Snow Blind

A few friends have been talking about moving to the google chrome web browser. For a long time, I’ve been a big proponent of Firefox. And truth be told, haven’t had much of a reason to even look for an alternative. The game changed with Firefox 3. While Firefox still remains the browser of choice for many in the tech savy community, I know others as well as I have suffered through increasing instability and what feels like a bloated application. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an awesome browser and I still whole heartedly recommend it to any poor user I come across still using IE without knowing that there are better alternatives out there.

Good thing technology is always sprouting new seeds, though. I decided to try and feed my new gadget need and trying out a some of the alternatives. I’ll give Google credit. It definitely is a nice browser and I ,surprisingly, haven’t come across many gotchas while perusing the interwebs in my new chromed out set of wheels (pun intended). But it is not without flaws.

2 jump out to me right away. First is it’s handling of xml formed documents is terrible. It seems to try and view them as if they were html documents. Also it needs to have some way to handle rss files as live bookmarks. I personally find live bookmarks as more of an annoyance, but it’s still a standard feature in todays browser and I see no reason effort shouldn’t be made to make it contain the features that have become standards. All in all, this is a pretty trivial feature missing. After all, a browser is for, well, browsing html pages. Can I seriously knock it for having non essential features? Of course I can! But it’s still not going to keep me from using a good product.

The second missing feature isn’t really something that is standard, but it is something that has become so ingrained in my web browsing usage, that I dare say I couldn’t be without it. Yes, it’s my delicious bookmarks. I’ve tried various solutions that have failed for one way or another. I have recently read that the ability to incorporate plugins is on the horizon, so I have faith that a solution will be in the works form some one, but if I’m going to use it now, I will need a solution now.

Ok, so </rant>.

Start howto:

I did, however, come up with a quasi-solution. This makes it serviceable until a more elegant solution comes along. There are tons of posts out there talking about how to get a bookmarklet to tag sites to delicious. That wasn’t really my dilemma. What I wanted was to be able to easily find any of my 1000 or so bookmarks that I have already tagged. Isn’t that the point of bookmarks? To be able to easily retrieve what you have already found?

Well, since I normally end up searching through them any ways, I figured perhaps I could harness the keyword search capability of chrome. To create a new one, follow the instructions:

1. Right click the address bar and choose “Edit search engines”
2. Click “add”
3. Give it a name, something like… oh, I don’t know… “Delicious.com”
4. Then give it a keyword like say “delicious.com”. I tried to create one without the .com, but it didn’t seem to like that.
5. Enter the search URL. If you want to search just your own bookmarks (what I was looking for) enter this in: http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts&p=%s&lc=1&u=<your_delicious_username>

Now, when you type delicious.com <some search term> it will search through your bookmarks. Again, not nearly as elegant as the delicious plugin for firefox, but as I said, hopefully some gracious member of the community is feverishly working to right this injustice in the chrome world, but until then, I think this will get me by. Hopefully you too.

As a standing member of my local LUG group, I’m almost ashamed to say I haven’t spent much time on my linux boot partition since I got my new computer. In my defense, online poker is just a pain in the ass if you have windows at your disposal.

But I had a presentation to get ready for tonight’s meeting. It’s setting up xdebug in apache to do php debugging in netbeans. Awesome sounding I know, right? Don’t worry, some one is supposed to be recording it and I’ll link it up once I get a url.

Anyway, I have had the new computer for just over 3 months now and had linux installed shortly after I got it. Last night I was chugging away at it and I can’t live without my email (even though I don’t get that much of it, I still like to respond quickly when I get one) so I strike up thunderbird only to be prompted with the new account wizard. Hmm. Did I really just install it and not set it up?

If I was gonna have to set one up anyway, I decided instead of setting up thunderbird, I was gonna go install and setup mutt. What is mutt? It’s a lightweight, text based email client. Here’s a screen shot.

