Edward Andrew Robinson

I love planets, both the ones in the sky’s, and the ones on the web. But this post is about the latter. One of the things about the web is that you have profiles everywhere, and while openID partly solves this problem allowing me to use one user name to authenticate everywhere it does not solve the problem that people have to visit a bunch of different sites to find out about me. They need to visit my facebook profile to find out what I’m up to, last.FM to see what music I’m into, Digg to see what I’m digging (but I can never decide if I like Digg or not), and the list goes on. I guess if something really important happens, like the launch of Ubuntu brainstorm, I can always blog about it or Digg it but I’m not about to go blogging or digging everything I see. There are a few facebook apps that allow me to display my google reader info on my facebook page and thats kinda cool but I want it all in one place.

My solution planet earobinson, this lets me put any content I have with a rss feed onto my own personal planet its kinda what I’m up to everywhere and until I find a better way to link all my content into one place I’m sticking with it. Google’s open social has some promise but as of right now i’m only linked to my last.FM profile.

So how do you keep all your content in one place?

Using gmails spam filters I normally don’t have a problem with spam. However my one email that does receive a lot of spam is my Ubuntu email address. Interestingly enough a few open source members have droped there open source email addresses due to this exact problem. Jeff Bailey has disabled his @gnu.org email address, and talked about doing the same to his Ubuntu address. Daniel Robitaille has also posted on the problem. Now I like my Ubuntu email address so I’m not about going to delete it but I did receive three rather “great” bits of “email” to it today (Ill only include screen shots of two).

What I thought was “great” about these messages was that they where “sent” to Colin Watson and Corey Burger. Yes they got the emails wrong but I recognized the name instantly. I did find it funny that I had “antecedently” received personal emails to the both. It would be great if we where to use google apps, to run the Ubuntu emails that way we could take advantage of google great spam filters but I know that wont happen. I guess for now I’m stuck reading emails about the sexual prowess of Colin Watson and Corey Burger.

I often recommend Ubuntu to people and recommend that they install programs like miro, and geany. Geany comes stock in the Ubuntu repositories and miro has great step-by-step install instruction for beginners, however as I make this post they currently have no official Gutsy support. When I recommend a program to a user I usually send them the command line install command sudo aptitude install geany as well as sending them instructions

Go to System, then Administration, then click Synaptic. From there you can search for geany and you should be able to double click the name then click install and Ubuntu will install geany for you.

In my mind both solutions extremely simple, but then I have been using Linux for a while now and am a computer geek. I was trying to set up ssh the other day for a friend and they where complaining to me about how on Windows they can just click the program the select run, I claimed that you could do the same thing in Ubuntu (with a deb file) but the claim was that the website (repository browser) was ugly, and well I cant really argue with that. Now that Geany is out I can go back to my friend with another solution and if they want to install Inkscape I can just say “here you go“.

The only downside is that currently adding a new repository is disabled, my two cents is that we should give the user a nice large warning then go ahead and add the new repository. Another anoying and easily fixed thing is that I was looking at the Ubuntu wiki for games yesterday and I thought “ohh I’ll add in some apt:// URLs so that users can just click to install games”, but currently the Ubuntu wiki doesn’t support apt:// URLs so I got them working on my own wiki, just to make sure that it was easy and started a list of my favorite applications.

I guess I really have 2 requests:

1. Enable AptUrl to add third party repositories, I’m going to download the code eventually and take a look at this and post a deb file if I make one. But It would be great if someone beet me to it.
2. Add support for apt:// URLs on the Ubuntu wiki.

Oh and thanks for such a great feature.

In light of the fact that I am now bald, today I uploaded a new hackergotchi to the planet ubuntu bzr tree. Uploading the picture was easy, making the picture was a bit harder. This is my first time using GIMP 2.4.0-rc3 and it seems that the selection tools don’t work the same way that they used to. In the old gimp I was able to make a selection the drag that selection around in order to remove it. It would seem that in the new gimp the only way to remove a selection (That I my girlfriend, could figure out) is to cut (<ctrl>+x) that selection. On the other hand the fuzzy select still works great.

