup Type to Disabled and click OK.

3. Aero Glass
I like the new look of Vista. It’s not a bad thing, but the transparency is a resource whore for my tastes. Shut it off and see how much of a difference it really makes. But, like i said, I like the new window look and the explorer nav bar, and the Windows menu (more on these later), but you can also go retro to Windows Classic and save even more.
Right click on your desktop, go to Personalize. Click “Window Color and Appearance” (should be the first option in the list you see.

Stay tuned, kids, upcoming topics include User Access Control, shortcuts, helpful tools, registry cleaners.

JOY!

In my “free time” I’ve been idly trying to become proficient at the *nix command line. As told by my previous “converting to Linux” article, I’m trying to make the shift over to Ubuntu full-time, but for a Microsoft-head such as myself, the move isn’t exactly instantaneous.

So, in an attempt to log my efforts, I’m going to start posting little pieces of information that learn/figure out. Today we start with a light lesson in grep.

Side-note(s)
While I am trying to make the switch over to Linux, I find it unfair to my clients to be uncomfortable on my laptop while working billable hours. So this particular lesson will consist of Linux commands, but are run via Cygwin under windows. For those who don’t know, Cygwin is an implementation of the Linux command line and tools that run under windows. Read more about it on the Cygwin website or at the wiki.

My example is at the bash command line. If you’re using a different command line, the methodology may change, I don’t really know (insert lack of Linux knowledge here).

Also, grep is an unbelievably powerful tool. Books upon books have been written on it. This is in no way the only use of grep, nor is it a comprehensive account of using grep in this scenario. I’m just laying the groundwork. The internets (sometimes called blagosphere, tubes, whatever you may like) are a wonderful place, do some more research…

Scenario
I’m working on a website where we had to find all files containing the word “Leads” and change it to “Prospects” (clients… they ask for such weird stuff…). In the project directory, there are a bunch of common website files (php, html, css, js, etc…). But this particular project folder is also maintained by Subversion version control. On windows, that means there is a hidden .svn folder in every directory to maintain the changes to that file. This will make sense in a minute.

Technique – Step 1 – Grep
The manual page for grep says to do a simple search through files is something like this:

grep -R "search value" ./

translation: find every file within my directory and its subdirectories containing this search value.

Technique – Step 2 – | [pipe]
There is a rather handy thing called “piping.” It allows you to run more than one command at once, but also run each subsequent command on the previous commands output. Semi-unrelated example:

ls -la | grep .txt

ls -la will give you a directory listing. What this statement then does is say “ok, with the output of the directory listing, give me only lines containing .txt” giving you a list of all text files in a directory.

ls -la | grep .txt | wc -l

this does the same thing, but wc -l (that is a lowercase L) means “word count, lines only” showing you how many text files you have in your directory.

Back to the task at hand: find all files containing the word Leads.

grep -R "Leads" ./

Output:

$ grep -R "Leads" ./
././.svn/text-base/Popup.php.svn-base:    case 'Leads':
./.svn/text-base/Popup.php.svn-base:            require_once("modules/$currentModule/Leads.php");
./.svn/text-base/Popup.php.svn-base:            $focus = new Leads();
./.svn/text-base/README.txt.svn-base:12. 131  - Sorting Name in Leads
./.svn/text-base/README.txt.svn-base:49. 1161406: Assigned ToUser in Leads can be Assigned to User
./.svn/text-base/README.txt.svn-base:16. FORUM:1276 - Converting Leads and assigning to user
./.svn/text-base/README.txt.svn-base:20. FORUM:1559 - Tasks not working in Leads
./.svn/text-base/README.txt.svn-base:31. SF1095038 - Import Leads - No Mapping Fields
.... more of the same ....

