I largely credit that old computer to where I am today — it wasn’t just the Macintosh’s ease-of-use and small learning curve, it was also, literally, the spirit of the designers and tinkerers that worked at Apple computer that existed in that machine.

The Macintosh was a computer that you could delve beneath the surface, when you wanted to — you could modify code, the way applications worked, the modules and extensions that started up when the machine booted — you had, when you wanted to, access to all the tools that the designers themselves used to create that very Macintosh you were using right then and there.

There’s a whole generation of programmers who got their start in this very way, and for that, I do have Apple to thank.

CELEBRATION OVER, CRITICISM BELOW:

And that’s the very reason why Apple’s current practices today kinda scare me. Apple’s products today are precisely not about giving the user tools and control — with each new version of MacOSX, each new iPhone that comes out, there’s less and less that tinkerers like me can do with it.

There’s less and less that the next generation of tinkerers can do with it. How would the next Steve Jobs design anything on an iPod Touch? On an iPad? How would a budding application developer get anyone to use a new application he’s designed, when people can only install apps via a curated, policed, application “store?”

I thank Apple for starting me on the path to where I am today, but I thank companies like Google for keeping that spirit alive, when it becomes increasingly evident that Apple either isn’t able to or just no longer wants to.

1) Enable Auto-Logins (optional)

All depends upon how you set things up, but you may want to run everything easily through a default user account — just go to “System > Administration > Login Screen”, and set it up.  (These instructions are for the GUI of Ubuntu, of course — I’m not a CLI-queen, and would rather edit things quickly through an interface that I’m familiar with than search forums for hours trying to find the esoteric commands necessary to do this stuff manually, sorry.)

2) Enabling Networking With Automatic User Login

Now, you may have set up automatic logins, but noticed that you always have to enter in your account password manually anyway once your network tries to connect — took me a while to figure out this one, but just go to “System > Preferences > Network Connections”, and in the type of connection you’ll be using, make sure the option for “Available to all users” is selected at the bottom.  That’s it.  I feel dumb for not figuring this out long ago.

3) Enabling VNC to Run Headless

As per the instructions I found here, you have to

1. Edit “/etc/gdm/Init/Default” to include the line “/usr/lib/vino/vino-server &” right before “exit 0″
2. Edit “/etc/gdm/custom.conf” (or “/etc/gdm/gdm.conf” if older than Ubuntu 10.04) and add “KillInitClients=false” — this will prevent any existing VNC clients from being killed if you do login on the server physically
3. Do a “sudo vino-preferences” and enable the necessary stuff

More to come, including the Minecraft configuration scripts!

Mapnotes

Apparently, MapNotes is no more.  Trying to find an addon that will import my many years of notes that I’ve made with this addon.  (It’s seriously been one of the most helpful for questing with alts.)

I have a long history with this addon — for the longest time, I used it WAY back in the day, and then with the release of TBC, it stopped working.  Thankfully, there was “Metamap,” which imported MapNotes map points just fine. (Metamap doesn’t even have a Curse page — I used to have to download it directly from the author’s website.)

However, it in turn stopped working with version 3.0 of WoW, but MapNotes came back with a fan update!  (A fan update is where a fan of a defunct addon is able to get in contact with the original addon maintainer, and gets them to give them control over it.)  But, now MapNotes no longer works anymore, either, and I’m stuck trying to find a replacement.  Looking at HandyNotes for now — apparently there’s some way to get it to import MapNotes points.

SellValue and SellFish

Long live SellValue!  I used this addon for the LONGEST time, and it was an absolute lifesaver.

Out questing and need to know if that stack of gray shit you’ve been collecting is worth it to keep?  SellValue would tell you how much it was worth (dependent upon prices you had seen before).  This addon worked for the longest time, even though it hadn’t been updated since forever.

Even though it was still working wit version 3.0, I started using an updated addon called “SellFish” — however, as you can see, WoW integrated this functionality into the core game with version 3.2, so there’s no need for either addon anymore!

AnnoyRP

AnnoyRP was a neat little plugin everyone started using back in my heavy guild-RP days (god, that sounds so dorky). It had amazing functionality — based upon certain events in the game that you set it to notice, i.e. mounting up, casting a certain spell, it would /s certain things.

For instance, you could set it to say “Hi Ho, Silver, Away!” every time you mounted up (or a certain random amount of times, or even a certain random choice out of a group of phrases).  As you can imagine, it was LOADS of fun.

