Edward Andrew Robinson

Hot off the press, get yours now at the Ubuntu store. Congratulations to everyone on the release of the Karmic Koala (late I know but I wanted to wait till I got my shirt)! And here is a picture of me modeling my Ubuntu shirts (and I know I look grumpy I was focusing on my new camera and tripod to keep the backgrounds aligned)

Left (Jaunty Jackalope) Middle (Karmic Koala) Right (Hardy Heron)

Looking forward to the Lucid Lynx. You can also check out all the Ubuntu code names here!

Well yet another meem on planet ubuntu, and so without further ado:

earobinson@MinusOne:/media/data/personal/hackergotchi$ vrms
Non-free packages installed on MinusOne

fglrx-modaliases          Identifiers supported by the ATI graphics driver
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.28 modules helper script
linux-restricted-modules- Restricted Linux modules for generic kernels
nvidia-173-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-180-kernel-source  NVIDIA binary kernel module source
nvidia-180-libvdpau       Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix
nvidia-180-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-71-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-96-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-glx-180            NVIDIA binary Xorg driver
opera                     The Opera Web Browser
picasa                    Image management application from Google
sun-java6-bin             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-jre             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
tangerine-icon-theme      Tangerine Icon theme
unrar                     Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
Reason: Modifications problematic

Contrib packages installed on MinusOne

flashplugin-installer     Adobe Flash Player plugin installer
flashplugin-nonfree       Adobe Flash Player plugin installer (transitional pack
nvidia-common             Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
nvidia-settings           Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
ttf-mscorefonts-installer Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts

16 non-free packages, 0.9% of 1712 installed packages.
5 contrib packages, 0.3% of 1712 installed packages.

Post yours!

I love lists, and I love open source software. Whats more I find that I am using more and more open source websites in my daily life. Without further ado here are 8 open source websites I use:

and two that I don’t:

Update: I just realized I also use tr.im as my url shortener and they will be going open source.

In keeping with tradition the ubuntu store (well canonical store) has released a Limited Edition Jaunty Jackalope T-shirt to celebrate the release of ubunut 9.04.

Get yours now (I have and they went really fast last time), and congratulations to everyone who made Jaunty Jackalope a success!

With the release of wordpress 2.6.1 I have once again updated my hackergotchi. This will be my third hackergotchi since 2006, and the original image was taken by my mother at our cottage in Pointe au Baril, and yes I am sitting on the barrel that markes the site of the original barrel that the town gets its name from.

New Hackergotchi

I got my Ubuntu Hardy Heron T-shirt Today. I will try and post some pictures soon. Maybe even update with a new hackergotchi.

I was reading reddit the other day and stumbled upon the fact that wikipedia has an API. Neat I thought, and having some free time since my exams are now over I figured I would play around a bit with it. When I browse wikipedia I often click from link to link, and have come to the conclusion that all articles are 6 degrees of separation. For example I can go from Ubuntu to Tesco to Japan to G8 to United States to George W. Bush bet you never knew Ubuntu was connected to George W. Bush. I once wrote a map of the internet program that people seemed to like to download and modify so in that spirit I wrote wikimap.py to map wikipedia. wikimap.py Requires pygraphviz (Install using sudo aptitude install python-pygraphviz). To use the program simply run the program and give it the wiki page name for example “python wikimap.py Norman_Graham” Note that Ubuntu is Ubuntu_(Linux_distribution) and you can find the full name in the address bar of your browser. For more complicated maps use wikimap.py –help for full usage info.

Here are a few examples that I created with wikimap.py


And a really large one being viewed in inkscape.

More examples including the dot files can be found at http://www.files.earobinson.org/wiki/. But there are a few features I would like to add:

1. Generating the graph using python-pygraphviz currently takes a really long time and I would like to be able to do it faster
2. Page links currently include templates, I would like to only use links in the body of the text
3. It would be nice if the software cached previously seen connections. (But then I need to detect updates to that page)

If anyone has a nice simple soultion to any of those problems leave a comment. Also if you are able to generate any neat images I would love to see them.

Today I updated to wordpress 2.5, and I have to say its great. I love the new interface. As well as updating in response to all the websites stealing planet Ubuntu content I am going to try using the ©Feed plugin for wordpress. So we will see how that goes and I hope the plugin is not to invasive for people.

I am also loving playing with the Hardy Heron Beta and am looking forward to upgrading all my machines when it officially comes out.

In other news my girlfriend has now been using Ubuntu since Christmas and has promised to help me write a post about her experience.

Edit: I have nothing against other sites hosting my posts as long as I get a backlink.

This Friday I got my powered by Ubuntu stickers, from system76. They came with a nice little letter pointing me to ubuntu-ca.org. I did send off for these about a year ago but free is free so I’m not complaining and my Ubuntu CD’s always come fast so I’m not complaining.

Thanks to everyone who made the stickers possible. They look great on my laptop. Sorry about the picture quality I took them with my XO because my digital camera is dead.

APT-URL is one of my favorite programs. The great thing about it is I can keep a list of programs I like on a website and easily install all the program I like on a new box, or point someone new to Ubuntu to the website with all my favorite programs. The problem is that with the personal package archives, letting users run there own repositories on launchpad, and many great programs using there own repository’s you need to add them to your source.list file before you can use any of those great programs.

My solution, let APT-URL add a repository after giving a warning of course. Is this dangerous, sure it is but we can take a similar approach to this that Firefox does, only let trusted websites add to the source.list file. So on a trusted website like launchpad you would get a message like “launchpad.net is trying to add the following repository” compared to a random website that might say “wiki.earobinson.org is trying to add a repository if this is a trusted website please click yes otherwise click no”. This would add some risk but the benefit to the user is huge. Please support this idea by voting for it at the Ubuntu brainstorm.