We've had it for a while, but haven't had a chance to blog about it. Its my new Wii.
At the moment I'm in the middle of Zelda and Paper Mario. Really waiting for Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
Really want Nintendo to get their internet access and channels developed for the Wii.
As I am running Ubuntu, I get kernel updates automatically.. This is cool and fine except that VMWare is built for each kernel. Once the kernel is updated VMWare stops.
Its not like I use VMWare every day, but it's still a hassle to remember what to do when the kernel is updated.
So here are the steps..
1. Install the kernel headers
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.15-27-386
2. Run vmware-config.pl
Answer everyting by default, when it gets to the question about the linux headers enter /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.15-27-386/include
What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running
kernel? [/usr/src/linux/include] /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.15-27-386/includeExtracting the sources of the vmmon module.
3. Run the newly compiled vmware
steve@steve-laptop:~/downloads/vmware-distrib$ vmware
Your done, simple now you know.. Just as an aside u might have to change the kernel version numbers, this can be identified by running 'uname -a' from a prompt to get the settings.
After having my laptop grind to a halt with all the clogware that comes with windows, I decided it was time to re-build her.
I had just got the updated APC mag that included a livecd of ubuntu and decided to see how it would run. I was only planning on playing around a bit and see what was still broken running a linux distro on a laptop.
But was I supprised! The only thing that didn't work straight out of the box was the WPA wireless, but open accesspoints worked seemlessly. I have a internal sd slot, along with an external HD and my iPod. All these were detected and mounted automatically and fully accessable.
The widescreen resolution, automatic, the network access, automatic, booting and configuration automatic. The liveCD was the most seemless operating system start up i've seen. It just works.
So I played around, used the package manager to install a couple of apps, started playing mp3's from my external HDD, then decided to get email, setup evolution. A bit of development to try out, so I needed the jdk installed, now is when the ease of use slowed down, but a couple of google searches (thanks to the automaticly installed firefox) and I had it on, then download eclipse, extract and run.
It was then I realised I had a fully functional computer and that I was still running on the liveCD. Nothing on my internal HDD was being used or touched. So I tested a few more things printer connectivity, fileserver network access and it was all good.
So do I take the plunge, yep why not.. I was rebuilding it anyway what would matter if I had to re-install XP in a couple more days.. Ok deep breath and go...
The next brilliant thing is the actuall installer, I expected to have to re-boot and select a boot menu option to actually install ubuntu. But no, on the desktop there is a funky little button called install. Double click that any you are away.
Now let me set the scene. Eclipse open reviewing some code changes, email open in evolution, firefox searching the web and xine playing mp3's in the background. And now another window in the foreground, the installer. It goes through all the normal steps, pick the timezone, keyboard format, disk partitions and usernames, then the please wait while we do all the voodo magic to install this operating system for you.
So it chuggs on for a while, I surf the web, checkout some code read email and listen to mp3's.. Then bing up pops a dialog box saying the ubuntu install is complete and it has to reboot.
A reboot and 40 seconds later and I have a login screen for ubuntu. It no longer has my mail configured, or the jdk/eclipse installed but 15mins later all thats installed again and its working like a Breeze (pun intented).
I've been with it for a few weeks now, and apart from a few apps that are missing its brilliant. See followup posts on my setup and how I still have XP apps running perfectly.
Ever wondered what made the developers of windows choose the icons for close, minimise and maximise?
It came to me the other day that the choice for the close button has more than one meaning. Yes the cross is standard for no, cancel, remove which is basically what you are doing when want to close the window, but another more accurate term came to me.
When you want to leave somewhere you “Exit” the building, so taking the visuals litterly when you click on the close icon, you are X-ing it, or X-it-ing.
So now when ever you click the little close button you can rememeber that not only are you closing the window, but X-it-ing it too.
Animation vs Animator
I’ve had issues with my blog posting application but thats all fixed and have heaps of news to catch up on. There are also intermittent issues with the site being publically accessible, but those issues are also being looked into.