That seems pretty useless because this is all information contained in the .svn files. Eventually, the appropriate info will be contained in there, but make the machine do the work. We want all files containing “Leads” that aren’t in a .svn directory. The -v flag is your friend… It means “find things that don’t contain this.” Code:

grep -R "Leads" ./ | grep -v ".svn"

Output

$ grep -R "Leads" ./ | grep -v "svn"
./include/js/general.js:           if(record_id != '' && module[0] == "Leads")
./include/js/general.js:           if(task_recordid != '' && task_module[0] == "Leads" )
./include/language/en_us.lang.php:'LNK_IMPORT_LEADS' => 'Import Leads',
./include/language/en_us.lang.php:'SINGLE_Leads' => 'Lead',
./include/language/en_us.lang.php:'COMBO_LEADS' => 'Leads',
./include/language/en_us.lang.php:'Leads' => 'Prospects',
... more of the same ...

See the en_us files there? That’s all I’m worried about, so I can do another pipe to only view those files:

grep -R "Leads" ./ | grep -v ".svn" | grep "en_us"

Output

$ grep -R "Leads" ./ | grep -v "svn" | grep "en_us"
./modules/Emails/language/en_us.lang.php:'LBL_LEAD_TITLE'=>'Leads',
./modules/HelpDesk/language/en_us.lang.php:'Leads'=>'Lead',
./modules/Home/language/en_us.lang.php:'LBL_LEADS_BY_SOURCE'=>'Leads By Source',
./modules/Home/language/en_us.lang.php:'LBL_LEADS_BY_STATUS'=>'Leads By Status',
./modules/Leads/language/en_us.lang.php:'LBL_IMPORT_LEADS'=>'Import Leads'

My task is complete. I’ve gotten all the translation files that contain the word Leads, and I can either manually edit them, or use the command line to edit them, but that’s another lesson.

Optional Step 3 – >>

I want to make a checklist that I can print and have on my desk while i’m working with these files. There’s a simple way to do this:

grep -R "Leads" ./ | grep -v "svn" | grep "en_us" > /path/to/file.txt

This will take all the output and drop it in the file I specified. If you use one >, it will create the file if it doesn’t exist, and if it does exist, replace all content in that file with the output from our grep. If you use two >>, it will create if it doesn’t exist and it will append the text if it does exist.

I know it’s a sloppy example, but that’s how I achieved my goal, and it was MUCH faster than finding all the translation files in the application and doing it by hand.

Ok. First off, I’d like to lay out my credentials. I can actually play guitar. Granted, I’m no Jimi Hendrix, but I can play more than just the intro to Nothing Else Matters or the beloved 3-chord songs of the 90s (do I hear Green Day in the background?). Also, I can play the drums. I even took about 8 years of piano, although I really have nothing to show for that.

So, I’m not trying to live a dream of playing guitar. I understand that this game is just Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. But I bought it anyway.

I’m going to keep saying that… But I bought it anyway…

And if you can get past all of that, it really is fun. The songs can get a bit old (I’m really sick of Pat Benatar, seriously), and easy is really way too easy, but try playing Muse – Knights of Cydonia on hard. But don’t try expert unless you want to blow a gasket, or you’re some 9 year old wiz-kid on youtube. And, believe what you will, but drumming skills actually translate better for this game than guitar skills. It’s all about realizing that the frets are quarter notes and figuring out where the notes fit the song. (I know, I know, that’s obvious, but that’s really the summation of it).

But… I bought it anyway.

There are some good songs. Queens of the Stoneage – 3’s & 7’s, Muse – Knights of Cydonia, Weezer – My Name is Jonas, Rage Against the Machine – Bulls on Parade, Pearl Jam – Even Flow, Tenacious D – The Metal, and a few others. But again, I’m sick of Pat Benatar, and there are definitely a few others on the shit-list as well.

Battling is well done too. They haven’t come out with a guitar without a game for the Wii yet, so I haven’t tried it against another person, but the in-game battles are pretty good once you get past medium. It took me a few tries to get past Slash on medium, I’m scared to see that on hard.

So, go ahead, make fun of me. There are 3 kinds of people. Those who play and enjoy the game for what it is, like me, those who live the game and have a serious problem, and those who won’t play the game because they think that it’s trying to replace guitar playing. I expect comments making fun of me for playing or comments making fun of me for having trouble battling Slash on medium.