It stopped working some time ago, but the author made Chatterbox to make up for it.  Did the same thing, worked great.  However, now the author has left WoW (back in July over the whole RealID thing, which sadly enough didn’t even happen!), so who knows?  It seems to work fine for now, but that could stop at any minute with version 4.0.2 of WoW.

Picasa (or Google) offers nothing in the way of little blog widgets (unlike Flickr’s great support for everything), nor is there really any third-party support for this kind of thing out on the web.

I don’t understand why, since — at least to me — what Picasa offers for free is so much better than what Flickr offers, still, even to this day. :\

Every third-party WordPress plugin I’ve tried either doesn’t work, doesn’t work right, or needs so much configuration on the server side — and I’m talking about editing raw PHP here (unacceptable) or creating farking CURL scripts for the server (why did you even release this plugin?).

Sadly enough, the BEST solution I could find for the problem of integrating Picasa was actually done in straight JavaScript (yay!), found here: http://www.bloggingtips.com/2009/03/23/picasa-widgets-and-plugins-for-your-blog/

Her code works great, works fast, requires almost no configuration (besides your Picasa username), and uses JQuery, so pretty much anyone can edit and customize it.

Which I did. ^_^ Though the code works, it doesn’t appear to always grab your latest photos from Picasa. (I’m guessing it has something to do with the “max-results” flag in the URL string — you have to restrict the number of photos that Picasa feeds up for you to get the latest.) I also made each photo be a link to the Picasa page where it’s at, as well as cleaning up the code a little.

There’s basically two parts:

First, put this code in a widget text block where you want it to be in your wordpress blog (this is also where you can edit the style):

<style>
#picasaStream img {border: 1px solid #000; margin: 0 5px 5px 0;}
</style>  

<div id="picasaStream"></div>

Second, put this code either right after the widget, or wherever you put your JavaScript (if you choose to put it in another place, like a footer):

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.0/jquery.min.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
/*
****	Uncomment this line if you are using other JavaScript libraries
****	(Prototype, Scriptaculous, etc.)
*/
// jQuery.noConflict();

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
	/*
	****	Change your Picasaweb username here,
	****	as well as how many thumbnails you want to show
	*/
	var _userName = "captainskyhawk",
		_count = 6

	/*
	****	Choose your thumbnail size here:
	**** 	"0" for small, "1" for medium, and "2" for large
	*/
	var _thumbnailSize = 0;

	/*
	****	Script Code
	****	No need to edit any further
	*/
	jQuery.getJSON("http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/"
		+ _userName + "?kind=photo&thumbsize=72c&access=public&alt=json&max-results="
		+ _count + "&callback=?",
		function(data){
			jQuery.each(data.feed.entry, function(index, pic) {
				jQuery('<a href="' + pic.link[1].href + '"><img src="'
					+ pic.media$group.media$thumbnail[_thumbnailSize].url
					+ '" alt="' + pic.summary.$t + '" /></a>')
				.appendTo("#picasaStream");
			});
		}
	);
});
</script>

Just change your name in the code from “captainskyhawk” (that’s me!), and it should work!

It couldn’t host multiplayer games.

It couldn’t share a printer.

It wouldn’t share files.

You couldn’t access multimedia of any sort over it.

I had absolutely no idea what the problem was — it was a very old Windows XP installation, probably four years or more, and had gone through Windows XP SP1, SP2, and SP3, so there’s no telling.

It might’ve been some service I turned off years ago, or (more than likely) an old remnant  of Norton Antivirus (a horrible, horrible program) that refused to let go.

I noticed that my much newer gaming PC would work just fine, and that it was running the exact same services that the Titan was running, so I was stumped.  You couldn’t even ping the Titan if you wanted to.

So, on a whim, I search for “cannot ping Windows XP computer” on Google, and found this:

Try this to reset TCP/IP in XP:

Click Start -> Run -> CMD

At the prompt type:

NETSH INT IP RESET C:IPRESET.TXT

via Help! Unable to ping machine on the network – Windows NT / 2000 / XP / 2003.

And it worked.  I don’t know what it did, but it worked.  I think it reset completely the way that TCP/IP worked on Windows, because when the Titan restarted, my IP settings were completely reset, but I could ping it. And it shared files.  And it could host games (I think).

Either way, I’m happy!

I tested on two different computers — my venerable Dell laptop and my largely MSI-powered gaming PC.