I updated BlogJet last night and now I have problems with it, will have to reinstall I guess, but thought I'd try out ecto..
So this is my first post from the ecto 2.0 beta, had issues installing the .NET framework, but now its on and fine.
Will see....
Technorati Tags: Tag 4
Well actually Podcasts to my car stereo. Introducing the new toy, My Griffin iTrip for iPod nano
So my initial thoughts raise a couple of issues, the first and by far the biggest issue is the length of the headphone jack plug. It seems like its a few millimetres short, coz it only takes a small amount of movement for the iPod to come undocked from the jack thus stopping all sound. I’d have expected that you would be able to push the iPod right on, and it have some sort of lock (on the dock connector) like the standard nano cable does.
So if the iTrip/nano slide around when driving there is a good chance that the iPod will shift in the holdings and disconnect from the jack.
I did find that the stickie thing on the top helped a big (u can see from the images that I hadn’t removed the sticky cover yet) but it still only takes a mill or 2 movement to disconnect the sound.
The ability to configure the frequency on the screen rocks!! Simple jog type dial on the right of the unit access a menu on the iTrip that displays its info on the nano’s screen.. Nice.
My other small issue is in relation to power.. They state that you should only have the iPod at about 75% power so as to not distort the sound. If I do that I have to have the stereo turned up SOOOOO loud that if the iPod was to go off, I'd blow the speakers in the car with the static.
In all it works well, and I can’t expect to much power from a unit so small, otherwise i assume we’d get 5 mins of battery life.
Oh, actually there is another thing.. The iTrip is designed to become part of the nano, so I think a couple of changes to the design would work. Put back the nano connector on the bottom, so that syncing and powering can be done with the iTrip connected, and another minor addon would be to have a headphone jack in it so that you could keep it attached and still have headphone use.
Basically if a headphone was plugged in, the FM transmitter would shut down and act as a pass through for the audio.
Only had it a day or so, but so far so good.. If there are any changes to my thoughts I'll post an update.
All the work I’ve been doing for the last 13 months has finally come to completion and we have launched the new services on the Best Bets website.
I’ve been working with the guys here for the last 13 months on a project to rebuild the entire website and develop the world leading Comparator product. Best Bets is a magazine that gets published every week with all the information and data you need to punt on the races over the weekend.
The new website has extended this offering to allow punters to access up to the minute data on all race meetings held in Australia all days of the week. For the last month or so we have had the first half of the site live, showing the new UI, new live feeds, tote feeds and some of the additional member only functions. But on Wednesday we launched “Comparator”. Comparator is the name for our product that allows you to open accounts with Australian bookmakers and punt directly from the Best Bets interface. You can have one account with us, and we’ll automatically open others with the bookmakers you select and allow you to place bets with them.
We’re just seeing the start of the offerings from Best Bets, and I’m really excited about the possibilities that we have been discussing and the rate at which we are making these ideas become a reality.
So if ur up for a punt, or just want to get the lowdown on all that is horse racing, check out our new site bestbets.com.au, and feel free to send me feedback via the orange button at the top of the Best Bets site.
Happy Punting
Tags: BestBets Best Bets Punting Horse Racing
PodShow Receives $8.85M from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital and Sherpalo Ventures
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. August 16, 2005 – PodShow, Inc., today announced $8.85M in strategic investments from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital and Sherpalo Ventures. PodShow is the breakthrough business that is at the epicenter of the podcasting revolution, providing directories, community, technology and content programming that have helped to make podcasting the most explosive media innovation since the introduction of the web browser.
Wow, it seems that all of this podcasting became a little bit more real today with the announcement from podshow. It looks like Adam Curry really wants to be a power player in this industry and now has some financial backing to ensure that Apple doesn’t capture all of the cookies and keep them for itself.
I’ll be interested in seeing the develpoment of podcasting now. So it really must be time for me to get the first beta of FeedListener into the wide world.. Hmmmm just when to find the time.