…. But I bought it anyway…

But man was I wrong. This game is damn impressive. There isn’t a single thing this game has in common, playability-wise, with other platform games I’ve played. Here’s why:

Gravity
Yeah, big deal, right? Up till now, video games taught us that “if you run over the side, you’re dead…” Not here. If you’re on something like a tiny planet you can just run over the side and end up on the bottom. It’s disconcerting at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s fun as hell. Likewise, you can be on one planet next to another, jump and get pulled to the neighboring orb.

Camera Work
You’re gonna hate it. When you pick up the game, you will actually shout “why aren’t you staying behind him?!?!” at the camera man. But play it. Get used to it. Be one with the camera. The camera work is definitely great. Soon after you start playing, the camera becomes predictable, even helpful. If you had to deal with positioning it all the time (think Zelda, Ocarina of Time), you’d probably throw yourself out a window. One level has you running up around a column, reversing gravity, and avoiding baddies, but the intelligent camera just swoops around so you always have the right point of view.

Tasteful use of the Wii controller
The Wii controller for bowling was cool, boxing was fun, baseball, smeh… Then, after a while, you start to long for the simple controls of the gamecube/360/ps3 type controller. For a comparison, Tony Hawk: Proving Ground is a good example of this. There was nothing wrong with the Tony Hawk controls of old, but now they tried to use the Wii controller and went way overboard (but that’s for another review). In Galaxy, player 1 only uses the Wii motion/point controls for a few things: collecting star bits, shaking the controller for a spin attack or high jump, and a few mini-games. That’s it.

Two can play
The best part is the seamless 2-player co-op. It’s not your usual alternating players like Super Mario 3 for NES. My roommate can be playing and I can pick up player 2 in the middle of his game, power it on, and I’m in, collect star bits for Player 1 with a point of the wii controller. The fun part is actually being able to watch and be useful. Player 2 can just point at an enemy and press A to hold them in place, or shoot them with star bits to get them out of the way for good. It the game so much more fun for spectators than just watching someone else play, it almost makes you feel useful.

So is it the best game ever?
Well, don’t go that far. It’s great. But… It’s a little easy. I don’t know why, but it seems like you go into a world, and before you know it, you’ve completed the level and are back out in the overworld. I guess I want more within each world rather than so many worlds? I’m not sure. But seriously, this is probably the best game that doesn’t have that Wii Sports control novelty on it. If I wasn’t such a fan of Zelda, it’d probably be the best game available for the Wii.

Go buy it. You will definitely thank me.

New things that make this phone a joy to use:

1. Faster*. Definitely faster*. The old Q was slow. If you wanted to view text messages or email, the little loading wheel would come up for a while. Navigating between screens is definitely faster. So what’s the * for? Well, Qs do this thing where they never ever make you get rid of text messages. I did a software upgrade / system reset on the old Q in January of this year. Assume I receive 20msgs a day and send 20msgs a day: 40msgs/day * 30days/month * 8months = approx 9600 messages on the Q by the end of August. I would assume this is why it was slow loading the text message list, but I still don’t know if it slows down the entire system. I wasn’t running out of space as everything else was stored on my 1gig SD memory card.
2. Text/Email Searching – Thank you, thank you, thank you… I don’t know how many times I wanted to be able to search the aforementioned 9600 text messages for critical information such as a txt’d phone number, password, house address, pin number, etc… all you have to do is navigate to a message list (any email account or your text message list) and start typing. The list will shorten as per your search and the string you’re typing will be highlighted. Wicked handy…
3. New Keyboard - The only thing new about the physical hardware, aside from the black/red colors, is the new style keyboard. Instead of little, separated capsule-shaped keys, the keyboard is flatter and the keys are all touching. It’s much easier to type on and the phone is no bigger in size.
4. Better Battery Life / Light Sensor - On the old Q, which I used the crap out of, I had the standard battery and 2 extended-life batteries, as well as the dock to charge everything. An extended life battery, which I used probably 95% of the time over the standard one, lasted about a day of use. I would have to charge it while I slept and probably while I was at my desk throughout the day. The new Q is much different. First off, I currently only have the standard battery for it. I am in the habit of charging while I sleep, and usually I go to bed with 2 out of 3 bars of battery left. In the top right corner of the phone there is a little light sensor that helps with the battery problem. In bright light, the screen is as bright as can be, but the keyboard back-light is off. In a dark room, the screen is dim but still perfectly visible and the keyboard back-light is on. I know they stole this from the Apple MacBook Pro, but I don’t care. It makes my phone last longer and I love it.