Pretty sweet, huh? I had tried it out looking for a lightweight and faster way to check my email on my old computer and spent some time getting used to the interface. Since I invested that time, I figured I might as well use it. I literally spent the weekend setting up a config file for it before. Not exactly the time saving technique I was hoping for, but I do think I will make up some of it in usage. I do find that it’s quicker for me to navigate through it now. Not to mention all the geek cred bonus points that I bank for using a text based email client. Yeah, that’s right. Geek cred is what gets you the chicks.

Enter: Can of Worms

So I had already set this up so it should be a snap right? Just get my old config file and boom, I’m off and running. So I run sudo apt-get install mutt, and go to my old home directory tar file to extract the probably like 11kb .muttrc config file and…. wait…. Did I mention my old home dir tar file was in the range of 25GB? Apparently I had some iso’s I forgot to delete before I made the tar file along with my Music directory. It took like 15 minutes to get my 1 file out of that archive. Sigh. At least it gave me some time to finish up my presentation notes.

Alright, got it set up and run mutt. No problems. Until I test out sending an email. Error. Ugh. I was missing ssmtp to send email. Download and install that (like 30 seconds) and try it again. Error again. Crap. Must not be setup. A quick google and running sudo vim /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf, and we are back to the races. Mail got sent.

But WTF is it? WTF was that command to refresh the mailbox? Quick search through help and figure out it’s G. Bah, an error. Some crap about pop not being setup. Well no shit. The command doesn’t have a key bound to it for the imap-fetch-mail command. Ugh. Quick google again and I’m back editing the .muttrc file and overriding the G key binding to map to the imap command. All’s good there. I even ran across the colors config file for it and turned on some of the helpful coloring mappings for links and email addresses in the messages.

Hmm, url’s. Do they work? I go back into mutt and pipe the message to urlview. Ugh, crap. That’s not installed either. So again, sudo apt-get install urlview. Ok, done and it even opens in a new tab of FF (I had to change the script last time I set this up). Bonus points there.

Even though mutt has a memory footprint that isn’t even worth mentioning, I still probably don’t want to run it constantly. So I spend the next 45 minutes modifying my panels in xfce so I only had 1 panel, I added the email notification widget and tried to configure that. Hmm, now how do I get that to open mutt in a terminal window? It’s a text based app, after all. I figured out that the command xfterm4 mutt will open a terminal window and run mutt in it. Awesome. All set.

So there you go. 3 hours of configuration and googling and I’m all set to be much more productive with my email. I’m sure it will only take me 4+ years to recoup that time back. Well, at least I got all that geek cred. Sigh.

Despite Zooks’ relentless efforts to find me a new laptop, nothing has caught my fancy and I still haven’t gotten a replacement for my broken laptop. I don’t have a lot of spare change laying around to throw at something that will just be used for email, internet, some poker, porn, and some light development work. Really, the 4 year old laptop I had was able to keep up with my needs very aptly.

Despite my modest requirements, I still couldn’t bear breaking down and snatching up one of the many “good deals” that I have come across or been shown. What keeps coming up on the radar is some inexpensive Acer laptops from newegg.

But really??? Acer? Are you serious?

Why do I not like Acer? I’m not absolutely sure. It’s just been the poor image I have of it. Back in the day, the other clan of geeks I hung around and I associated Acer with the bargain basement products that they seemed to be. Queue up Mr. Green.

So I don’t really have any reason other than my own personal image of them, but I still find myself struggling with thought of actually owning one. Are my issues unfounded delusions of inferiority? It would seem that might be the case. These things seem to be getting reasonable reviews from both users and critics. Especially considering the price.

So here I sit, in a quandary trying to get over a 10 year old image of a product solely based on some, what was most likely, elitist view. Fair? Probably not. But it does go to show how valuable image is and how hard it is to overcome.

Back to my issue at hand, though. Any one have any first hand experience to prove I’m being unreasonable with me valuation of Acer products so that I can just get over this petty issue and get back to getting a new computer back in my hands? I’ve got tons of porn development projects to catch up on.

Being a Linux user (and also a Mac user, BTW), I have a few likeminded people that read my blog. Hopefully they will find this interesting or maybe I’m just increasing my post count cheaply.