This is the first post to my new server, its the same machine, just new Hard drives.. Upped the capacity to over 500Gb so heaps of room for all the stuff I need.
I recently stumbled upon a site called DIGG and have been playing with it. This is a quick review of my initial thoughts on the product.
So what is Digg? In short its a “social news site”. This site allows the anyone, yes you and me, to submit news items to the site. Others then come and browse these items with the ability to mark the items as popular and if they become popular enough the items will appear on the home page.
Digg state that you can: Digg stories that you think are cool. Once a story receives enough diggs from people like you it will be promoted to the front page.
It works by people adding articles to the site, then others browsing this set of articles for things that they “dig”. The user can then “dig” the article by clicking on a link incrementing its value by 1. Once enough people dig the article it gets added to the front page, and from there more people get alerted to it and dug some more. This social system works in much the same way that Slashdot does, but without the editors.
The other cool function is that each of the users have a page that shows what they dug. To see what I have recently dug checkout my digg page and even dig your own. You also have the ability to add friends and see what your friends have dug. All the cool things to come to expect from these new “social website's”.
On a technical note, it seems to use some nice javascript to increment the digg count, notice sometimes when you dig a story it increments by more than one. I assume it submits the dig to the server which returns the new dig amount, if others have dug the story in between viewing the page and clicking the link the value will be higher and so the new value shown.
Tags: digg social networking
How cool is this keyboard!!! Each of the keys is an individual OLED display that is configurable to show different images based on different configurations. Check out the site for more images.
http://artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/
Now playing: digg.com - Episode #003 Audio
The Konfabulator widgets are something that I’ve played with a while ago, and really looked at building a couple, but got caught with having to pay for the runtime to run them. Now Yahoo! is looking at releasing it for free, it may be a more attractive platform.
Macworld: News: Yahoo! acquires Konfabulator
Yahoo! Inc. on Monday will announce the acquisition of Konfabulator, a Macintosh and Windows application that allows users to run mini files known as Widgets on their desktop -- the same model used by Apple for its Dashboard application. Yahoo! company executives said they would also be giving Konfabulator away for free, completely doing away with the US$19.95 currently charged for the product.
Tags: Yahoo Javascript
I’ve just got a new set of HDD for the server at home, so I'm going to rebuild it using these drives. There's heaps of crap on the old one, so I'm going to re-install each thing needed leaving out the ones that arnt.
Now its time to hunt how to migrate some of the apps, the first on is this blog. It seems the following is helpful.
http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000587backing_up_your_blog.php
While browsing around at freshmeat I noticed that the latest Linux Kernel was updated yesterday.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/linux/?branch_id=46339&release_id=199319
Why do I care about this release you ask? Well Sharkey and I have been playing with getting a 6.12 kernel compiled to get DVB support for his MythTV box, and as you can see from the freshmeat release there is a mention of DVB drivers.
Changes:
This release features a newly added TPM driver required for certain IBM Thinkpad models. Various driver updates were made for DVB, USB, networking, sound, and SATA. The CIFS, JFS, and XFS filesystems have been incorporated. Extended support for AMD/Intel dual core CPUs and SuperHyway Bus has been added. IPv6 support has been declared stable. SELinux and software suspend have both been improved. The device mapper now supports multipathing. Address space randomization has been implemented.
Been a while since the last post, things are hectic at work as we are pushing towards getting the new stuff out the door so this post aims at recapping all the stuff thats been happening.
Went for a ride with Sharkey yesterday, did our big eltham circut, which head from my place up to the eastern freeway, along that east till we get to springvale rd then up along springvale rd till it ends. There is then a trail (the yarra creek trail I think) that winds its way west underneath eltham and all the way up to burke rd. The trail then turns south and links back up with our normal trail along the eastern which we then take back east to my place. Its about a 45km trip, which we did in just under 3 hours. We did stop a couple of times to watch some local footy and hockey so would probably be 2.5 hrs if we hadn’t stopped.