New things that don’t affect me or I don’t care about, but I’m not complaining:

1. Documents to Go - The ability to view AND edit office documents on the phone is a great feature. The old Q would actually take the .doc file, send it to a web service, and show you a pdf, which you could not modify. Now you can create documents from scratch (although I would probably kill myself if I had to edit docs on the phone). The tools are PDF To Go, Sheet To Go, Slideshow To Go, Word to Go and Zip To Go.
2. Windows Mobile 6 - The new os is like any other new Micro$oft OS. It just is. There’s nothing to scream about. I still don’t know if it’s new hardware or the new OS that’s making my phone usage faster, or a combination of the two (or the text message thing mentioned above) but I like it either way. I like WM6 better than a blackberry. While I’ve never owned a Blackberry, I’ve used many, the interface on this is just much more intuitive.
3. VCast - The major push by Verizon on this phone is that it is VCast capable. Apparently you can download ringtones, videos, mp3s, etc… Frankly, I can download an MP3, use my SD card to move it from my laptop to my phone, and use that as a ringtone. So I never use it.

Not many, but a few complaints:

1. Where the F is the Camera Key - There is no camera key on the keyboard. Believe me, I’ve looked… It’s been replaced by the VCast Homepage button. This button, when hit, takes you to the circular VCast page where you can access your MP3s and crap. Yes, you can get to your camera here, but it takes about 5 seconds to load that homepage. So whatever I saw while I was at the bar that I wanted to snap a picture of is already gone. Why did you get rid of the camera key, Motorola/Verizon? Why?
2. Internet Explorer - I hate IE. I absolutely hate it as a browser on a desktop machine both as a common desktop user and a website developer. My hate is no different for the phone version. This hate became more fierce after using an iPhone. I’m not a big fan of the iPhone, but the safari browser on that thing is so cool… You can view a web page, with forms, css, images. That brings me to the next problem…
3. No JVM - this is a complaint now, but it may be resolved later. Initially, I wanted to install the opera browser (because I hate IE, see above). Opera is not WM6 ready yet, but hopefully that will be fixed soon. The only way to get Opera installed on a phone like mine is to install a Java Virtual Machine. But there is no JVM for my phone either. So I’m screwed from both sides… Please, Opera, build your browser for my phone and make it better than IE (not hard to do).

So the tally is 4 things that make my life so much better, but 3 strikes against it. BUT, the old Q had the same IE problem and the same JVM problem, so there’s really only 1 complaint: the camera button. If you’re looking to upgrade to a PDA, the Q9m is awesome. If you have a current Q, don’t pay to upgrade, but use your “new every 2″ when you can. I love it and I wouldn’t change it for any other PDA available from Verizon right now.

The groundwork
I purchased a Dell XPS M1710 laptop back in June. When I got it, like any good nerd would, I formatted it out of the box, partitioned it, reinstalled Vista Business and installed Ubuntu Edgy (I had it laying around). A month or so later, I upgraded to Feisty, and just recently I followed the upgrade recommendations found on Ubuntu Forums to Ubuntu Studio – Graphics Edition (instead of video or audio, this has Photoshop, Illustrator – like programs, which I’m more prone to using). So now I’m using the 2.6.20-16 kernel with Ubuntu Studio (not the low-latency audio kernel, which is apparently prone to crashing).

The F*ck up
I moved too fast. Either that, or I did something wrong. I tried to first install Beryl and get it to run on boot, then installed Studio, then removed Beryl and Compiz because they weren’t working right. After hours and hours of figuring out why my window manager was crashing, I finally found a great blog detailing how to upgrade to Compiz Fusion. This had me remove all the spare Beryl and Compiz stuff I had laying around, showed me how to actually install Compiz Fusion and even how to run Emerald window manager by default on boot. Now my machine is slick looking, just like those who actually know what they’re doing.