TIP: when using fuzzy select you can use the ctrl key to un-select things that you have selected.

All in all I would say the update was a success. I just wish I had had a larger source image, (The large scale version of my new hackergotchi is a bit jagged around the edges, stupid digital camera being broken).

Large Version

From Me

Small Version

From Me

On a side note it would be fun to make a web page linking all the planet ubuntu faces to there websites / launchpad IDs, any thoughts on this? (Update: it could be just like the gnome one unless we all ready have one?)

Also I have three midterms this week, wish me luck.

A while back I posted about my top 10 feature requests for Gutsy on the Ubuntu Forums. Gutsy has brought some great new features to Ubuntu many of which I did not include in my original top 10 feature requests but if I was to do it again I probably would. In fact when I wrote the original list I had a bit of trouble coming up with 10 and in my opinion “Allow Us To Vote (like ideastorm, digg, etc.) On Ideas Here.” while it would be a grate addition to the Ubuntu Forums is not a feature for Ubuntu and hence a bit of a cop-out. All the same with the release of Gutsy I think its about time I revisited that list and commented on that list again and congratulate everyone who worked on it.

10. [IDEA] Nautilus “Restore from Trash” – Still not implemented. This feature would be quite hard to implement and for me it is a very low priority, but I can see why other users would want it.

9. [IDEA] Modify the installer so that it asks for Timezone instead of City. – While this did not happen, as far as I could tell there where a lot more cities to pick from during the install.

8. [IDEA] Reliable Kill for Fullscreen Applications – I think the best way to do this is still <Alt>f2 then type xkill then click the application.

7. [IDEA] Auto removal of old kernels - Unknown so I will assume no. (kernels are removed during a dist upgrade, thanks Kai Schröder)

6. [IDEA] Bring back screensaver settings - The new screensaver settings manager is still being used, how do I change a screensavers options in this gui?

5. [IDEA]: Warning about disk being full – Nope, per this blueprint on launchpad this feature never got out of the idea stage. (This feature might be included according to Kai Schröder … Thanks)

4. [IDEA] External Monitor Support – This feature is now included, however using the propitiatory drivers nvidia-settings gave me more options

3. [idea] Fix the delay when searching in Synaptic – It feels faster, but then this is a fresh install.

2. [IDEA] Graphical Frontend for xorgconfig (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg) – This works really well. I’m really glad to see this feature.

1. Allow Us To Vote (like ideastorm, digg, etc.) On Ideas Here. – As I said before this is a cop-out and It has not been implemented on the Ubuntu Forums, however the forum staff did a great job of communicating the forums needs.

So that gives us about three 3.5 (I rounded to three 3.5 because there was a few half implemented features ex feature 9) out of the nine (I’m not counting feature number 1) features that I blogged about all that time ago and that doesn’t even include the 10 rocking features in 10 days. All in all I think that makes Great Gutsy Gibbon.

I’m quite a fan of stats, checking my most viewed posts is a bit of an obsession of mine. On of my posts that continues to baffle me in how much activity it gets is my post about ubuntu root access. This post resulted in a friendly argument between me and a friend during class. At the time it was a quick and dirty post to try and prove to him that linux was far superior to windows (lol, j/k, only a friendly debate).

In response to that post so long ago I now want to post about SUM (Screenshots). SUM lets you control your boot settings, including your boot password, from a GUI. For anyone interested you can get SUM here, or if you use propensity you can import this .pa file.

I have my own subversion repository, I use this to store my school work, personal data like my resume, and pretty much anything else I want to keep backups of or keep synced across all of my computers. The other day I was trying to do an svn up and I was getting the following error “Can’t find a temporary directory: Internal error“. With all my googling I found a lot of people that said that they had this error also but that the problem had fixed its self. This was no good for me since the posts I found seemed to be implying that the problem was on the side of the svn server, but since I ran my own svn server the problem was mine to fix.

Well it turns out that the problem was that my computer that runs the server had run out of space and the simple fix was to delete some old files I had. Just thought I would put this out there for anyone else having this problem.