It was a much more serious ride than we have been doing recently, but the type of thing that we should be doing all the time. Once we got over the initial 10k mark the body had warmed up and it got easier from there. Only the last 5k which is up and down was a bit hard, but I'd hope that it was after 40k or we should be riding further.
So what else is going on.. Crickscore is back. I had an issue with the database corrupting and had to get help from the guy that built the database software to fix the errors. So a big thanks to Toby and his Mckoi database.
Given that Cooltools is on a break this season it wasn’t super important to get Crickscore back, but now it is it must be time to do some serious interface work. We’ll see how time goes over the next few weeks.
Downloaded KnoppMyth to try it out. Was ok, couldn’t get the Australian channels to load but the install was pretty painless.. Good to see development making this sort of technology more like an appliance. Now all I need is a machine capable of running MythTV happily and I'll be happy.
After playing with KnoppMyth, by torrent download of Fedora Core 4 (FC4) was complete, so decided to install that on my test machine. Yeah its nice. Got the latest firefox pre-installed and Gnome looks really cool.. I’ve been a kde guy for a long time, but on this install left Gnome as the default. I really like the menu bar and task bar separation. And the UI-themeing looks really clean.
The only problem with FC4 is that is so new that the apt-get repository's haven't been updated yet, to even a point that the apt-get rpm from freshrpms.net hasn’t even been build. But I can wait.
I’m planning on updating my main server, the one u got this from, from an older Redhat 9 release to the latest FC4. Just need to plan a backup first, just in case.
So what else has been going on??? Went and saw the Bahrs last night. Good to catch up with them again, its been a while since we have. Jessica (the latest to the clan) is so small and cute and Rach looked right at home with a new baby in her arms…
Not much else, and I think thats probably enough for now. I’ll try and get back soon with more details.
Oh, one last thing is that I'm working on a new whitesquare software development site. Thinking of using a blog engine to distribute news about all of the whitesquare products.. The current trial is over at dev.whitesquaresoft.com and I hope to get some content and the current beta downloads up in the next few days.
C ya!
I’ve just got the latest BlogJet beta. I logged an issue that images were missing a slash (/) when posting embedded images. This meant that I had to re-download the post and manually edit the html to add the slashed back in.
But hopefully this has been fixed in the new release of BlogJet, so now I'm testing to see if the fix has worked..
I had to find an image to post, and this was something I had lying around… so lets see…
1…. 2….. 3…. publish.
Update: As you can see the image is still broken.. I’ll leave it broken incase the BlogJet developers want to see a live posting with the image broken.. It’s pretty easy to explain, but at least here is an example.
Today we move one step closer to finishing off our A/V system with the purchase of a new entertainment unit. Its a low line unit with enough space to fit in the center speaker, dvd player, HD set top box and A/V receiver.
There are 4 speakers still missing from the final solution, but this was one of the hardest pieces to find. I wanted somthing low and flat to highlight the widescreen tv while still having enough storage space for all the equipment. I’m looking at getting free standing floor speaker boxes for the fronts leaving all of the units space open for other stuff. Then run some cables around the other end of the room to some wall mounted rear speakers.
With the new speakers in place the entire system will be complete, but it’s still a few weeks away until we have the spare cash to afford to grab them. I was going to head to JB today to price the 4 speakers, cables and mounts but ran out of time waiting for this to get delivered then getting all the stuff in it.
We’re very happy with it, and also the fact that the colour matches nearly exactly the other box type thing that was already in the loungroom.
Thanks to Sharkey for the help cutting out the extra holes needed to run all the cabling. If I get a chance I’ll pull the unit out and show off all the cabling and such thats hanging around behind it.
Albert has been playing up a fair bit, so much so that he keeps freezing for no reason and he forced me to move all the important information off him over the last week or so.
Sometimes while booting the primary HDD would not detect, or it would then make clunking noises and freeze during the first 10 minuites of use.
So the plan was to boot up, copy some stuff let it freeze then repeat the process the next day. The HDD was so temperamental that it seemed to only successully boot up once a day… go figure?
