earobinson.org

<rant>Although I get to use Linux mostly for work and personally, there always comes a time when I need to use Windows. It could be that I need to write a program for Windows, or that I have a friend, or family member that needs windows for something. This is one of those times.

What frustrates me most is that I’m trying to install Windows on a laptop that came with Windows Media Centre. That laptop has a Windows Media Centre key but I don’t have the Dell disks that came with that laptop, and I know I can order them from Dell and at the end of the day I just might have to do that (and end up paying for it). But what annoys me most is that including the Windows key on the bottom of the laptop, that I’m trying to install windows on, I have three legit Windows XP keys but cant get an install working. I have an MSDNAA Windows XP key, as well as the Dell XP key from the bottom of my laptop and what annoys me is that I have three valid XP keys and I cant seem to install XP.

I have no media center disks, annoying and I really don’t want to used bittorrent to download them. I don’t feel like I should have to steal software that I own

The MSDNAA ISO and key came from two different people, eg its my key buy my buddy burned the ISO when he got a key, maybe that’s causing the problem I will burn my own copy and find out.

Obviously my laptop is OEM for XP pro and cant be installed on another computer even though I have never used it.

Guess this is just another reason I use Linux, I find this so annoying. Microsoft/Dell should really have a website that I can find out why the one key wont work as well as download ISOs. I know this is the way things are and that me wining about it is not going to change anything but I really just wish if I had a CD key I could download the ISO and use that key on any computer (only one of course). This just makes my windows experience more painful and makes me want to avoid Windows more.</rant>

Also my blog still seems to be broken I don’t want to update and spam the planet again by removing the fact that I think I fixed one of the issues.

Tags: Dell, Linux, Microsoft, My Experience, Rant, Why I use Linux, windows, Windows Media Center, Windows XP

I was reading reddit the other day and stumbled upon the fact that wikipedia has an API. Neat I thought, and having some free time since my exams are now over I figured I would play around a bit with it. When I browse wikipedia I often click from link to link, and have come to the conclusion that all articles are 6 degrees of separation. For example I can go from Ubuntu to Tesco to Japan to G8 to United States to George W. Bush bet you never knew Ubuntu was connected to George W. Bush. I once wrote a map of the internet program that people seemed to like to download and modify so in that spirit I wrote wikimap.py to map wikipedia. wikimap.py Requires pygraphviz (Install using sudo aptitude install python-pygraphviz). To use the program simply run the program and give it the wiki page name for example “python wikimap.py Norman_Graham” Note that Ubuntu is Ubuntu_(Linux_distribution) and you can find the full name in the address bar of your browser. For more complicated maps use wikimap.py –help for full usage info.

Here are a few examples that I created with wikimap.py


And a really large one being viewed in inkscape.

More examples including the dot files can be found at http://www.files.earobinson.org/wiki/. But there are a few features I would like to add:

1. Generating the graph using python-pygraphviz currently takes a really long time and I would like to be able to do it faster
2. Page links currently include templates, I would like to only use links in the body of the text
3. It would be nice if the software cached previously seen connections. (But then I need to detect updates to that page)

If anyone has a nice simple soultion to any of those problems leave a comment. Also if you are able to generate any neat images I would love to see them.

Tags: api, graphviz, internet, Linux, map, Programing, Python, sandbox, Ubuntu, wikipedia, wikis

I’m currently working on a cross platform project. The code is C++ and I’m going to be doing most of my development on the linux side but I need all of my compile scripts to be able to work on windows. After doing some googling and talking to people cmake seems to be what I’m going to go with.

My problem is that the documentation sucks. In fact even the example on the site did not work when I tried to download it (Update: Thanks for fixing this Bill). I was able to download the file but it seemed to be an empty tar.gz file.

So with a bit more googling I was able to create my own example. I know the KDE guys switched to cmake but thats about it. Anyone have any experience with cmake? How did it work out for you? Any better recommendations? Better sites for documentation?

Tags: C++, cmake, compile, documentation, example, Linux, Programing, windows

I’m quite a fan of stats, checking my most viewed posts is a bit of an obsession of mine. On of my posts that continues to baffle me in how much activity it gets is my post about ubuntu root access. This post resulted in a friendly argument between me and a friend during class. At the time it was a quick and dirty post to try and prove to him that linux was far superior to windows (lol, j/k, only a friendly debate).

In response to that post so long ago I now want to post about SUM (Screenshots). SUM lets you control your boot settings, including your boot password, from a GUI. For anyone interested you can get SUM here, or if you use propensity you can import this .pa file.

Tags: Linux, password, Propensity, root, security, start up manager, stats, sum, Ubuntu, windows

I have my own subversion repository, I use this to store my school work, personal data like my resume, and pretty much anything else I want to keep backups of or keep synced across all of my computers. The other day I was trying to do an svn up and I was getting the following error “Can’t find a temporary directory: Internal error“. With all my googling I found a lot of people that said that they had this error also but that the problem had fixed its self. This was no good for me since the posts I found seemed to be implying that the problem was on the side of the svn server, but since I ran my own svn server the problem was mine to fix.

Well it turns out that the problem was that my computer that runs the server had run out of space and the simple fix was to delete some old files I had. Just thought I would put this out there for anyone else having this problem.

Tags: Can't find a temporary directory: Internal error, error, fix, Linux, svn, Ubuntu