Either way, I think a free version of codeweavers is significant and postworthy. And it’s my blog so

I posted once before about social bookmarking and now is just as good a time as any to revisit it. The site I use, del.icio.us, has recently just jumped their user interface ahead about a dozen years with a new design. Along with that, they implemented a bunch of other updates that aren’t as obvious as their visual updates which they outline in their blog post.

Seriously, if you don’t use social bookmarking, you should really consider it and no better time than now. I like a lot of the changes they have made and other than the easier to navigate interface, the overall speed of the site is really noticeable. You used to really be able to tell when the servers were being taxed before, but it feels quick and smooth now. It’s good that they finally fixed the site to be up to par with their functionality. Kudos to yahoo for fixing an already great service.

If you want to know what I’m tagging, you can find me here.

I talked before about looking for an mp3/media player that fit my needs. Well, after a great deal of waffling over solutions since I couldn’t find thee perfect solution, it broke down like this. The only device that met my wants (play mp3, aac, ogg and have support for linux) was a cowon video player that happened to support a great deal of file formats. But, as it was intended as more of a video solution, it was larger than I need both in terms of memory (like 30 GB) and physically to support it’s ginormous (for a portable media player, anyway) screen. Along with that was attached a price tag that was a bit more than what I wanted too at around $300 for the smallest of the models.

So I kept looking hoping some perfect solution would pop up. But as life and technology isn’t perfect, nothing did. If I was gonna have to make a file format concession, I figured I might as well make 2, right? I mean, how much more difficult is it to mass convert 400 songs than it is 200 songs? In the end, I decided that bang for the buck right now and still had reasonable user reviews was the Sansa View player. It’s pretty cheap (you can find it for around $120 pretty easily) and had reasonable reviews from users for devices in that price range. Plus it had linux support right?

Ok, so I was a bit off on that point. The previous model SanDisk had out, the Sansa E200 series had well documented good support of linux. For a company with a history of that, I figured it carried through. Well, I was wrong. At least not out of the box. The 2 days of shipping from Amazon gave me time to scurry and find a solution.

The solution didn’t actually turn out to be that bad. As I found out on this blog, the solution wasn’t that bad at all under ubuntu. All it really took was… well nothing. The one package (libmtp) I needed to allow amarok to sync to my newly acquired toy was already installed by default and was the latest stable version too (a problem I’ve had with certain less than typical packages with ubuntu).

Ok, so I got it hooked up, the remaining portion was user issues. First issue I had was an issue where I thought it wasn’t connecting. The connected wheel view popped up on the View spinning around which seemed a good sign to me, and then went to the normal menu view of the device. Was this normal? I didn’t know since I had only had it in my possession a mere hour. Well, it didn’t connect, I couldn’t get amarok to recognize it and worse, I couldn’t get the mpt-detect command to find it either. After many minutes of googling, trying futile tasks and building frustration to something that should be easy, I clicked a few buttons and once again got the spinning connection wheel on the View. Happy, happy, joy, joy – yes, it was finally working. So had I actually been familiar with the device, I anticipate my period of getting it to work would have been close to nil.

Now it seems to just be matter of getting used to using the connection and disconnection options in the device tab in amarok, and I should have little issues from here on out. With it being about 2 years since I’ve been listening to podcasts, I was eager to get to striking up a few of the ones I had enjoyed in the past. In fact, it had been so long, I struggled to even remember a fraction of the shows I used to listen too. It’s almost like starting fresh. Finding new stuff to listen to all over again.

I still haven’t converted my music yet and may do that over the weekend as I’m stuck at the inlaws over the holiday weekend, but for now, I’m just happy to have something I’ve missed back again. It should make the hours at work pass a bit quicker as well.

Rake race update: Apparently due to some confusion, I’m not on the first update for the rake race as I thought the hands I put in on late June 30th were counting to my July totals. But a good change is that it seems they are paying the top 50 players and not 30, so I have an all but certain chance of at least getting something extra.