Some thoughts:

• The newest Opera 10 build on Linux does not like the SunSpider benchmark.  Understandably, it’s a benchmark put together by the WebKit browser team, but still — it performed about as bad as I’d suppose Internet Explorer would (were it to run on Linux).  I ran it twice just to make sure, and it was about 10k milliseconds each time.
• Chromium, whether it’s on Windows XP, or the pre-alpha build I’m using on Linux, is pretty damn fast.  Like scary fast.  Though, like I said, it is their own benchmark.
• Seamonkey on Linux is consistently faster than Firefox 3.1b3 on Linux.  I have no idea why, since they’re supposed to be powered by the exact same engine.
• It’s amazing how much faster an older computer (Like my Dell laptop) can feel when you use a browser that’s optimized to render JavaScript faster.  It seriously feels like an entirely different computer.
• I tried running this test in Internet Explorer 6.0 via Wine, on Ubuntu.  I figured it’s not exactly emulation (since Wine Is Not an Emulator and all), but it kept freezing on one of the “base64″ tests, and I got tired of waiting on it and killed the process.  Imagine that.

And now, the benchmark numbers, utilizing the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark (smaller numbers are better, all numbers in thousandths of a second):

Computer #1

Hardware:  Dell Laptop, Pentium 4-M 2.6 GHz, 1.5GB DDR Ram

Software:  Ubuntu 8.04 (x86)

• 10572.4ms:  Opera 10 Alpha, Build 4214
• 8435.8ms:  Flock 2.0.3
• 8171.8ms:  Firefox 3.0.8
• 5243.6ms:  Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 (Shiretoko)
• 4701.4ms:  Seamonkey 2.0 Alpha 3
• 1506.4ms:  Chromium Dev Build

Computer #2

Hardware:  MSI Mainboard, Athlon X2 2.5GHz (Brisbane), 2GB DDR2 RAM

Software:  Windows XP SP3 (x86)

• 6930.8ms:  Internet Explorer 8
• 2097.8ms:  Firefox 3.1 Beta 3
• 952.4ms:  SRWare Iron 2.0 (Chromium)

Well, I got tired of being stuck with the version 2.4 of the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) that ships with Ubuntu 8.04.  It’s old, it uses the old window system that I can’t stand anymore, and version 2.6 (the current version) fixes tons of more issues that it has.

However, you can’t just go to your package manager and add it — Ubuntu locks program versions when it ships (for example, the latest version of GIMP available to Ubuntu 8.04 users is 2.4).  This is done for compatibility reasons — if version 2.4 of the GIMP works fine when Ubuntu 8.04 ships, then they lock those versions together. That way, it’s always guaranteed to work, no matter when Ubuntu is installed in the future.

However, there’re sites likes GetDeb.net which lets developers upload installer files of popular programs for Ubuntu, so that users of older versions of Ubuntu can install new programs.

So, I went to the GetDeb page for GIMP 2.6 and downloaded all the files you need to install GIMP 2.6 on Ubuntu 8.04:

• libgegl-0.0-0
• libbabl-0.0-0
• gimp-data
• libgimp2.0
• gimp

Usually, in 99% of situations, you just download these files and install them, even on Ubuntu. However, on Ubuntu 8.04 with GIMP 2.6, there’s a bit of a problem — you have to force these files to install.

Now, you can do fancy command-line kung-fu if you want to, but you shouldn’t have to on Ubuntu, so I’ve included a file here for you:

• gimp-2.6-install-ubuntu-8.04

Just save that file, put it along with the 5 files you downloaded from GetDeb.net into their own folder, and then run that file. (Make it executable in its properties, and then double-click on it).

And that’s it!

(I got the inspiration for that install file from this blog post here!)

The Synergy of Mac, Linux, and Windows

I’ve always heard about the program called Synergy, but I’ve never used it, and that’s a damn shame.

Have a lot of computers side by side that you manage all at once? Tired of going from one keyboard and mouse, to another, even though the computers you’re working with are side by side?

Then download Synergy, configure it, and run it on all of your computers (Mac, Linux, and Windows).

And that’s it. Honestly. It’ll take you about 20 minutes and you’ll spend the next few hours wondering how you ever lived without it.

It treats all of your computers like one giant desktop — just move your mouse “off” of the side of your monitor towards your other computer, and your mouse will instantly reappear on that computer’s monitor. If you need to type something, you type it with the first computer’s monitor. Seriously.