So eventually had most of what I considered the important stuff off and decided to check out the HDD and see if there was any visible issues. But when I took it out you could hear the platters squeeking, and so I shook the drive and the squeeking got worse.. Dead drive…
Or so I thought……
Being interested in seeing if the disk would still work after that squeeky noise, I returned the HDD to Albert and booted it up.. And you’ll never guess what, no clicking, detected straight up and booted.. So I waited for it to freeze, 5 mins… 10 mins… 15 mins.. still good…
So to test the drive I decided to copy off all of the other semi-important data, 1 hr later it was all off and Albert was still running fine.. Return of the Harddrive.
At this point I have a now fully functional computer, but with no real purpose or content.. So whats a guy to do with a spare machine but to build a new Linux Box and configure it as a MythTV box.. And so the hunt for my TV Tuner card began.. and is still continuing as I still havn’t found it.
But back to Myth… decided to install it even tho I don’t have my card, just wanted to see the process and configuration. Installing was a breeze, followed the instructions on the MythTV site and its all running fine.
I now have a rebuilt machine with HDD that has been playing at being dead for the last few weeks, which is now a MythTV computer without a Tuner card.. Somehow that all makes sense.
Garth has just finished building a MythTV box for a pilot program at work, and I have gotta say that I want one…
Given that we are in Australia, and things like TIVO are not available here we need to find our own alternatives.. I’ve been toying with the idea of making my own DVR for a while now, but hardware costs were high and finding good software was hard.
Insert MythTV.
Not only is it a pretty funky application to use as a tuner for your tv, but it has all the cool features that you want from a DVR. Plus all the things you want from a computer. The number of Myth plugins seems never ending, music library, RSS reader, weather, tv guide, email client, movie manager, and the list goes on.
If I do go ahead with this, I think i’ll be looking at 2 digital TV tuners along with 2–3 200Gb disks so that I can watch and record all the shows that I currently miss.
Any suggestions on hardware?
Joel has updated his site with a post about Hungarian Notation, not only is it an interesting read as usual, but his example talks about Cross Site Scripting.
Being a webdeveloper for a few years now, its interesting to see XSS mentioned in such a simple fashion. We have had solutions for this since day one, but I don’t think that I have ever actually know the true definition of Cross Site Scripting.
On the Hungarian Notation side of the article, I can see what he means to use prefixing to highlight subtypes of data, but i’m sure that that sort of notation needs to be controlled so as to not fly way off into complex land.
As usual the article is a great read, well written and puts forward smart and sensible points. Thanks Joel.
I’m about to release a new beta version of my DCAF and WAF java librarys, but in doing so I want to have a system on my website that allows me to create a release, add notes and a series of files to download.
I’ve been hunting around, but its hard to find a term to google for this type of product. Words like release, software, version are all very popular terms on the internet and so how to find the actual product amongst all of the other pages.
So any suggestions as to a software package that can do this?
I’d love this product to have the following features:
I think thats about it… I’ll keep hunting for a while and see what I can find, it probably doesn’t matter what technology the application is developed in, just that it works.
An onward moves the Googlebot… Now they are using the power of Google to speed up internet access. If you do plan to instal the Accelerator, then make sure to check out the FAQ for more details of how it runs.
From the FAQ Google states:
How does using Google Web Accelerator affect my privacy?
Google Web Accelerator receives much of the same kind of information you currently send to your ISP when you surf the Web:
- Google will receive your requests for unencrypted pages (those with "HTTP:", not "HTTPS:", at the beginning of the URL), along with information such as the date and time of the request, your IP address, and computer and connection information
- If you enter personally identifiable information (such as an email address) onto a form on an unencrypted web page, some sites may send this information through Google. Whenever your computer sends cookies with browsing or prefetching page requests for unencrypted sites, we temporarily cache these cookies in order to improve performance
- In order to speed up the display of pages generally, Google Web Accelerator may store copies of web pages, including prefetched pages that you did not visit, in the Google Web Accelerator cache on your machine. This is separate from your browser's cache, which only identifies pages that you actually visited. You can empty your Google Web Accelerator cache at any time by following these instructions.