Miscellaneous Helpful Info
So now that the boring crap is over, I thought I’d detail some other useful information that I’ve come across along the way.

• Wireless Card
  • The Dell wireless card I have didn’t work so swell in Ubuntu. I think it’s too new maybe? I had to install the ndiswrapper to get it to work correctly. Follow these guidelines on the Ubuntu forums.
• Use apt-get with tab completion.
  • Commands such as ’sudo apt-get install <app name>’ is the easy way to use the command line to get new applications. If you just type the beginning of what you want, you can smack the tab key a few times to get suggestions as to what you want to install.
• SUPER! Remap the cube
  • In Linux world, the “Windows Key” is known as the “Super” key. It’s not used for anything useful by default, so it’s just waiting to do your bidding. If you go to System > Preferences > Key Mapping, there’s definitely many things you can map it to do. I’ve also gone into my Compiz Config (terminal command: ccms) and mapped my cube rotation to Super-Q for left and Super-W for right. It’s way easier to do that than to hold ctrl-alt and hit left/right to rotate it.
• Pidgin Instant Messenger
  • I’m not a fan of the default GAIM instant messenger installed with Ubuntu. I removed it installed Pidgin instead. This is purely personal preference, but try it, I bet you like it better than GAIM.
  • For some reason, the .bz2 file threw me for a loop. Then I found these easy step-by-step directions. Problem Solved.
• Avant Window Navigator – How to Mac up your Linux
  • I’ve installed this AVN because I’m not too fond of the default menu structure. As of right now, I’m only really using 3 things on Ubuntu regularly: the Terminal, Firefox & Pidgin Instant Messenger. Installing AVN is simple, configuring it is a little buggy, but if you get it set up like you like it then log out and back in, it’s pretty stable. (note: do this after you upgrade to Compiz Fusion). It looks a lot cooler if you turn on the “3d effect”
• Slick Terminal
  • Ubunut Unleashed has a great article on making an embedded terminal using compiz. Follow it to a T and you can make a wicked useful terminal on every desktop. One thing I noticed, however, is that in their tutorial they don’t tell you to turn off the scroll bar in the “trans” terminal profile you create. Click over to the scroll tab in the profiles dialog box and turn off scrolling. It looks much better that way.

Work… The reason I own a machine.
Next task is to switch over to using Ubuntu for work. Being a web developer, it’s not that difficult. So far, I’ve installed Eclipse Development Environment. You can easily install that through Synapic Package Manager. I also use Subversion Version Control, but I don’t like Eclipse’s implementation of it. On Windows, I use Tortoise SVN so I wanted something that integrates into Nautilus (Linux’s Windows Explorer). I found plugin that uses Nautilus Scripts that works better for me (again, personal preference). Here’s what I have left to replace:

• Mail
  • I use Outlook on Windows, but it’s Pop3, not imap. I have to switch over my mail usage to IMAP so both sides stay in sync. Once I do that, I’ll research alternative email clients, but probably just stick to the default.
• Backup
  • Mozy Remote Backup backs up all my business files (not site files, just invoices, checks, etc…) I’ll have to see how i can utilize an offsite backup in Linux
• Flash
  • Some of the work I do uses the Flash IDE which isn’t available for Linux. I’ll have to figure out how to run it using WINE or something like that, so I can open my .flas without rebooting.
• Database
  • In windows, I use Navicat MySQL to connect to all my client’s servers. It has this handy http/php tunnel feature which allows me to use it without having my cliens open up ssh tunnels to connect through or using that crappy phpMyAdmin software. Believe me, once you use Navicat, you’ll never go back. There is a for-purchase version of Navicat for Linux, but I want to research non-pay software first. I’ve had emma recommended to me, but that doesn’t have the tunneling, so I’ll just keep looking.

So, I’ll keep looking. I know anyone can use Ubuntu. I just hope I’m as smart as the next guy…