Archive for December, 2006
links for 2006-12-31
Posted by delicious in Miscellany on December 30th, 2006
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Totally RIAA-free music. You betcha!
links for 2006-12-28
Posted by delicious in Miscellany on December 27th, 2006
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Another really good resource for using folds in VIM. This is something one really needs to get the hang of.
Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux on December 20th, 2006
In case you didn’t already know, IBM’s Developer Works website is a treasure trove of UNIX knowledge. As expected, it leans heavily towards AIX, but there are hidden gems in there about other flavors of UNIX, Linux, and tips and hints that apply to all forms of *NIX. Case in point: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits
Adopt 10 good habits that improve your UNIX® command line efficiency — and break away from bad usage patterns in the process. This article takes you step-by-step through several good, but too often neglected, techniques for command-line operations. Learn about common errors and how to overcome them, so you can learn exactly why these UNIX habits are worth picking up.
This article is a goldmine of tips. Some of the tips I already knew (don’t pipe cat, quote variables), but most of the 10 tips are things that I either did not know or never occurred to me. This article is a must-read for anyone using a *NIX-based OS, including Linux, BSD, OS X, etc.
Photo manager shootout
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Install on December 20th, 2006
Linux.com continues their fun series of application comparison. This time up: Top Linux photo managers side-by-side:
Of the photo-management landscape looks bleak so far, don’t give up yet — there are alternatives. I am a big fan of GQview, a GTK-based image viewer that offers fewer features than either DigiKam or F-Spot, but in practice works better. It supports keyword tagging, collection management, Exif metadata, and sophisticated searches, and does not force you into its own way of organizing your image library. And it is incredibly fast — by far the fastest of the applications mentioned in this article.
Interestingly enough, Linux.com quickly rules out the top two (digiKam and F-Spot) as incomplete and inconsistent (or, in other words, buggy). Which might be a little unfair. digiKam is a pretty damned fine piece of software. Yes, it does have some rigid design philosophies (for example, organization is done via Albums/Folders, not individual pics). But once you get the hang of it, it’s relatively easy to use. And thanks to its use of the KIPI plugin interface, it’s pretty powerful, too.
I tend to keep flirting with Picasa for Linux. I’ve brought it home a few times, but continue to have problems with it. Part of the problem might be the size of our digital photo collection. But that can’t be all of it. I dunno… I’m tending to think that I’ll never use it. At least, not until Google comes out with a Linux-native version.
Most dangerous toys EVER!
Posted by Biffster in Miscellany on December 20th, 2006
Radar Online has an article featuring the most dangerous toys ever created. And it is quite amusing, and a little scary! If you thought toys with sharp edges were dangerous, that’s nothing. Most of these toys actually killed people! There were lawn darts that could stab someone in the head. There were toys which started on fire. And there’s even an actual radioactive playset! ‘cuz nothing is better than playing with actual Uranium!
Regular Expression Tester
Posted by Biffster in Miscellany on December 8th, 2006
Regular expressions are super-powerful, and can be friggin’ awesome. But for some reason, I just cannot bend my mind around them. I get lost right around the time that a regex gets to this point: /^[/. My mind immediately says, different language being spoken here, stop reading right now. I dunno why I have such a mental block about regexes, but at least I am not alone!
I’ve been looking at howtos and tutorials and primers to help me get over my problems with regular expressions. Some have helped, most have not. I learn by doing, not by reading, so there wasn’t much chance of that working, anyway.
But I just came across this awesome Regular Expression Tester. While teaching people how to create regexes isn’t really the goal of this tool, it definitely helped me to do that. Being able to see the structure of a regex and to play with the various sections helped things click for me. I’m still a regex beginner, but at least I’ve finally passed outside of n00b-ness.
From XMMS to Audacious: the history of a Winamp clone
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Digital music on December 7th, 2006
Putting aisde (for now) the interesting history of the X11Amp series of media players, and ignoring the multiple typos in the article, I stumbled upon a rather startling revelation:
Leaving off where the BMP development team stopped, William “nenolod� Pitcock decided to fork BMP a few days after Milosz started BMPx, and called it Audacious. Starting as just a large bug hunt, Audacious seems to have inherited XMMS’s title as de facto music player for GNU/Linux.
So apparently there is a new, de facto music player for Linux. And, well, I’ve never heard of it. Audacious? I think that this article might be jumping the gun just a bit here. From what I can tell, either Gnome’s default music player or amaroK would probably be at the top of the list right now. Audacious might not have eclipsed it’s progenitor, BMPx, actually.