Its interesting in that it seesm that google is offering to be a really large proxy server.. Does the future hold that Google will be the central point for all information?? Imagine if Microsoft said they would offer this, we’d all be asking How they are modifying the pages I request? and What are they doing with the parameters I use to request specific sites?
I think that my link is fast enough as it is, and I don’t really feel safe/secure/happy with the thought that all my communication that used to be point-to-point would now be stopping off on the Google servers for a tuneup.
This is one of the Google items that I won’t be installing in the near future..
Google Web Accelerator Download
Google Web Accelerator works with your browser to help web pages show up in a snap.
Sharkey has pulled his finger out and actually posted somthing to dead circus, not sure if we’ll c much from him.. but you never know.. I just might be amazed 
Ever since Matty got his new D70 camera I’ve been green with envy.. We were going to get one, but decided to spend the money on the wedding/honeymoon instead.
And now I hear that Nikon have released an upgraded and downgraded version of them. Below are a few links to so reviews and previews of the new cameras…
The new Nikon D50
Nikon D50 DSLRLets Go Digital has a preview of the Nikon D50 |
The new Nikon D70s
Nikon D70sLets Go Digital previews the Nikon D70s |
An interesting post on bute force cracking MD5 hashed passwords, not how it was done, but in the comments a discussion of salting and identifying the complexity of passwords to be hashed.
Cracking MySQL's MD5() function ... within seconds (alan.blog-city.com)
A cool idea of wearing a cell phone flasher that notifies you of your phone ringing.
How cool is this, a bike with a split rear wheel that comes together when moving then splits apart at rest… Makes learning to ride a whole new fun process.
Found this interesting article PHP on Tomcat that talks about configuring tomcat to serve PHP files, which got me thinking, I guess someone has written a servlet or a wrapper for most technologies.
I wonder if this approach makes PHP more or less secure? I havn’t tried this myself or read much of the PHP background to how this works, but it looks like it delegates to the local machines dll, which I guess bypasses all the JVM’s security manager.
Got passed this link from Matt Collins, how cool would one of these be?
Tech Watch: Cruise Around…Jetson’s Style!
Just a quick note to say that my indoor cricket system is now open to the public, if there are any Indoor Cricket teams out there that would like to use crickscore, then email me, or leave a comment and I can arrange to create access for your team.
My indoor cricket team uses crickscore to manage its fixtures, team status, results and statistics. Check out our site at Cooltools Indoor Cricket.
Update 19/4: Got a query as to why this is included in my Java category. The reason is that the technology behind the development of Crickscore is entirly java.. I posted it to this category to show what can be done with Java technology.
Now that i’m home, I have taken some photos of the new toy.. The cool thing that I have found is that it also has an SD card reader built into it, so no more having to plug in the USB card reader to copy the image from the camera…
After taking 3 weeks off to get married and have a honeymoon, it was back to work. Not too bad seeing as I returned to a brand new laptop..
Been waiting for this for months now, and its finally here. When I get home I’ll take some photos and post them up here, but in the meantime just be happy knowing that its a Dell Inspiron 6000, P4M 1.86Ghz, 15.4” (1680x1050) screen, 100Gb disk, 1024Mb Ram 802.11g and Bluetooth enabled with all the trimmings.
Yay..
And the best part, is that so far it’s heaps faster.. Will test it out over the next few days and report back on how it goes.
A couple of weeks ago we launched a new JSP/Servlet based application for Best Bets. This new site uses all of the Whitesquare technologies, (DCAF WAF)
Check out the new site Best Bets Sporting Guide.
As you can guess from this posting, I am playing around with the MovableType Blogging platform.. SnipSnap has started to become a bit annoying and with the introduction of me actually putting some content into this site, i'm not sure if it can handle the load.
So this is my test bed, until I see how it works, i'll stick with SnipSnap.
