Edward Andrew Robinson

Hot off the press, get yours now at the Ubuntu store. Congratulations to everyone on the release of the Karmic Koala (late I know but I wanted to wait till I got my shirt)! And here is a picture of me modeling my Ubuntu shirts (and I know I look grumpy I was focusing on my new camera and tripod to keep the backgrounds aligned)

Left (Jaunty Jackalope) Middle (Karmic Koala) Right (Hardy Heron)

Looking forward to the Lucid Lynx. You can also check out all the Ubuntu code names here!

Well yet another meem on planet ubuntu, and so without further ado:

earobinson@MinusOne:/media/data/personal/hackergotchi$ vrms
Non-free packages installed on MinusOne

fglrx-modaliases          Identifiers supported by the ATI graphics driver
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.28 modules helper script
linux-restricted-modules- Restricted Linux modules for generic kernels
nvidia-173-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-180-kernel-source  NVIDIA binary kernel module source
nvidia-180-libvdpau       Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix
nvidia-180-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-71-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-96-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-glx-180            NVIDIA binary Xorg driver
opera                     The Opera Web Browser
picasa                    Image management application from Google
sun-java6-bin             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-jre             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
tangerine-icon-theme      Tangerine Icon theme
unrar                     Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
Reason: Modifications problematic

Contrib packages installed on MinusOne

flashplugin-installer     Adobe Flash Player plugin installer
flashplugin-nonfree       Adobe Flash Player plugin installer (transitional pack
nvidia-common             Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
nvidia-settings           Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
ttf-mscorefonts-installer Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts

16 non-free packages, 0.9% of 1712 installed packages.
5 contrib packages, 0.3% of 1712 installed packages.

Post yours!

Since everyone else is doing it.

In keeping with tradition the ubuntu store (well canonical store) has released a Limited Edition Jaunty Jackalope T-shirt to celebrate the release of ubunut 9.04.

Get yours now (I have and they went really fast last time), and congratulations to everyone who made Jaunty Jackalope a success!

Well its been ages since my last real post, but life and twitter have been keeping me busy. Ever since I started using computers every 5 months or so I get board of my current computer setup and start to look at my other options, this can be anything from replacing a program, to changing my OS. This makes Ubuntu’s six month release cycle perfect for me because I can get get tired of my current setup in 5 months start messing with my computer then reinstall with the latest release of Ubuntu. I have found many grate programs this way like Miro, and Geany, and I love both of them dearly. Well I have found a new love to add to that list: tilda.

While the tilda website sucks including unfound images on the homepage the program is great. The idea of tilda is to provide the user with a “terminal taking after the likeness of many classic terminals from first person shooter games, Quake, Doom and Half-Life (to name a few)”[1]. The great thing about this is that it lets you collapse a lot of your terminals into one terminal (I’m sure I will still have a few terminals open to monitor things that I’m running) but in general it lets you map a hot key to pull down a notebook of terminals (like the tilda(~) would do in the games mentioned above).

Before Tilda

After Tilda

I really do love this application and it gives me a neat new way to interface with my computer. It is perfect for when I am programing and I want to then quickly switch to the terminal to compile my program now instead of <Alt> + <Tab> I can use <Super> + <Space> and bring down my terminal.

For those of you still running hardy you may want to upgrade to the latest version (yes those instructions will work with the latest version) but even then there are still a few features I would like to see mostly I would like each desktop to have its own terminal’s (right now they all share the same ones).

What apps do you love?

With the release of wordpress 2.6.1 I have once again updated my hackergotchi. This will be my third hackergotchi since 2006, and the original image was taken by my mother at our cottage in Pointe au Baril, and yes I am sitting on the barrel that markes the site of the original barrel that the town gets its name from.

New Hackergotchi

I got my Ubuntu Hardy Heron T-shirt Today. I will try and post some pictures soon. Maybe even update with a new hackergotchi.

I know that this has been done before but it seems to go around every once in a while and I always have fun reading them. So once again here are my top 10 commands.

My Computer
[sourcecode language="python"]earobinson@MinusOne:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
143 cd
114 ls
53 make
48 svn
34 svnup
18 sh
12 cat
11 rm
11 geany
9 touch
earobinson@MinusOne:~$ alias svnup
alias svnup=’. /media/data/dev/scripts/svnup/svnup.sh’
[/sourcecode]

Laptop
[sourcecode language="python"]earobinson@NaN:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
138 make
82 ls
70 cd
41 cmake
33 svn
19 svnup
18 cat
16 man
12 ./A/runA
10 geany
earobinson@NaN:~$ alias svnup
alias svnup=’. /media/data/dev/scripts/svnup/svnup.sh’
[/sourcecode]

Girlfriends Computer
[sourcecode language="python"]earobinson@Null:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
49 espeak
7 sudo
1 vi
1 top
1 ssh
1 man
1 ls
1 history|awk
1 history
1 exit
earobinson@Null:~$ espeak “love ya baby”
[/sourcecode]

This Friday I got my powered by Ubuntu stickers, from system76. They came with a nice little letter pointing me to ubuntu-ca.org. I did send off for these about a year ago but free is free so I’m not complaining and my Ubuntu CD’s always come fast so I’m not complaining.

Thanks to everyone who made the stickers possible. They look great on my laptop. Sorry about the picture quality I took them with my XO because my digital camera is dead.

APT-URL is one of my favorite programs. The great thing about it is I can keep a list of programs I like on a website and easily install all the program I like on a new box, or point someone new to Ubuntu to the website with all my favorite programs. The problem is that with the personal package archives, letting users run there own repositories on launchpad, and many great programs using there own repository’s you need to add them to your source.list file before you can use any of those great programs.

My solution, let APT-URL add a repository after giving a warning of course. Is this dangerous, sure it is but we can take a similar approach to this that Firefox does, only let trusted websites add to the source.list file. So on a trusted website like launchpad you would get a message like “launchpad.net is trying to add the following repository” compared to a random website that might say “wiki.earobinson.org is trying to add a repository if this is a trusted website please click yes otherwise click no”. This would add some risk but the benefit to the user is huge. Please support this idea by voting for it at the Ubuntu brainstorm.