Remembering, how to redirect output and stderr to null

info found here

./example.pl > /dev/null 2>&1

Sapiens application launcher for OSX

Looks neat. A way to easily reach for the app you want through mouse gestures. Supposedly it becomes better at it the more you use it.

Sapiens

My 30GB iPod 3G is dead, sadness

My 30GB Ipod, third generation with the buttons on top finally bit the dust. Getting the folder with exclamation sign warning, after listening to the hard drive spool up for a while.

Still divided on whether or not to buy a new ipod classic 80GB for $250 or just replace the hard drive with a used one for approx $75 off of ebay. I figure even if the first drive I get off of e-bay is bad, i'm still ahead of the game if I have to buy a second one.

Shrug, but if I get the new $250 ipod classic, I get a warranty and double the original capacity of my 3G.

We'll see how I feel after this weekend, when I go on a flight without an ipod. Oh the suffering! This is the one piece of electronics it always feels like I "cant live without!"

Update: it may have just been the connector coming lose where the hard drive attaches to the motherboard. The oversized battery i'm using may have caused the hard drive to sit unevenly in the ipod, and caused it to rock the connector slowly loose. I used a paper shim (a cut up portion of a Kubuntu Linux CD sleeve to balance out the hard drive's placement with the upgraded battery. I placed it between the hard drive connector extension and the hard drive itself.

The hard drive immediately became easier to seat with respect to the motherboard and the connector snapped right in. The ipod powered right up without errors following.

Twitter - being connected, all the freaking time

Check out Twitter if regular blogging does not provide you with the sense of immediacy you crave.

Maybe we're all at the point where we cannot form coherant thoughts that span the length of a proper blog post, but still, I enjoy the hell out of it.

Verizon BroadbandAccess Rev-A Card

This Verizon BroadbandAccess (Rev-A) card is amazing. It's plenty fast for the rapid web browsing that I do. It detects the wireless network easily, and with a reasonable price for an unlimited data plan, it does everything I want.

I had previously used PdaNet from June Fabrics Software to get online using my Treo 700p smartphone. But over time the usb cable and terminals on the bottom of my 700p became unreliable. I think they corroded a bit easier than they should. Even on the best of days, it was generally a crapshoot as to whether it would connect to the internet through the phone without problems.

This new broadbandaccess card is incredibly reliable. I could not be happier.

Had the strangest dream. Was rollerblading with hot french dancer chick, then went to a party where I met everyone I had ever known, in high school.


Perhaps the dream was triggered by a running copy of beagle on my new ubuntu system, which was steadily cataloging all my digital memories.

I distinctly remember waking up, and thinking it odd that my hard drive on the PC was clicking steadily. I thought I might have been hacked and someone was slowly copying off all my data. But turns out that beagled was running on my new Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon system. Glad to hear i'm listening to the hum of my computer in my sleep.

ubuntu and the gutsy gibbon

I decided to try out the new pre-release version of Ubuntu, titled Gutsy Gibbon. Overall I found the installer to be very polished and easy to use. Make sure that you have at least 512MB of ram or you will have to use their alternate installer CD.

User Interface
They've added a lot of really neat user control panels, including an "Appearance" panel and a very useful "restricted drivers" panel. the latter is used to enable binary drivers from manufacturers like Nvidia and ATI, something that most users of high end 3d cards will want to do.

Printer Detection
I unlike most folks, have an HP 4600 at my house. The detection and driver installation of HP printers using jetdirect is so fast and easy, i'd venture to call it seamless. Amazing work by the Ubuntu team on supporting business class printers.

It automatically sought out and correctly detected the printer model of my HP 4600 Color Laser.

Eye Candy
In the Appearance control panel there is an option for tweaking the desktop effects. If you choose the "Extra" radio box, you will be enabling Compiz Fusion. I was able to enable Compiz, but unfortunately all my window titles disappeared after doing this. Something wrong with the window decorator I guess. They are releasing tons of updates each day as this is a pre-release, and other users who have had the window titles working before have mentioned that some of these updates have broken, then later fixed this problem. They should have it worked out by the final release.

For the testers
I recommend that if you are testing gutsy, set up your home directory in it's own partition. That way when the final release comes out you can do a complete reinstall. Some of the problems experienced during testing might linger unexpectedly when you install the final release, which I believe is set to be out at the end of October.

Crash Reporting
The crash reporting tool is pretty badass. it's very easy to submit crash reports, a lot less intrusive in fact than the Mozilla project's crash report tool. This app comes up every time an application crashes unexpectedly, but it does go one up on the Microsoft crash reporting tool in that it will give you the option to ignore future crashes of the same application. This is sometimes useful for apps like firefox that take a dive when they are told to terminate with more than one tab open.

Firefox Extension Manager
Not only can you grab generic firefox add-ins, the Ubuntu team has their own firefox add-in manager that can be reached from within firefox. This extension manager will load Ubuntu approved extensions through the system package manager. Word of warning though, when you use this panel you are not told to restart to activate the plugin, as you are with the standard add-in manager panel. This may confuse some users down the road.


Conclusion
If you'd like to try out Gutsy, and are looking strictly for the eye candy, hold off until the release, or use a test machine. Also, dont go manually mucking about with the /etc/apt/sources.list file until you have applied ALL the current updates and still are experiencing problems. I'm somewhat suspicious that my messing with this file may have broken the window titles when compiz was enabled, since there were two batches of distribution upgrades following my tweaking.

Why Programmers Suck at Picking Colors

Found this via doggdot.us this morning:

Why Programmers Suck at Picking Colors

I generally am not the best at picking colors myself, so any tips are useful. The article goes on to link to a Nasa page entitled USING COLOR IN INFORMATION DISPLAY GRAPHICS which provides some web based tools for color selection.

Another book suggestion: Blaze

Check out Blaze by Richard Bachman when you get a chance. Dont read too much of the wikipedia article before your read the book. In fact, if you are daring, just go check it out from the library without reading any introduction. It's pretty damn good.

This is one of the books Steven King wrote under his "other name," And I think it is one of the best of those books. The character is deeply flawed, but as you learn more about him, you want him to succeed despite his horrible crime.

Get past the first 80 pages, and you will be unable to stop reading it. He wrote in the forward that he edited most of the sentimental stuff out before reviving the shelved manuscript after so many years. I think he did an excellent job. It's dark, and it's entertaining.

Yeti off to Universal Studios

This crazy Blog post by the Yeti is well worth a read, and has plenty of awesome pictures of him terrorizing Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure.



The yeti freaking rules. Add him to your myspace, he is indeed the greater Sasquatch.

Single keypress dropdown kde terminal

I have wanted something like this for ages in KDE:


YaKuwake - a simple dropdown terminal screen that comes with one hotkey press from the top of the screen. Like the old quake dropdown terminal.

Cant wait to try it out.