Ah, a caveat — on Mac and Linux, the setup isn’t as streamlined and easy as it is on Linux, so there’s a program called QuickSynergy that can do it for you. If you’re using Ubuntu, it’s already in the repositories — just go to your “Add/Remove Applications” menu item, and install QuickSynergy from there.

Well, I started playing around with Conky yesterday — if you haven’t heard of it before, just know that it’s a neat little Linux program that runs in your background and uses very little resources that displays a very neat desktop overlay.  (Like in the picture in the Lifehacker article.)

Now, some of the stock Conky scripts were more than adequate, but I had always wanted my laptop’s CPU temperature to be displayed as well, so I had to figure out a way to do that.

Now, if you’re somewhat familiar with tinkering in Linux, you’ve probably heard of the wonderful “lm_sensors” package — it’s a neat package for Linux that helps display lots of information about motherboard temps and whatnot.  Unfortunately, due to most laptops “prorietary-ness,” lm_sensors does very little for you if you’re trying to get it to work on a laptop.

Now, I had heard of the “i8kutils” package for Linux — this was a package designed for Dell laptops in particular, to display and control fan and temperature information.

So, with that, I was off to work!

(Note — these instructions are mostly for Ubuntu/Debian installations, because that’s what I use.)

First, install the package “i8kutils” using your Linux computer’s package manager (Synaptic, if you’re using Ubuntu).

Second, add the module “i8k” to your “/etc/modules” file.  (This will start the process at boottime.)  Restart your laptop.

Third, you’ll have to create some Conky script files.  I assume you’ve already had a bit of experience at least installing Conky and starting it up.  If not, play around with the instructions in that Lifehacker article and come back here afterwards.

Now, I noticed that one of my conky script files was a file called “hddmonit.sh” which contained the text:

#!/bin/bash
echo “$(nc localhost 7634 | cut -d’|’ -f4)”

Now, using a little bit of deduction, I figured that this file used a command called “nc localhost 7634″ to display a little bit of information, and then used pipe commands (the little “|” symbol) to further splice the info, extracting just the temperature of my laptop’s hard drive.

So, while “nc localhost 7634″ outputted this:

|/dev/sda|ST980815A|43|C|

Using the command “(nc localhost 7634 | cut -d’|’ -f4″ would output just “43″, which was the temperature of my hard drive.

(The “cut” command splices out specific text from a string it’s given, in this case the fourth (-f4) chunk of text seperated by a “|” chracter.)

Now, I learned that the “i8k” module, once loaded, could be accessed with the file at  “/proc/i8k”, which just contains a string like:

1.0 A32 7GGGGGG 53 -22 1 -22 90300 -1 2

From this you can see various Dell-specific information, the important part being “53″, which was my current processor temp.  (The items in the string are separated by spaces.)

So, I quickly made myself a new script file called “i8ktemps.sh” copying the contents of “hddmonit.sh” and changing them to:

#!/bin/bash
echo “$(head /proc/i8k | cut -d’ ‘ -f4)”

This file, when executed, will just output the fourth “chunk” in the file “/proc/i8k”, which as you remember is my current processor temp.

Now, I needed to edit my Conky configuration file, which is located in your home folder and is called “.conkyrc”.

Then I simply located the line:

${font weather:size=28}x ${font}HDD ${execi 1 ~/scripts/hddmonit.sh}C

Which displayed my hard drive temperature, and changed it to:

${font weather:size=28}x ${font}CPU ${execi 1 ~/scripts/i8ktemps.sh}C HDD ${execi 1 ~/scripts/hddmonit.sh}C

Which, when Conky was restarted, would display my hard drive temperature and my current processor temperature.

See?  It’s not that hard to program this stuff!  I did this all, both programming in the Linux “Bash” shell and coding in Conky’s personal configuration code, without any experience in either.  I just looked at what was there, and changed it.

Relevant Links:

http://www.arachnoid.com/linux/shell_programming.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=411800

http://www.linuxcommand.org/wss0010.php

Wondering why your brand new installation of Google Earth 5.0 isn’t working in Ubuntu?  Is it crashing after it gets done with the splash screen, or generally just not starting up?

An odd problem, but one with an easy fix — just go to the folder where you installed Google Earth (the program files, not the shortcut), and delete or move the file called “libcrypto.so.0.9.8″.

And that’s it — wierd, but it works.