Recently in Project Ideas Category

The old way of raising money to make a film consisted of one or a combination of all of the following:

I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now and quite like it. And when I saw they had released 10.04 I was excited to upgrade. The last two releases I did an upgrade-in-place with their upgrade tool and I didn't run into any major problems. So I did the same thing for this release. But that's where this story begins.

First I noticed that I was getting warnings and errors related to my X.org config. This was very alarming since I've never seen that before and I don't run any thing unusual in my x.org config. I tried a few different things to address it but could never really solve the problem. Then I noticed that rhythmbox was always crashing on me. Like all the time. Oh and my startup applications would never start up as they were supposed to. And compiz wouldn't work due to complaints about in correct driver even though I did install the correct one.

So after complaining about it for a week to my coworkers they suggested that I back up all my important stuff and then do a fresh install. Complety wipe it and install from scratch with 10.04. So I bought an external hard drive (500G) and did that. The fresh install was soooo easy and quick. I then carefully restored data back to my home folder. If you are doing this be careful not to copy back .gnome2 or .gvfs or anything .g* or at least be very cautious in doing so. Those could break things on an upgrade like this.

Conclusion- the fresh install worked beatifully. Ubuntu 10.04 works great and i'm not seeing any of the problems I had earlier. In fact it also fixed a completely separate issue I was having with my wireless card. So I'm definately still an Ubuntu fan.

I haven't written for a while, but I have gathered several ideas to write about.  Here are a few of them:

• My SageTV setup, and why I chose to go with SageTV versus MythTV, or TiVo or others.
• Controltier.  This is an automation framework for deploying and managing software.  It is a bit complex but can be very powerful.  I use this at work.
• My presentation at Postgresql Conference East, entitled "Postgres Administration for Sysadmins".  This presentation covers basics of configuration and running Postgres and monitoring your database.
• An updated how-to for Virtual Box- setting up several servers and getting them to talk to each other.
• How-to on getting CUPC (cisco's chat/video thingy app) working in Virtual box vm.
• Snippets of some of my screenplays (works in progress).

As you can see, I actually do have things to write about, now if I could only make the time.....

For some reason I'm drawn to music covers.  I like to hear new versions of the same song be different artists and compare styles and interpretations.  I have another blog post from a long time ago that mentions an idea for a mp3 player plugin that would connect to SecondHandSongs to query their database of song covers and provide information on the current song and related covers if any.

Well, I actually have renewed the desire for such a plugin and have a few links of resources to help be get started on this:

• http://www.secondhandcongs.com (of course)
• http://code.google.com/p/rhythmtoweb/
• http://live.gnome.org/RhythmboxPlugins/ThirdParty
• http://live.gnome.org/RhythmboxPlugins/WritingGuide
• http://www.grooveshark.com
• http://apidocs.tinysong.com/

My current idea is to ping SecondHandSongs with the song info and retrieve:
1. if this is a cover
2. if this is an original, with other artists covering it
3. if this is not found at all in their database

for 1 and 2, I'll get the list of all covers and artists, and then query TinySong.com to see if they have that song in their database.  If so, they will provide a URL to listen to that song in a browser.

So you can listen to a song and say, "Hmm, I wonder if anyone has redone this song...", then right click on it, or something, and choose "Find Song Cover Info...", and then a list of songs and artists get displayed, and when you click on any one of them, it pauses your current music player, launches a web browser with the URL for that song cover and you get to listen to it right there.

Coolness.

So I'm spending a little time to learn something new.  I've been working on www.todocycle.net for a while now (actual hours spent are still pretty low, but with the little free time I have it's been a long time)... any hoo.  I purposely chose to use some technologies with this site that I have never used before but had heard about and wanted to learn.

I started out with a few things that I am very familiar with, so that this project wouldn't take for freaking ever to get off the ground as I learn.  I only spend about 3-4 hours a month on it, so my time better be well spent in order to see any visible progress.  I started out with Postgres for the database, perl as the coding language, and CGI::Application as the MVC framework.  All of which I'm quite comfotable with.

Then I chose a few things to work with to force me to learn.  Template Toolkit for templating (I've been using HTML::Template for most other things), DBIx::Class for ORM (I've never really given and ORM a chance), and jQuery for a Javascript toolkit.

So far things have been a mixed bag.  Picking up Template Toolkit was no problem at all and I am quite impressed by it.  DBIx::Class has been another story.  It has been a struggle for me to embrace it, and another one to try to get it to do what I want.  I'm not giving up on it yet though.  I want to give it a fair shot, but it was not a "learn it in one sitting and go to town" sort of thing like Template Toolkit was.

And then there's jQuery.  I actually have been putting that one off becuase I was so focussed on the backend of things until now.  I just started reading the docs on jQuery and have to say I am mightily impressed.  I used Prototype before and disliked it.  At my work, they use Yahoo's YUI toolkit, which seems big and bloated to me.  jQuery is tiight, lightweight, and very easy to pick up.

So far:
   jQuery                A
  DBIx::Class         B-
  Template Toolkit   A

This is an attempt at a how-to for getting a few servers up and running that can talk to each other as well as with your host desktop machine all with vitrtualization.  This has been a personal desire for some time and I have read documentation about how to do this and have tried multiple times, and every time it seems that the job is complex and error prone.  So this how-to will describe how I finally was able to get it working with almost no effort!  Yeah!

First of all, let's set the scene and give ourselves a goal:  We want to have a VM web server and a VM database server running on our desktop that runs a simple web application.  The two machines need to talk to each other.  And we want to be able to open our desktop web browser and access the web application running on these VMs.  And do all that without any complex configuration or breaking your desktop's network settings.

The first thing we will use in this setup is VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org/)