Urban Puddle

Ok, going to try something a bit different and actually just put the instructions on the "new" blog. Click here for instructions! If you haven't already, please also update your feed readers for the new feed.

When I started this blog back in 2006 I decided to use Typo. I was in my infancy of Ruby development and thought that using a blog written by guys who know way more than me would be a good idea. Turns out I never really took advantage of that, instead choosing to work on my own websites as a way to learn. Any hacking I did on Typo was more because of frustration than love. And as time went on things got a bit worse.

You may have arrived at using ssh-agent a number of ways. I got here by necessity.. Capistrano wouldn't play nice while pulling code from my public key protected git repository without it. Still, I got tired of typing in the commands every time and adding them to my .bash_login file didn't help. Enter keychain.

A while back I wrote a post about hacking together a few Gedit plugins to come up with a new one called Find in Files. As mentioned at the time, I am no python programmer.. there is much room for improvement. In order to facilitate those improvements (I still rely on that plugin today) I'm posting the code to Github. If you so choose, please consider contributing fixes to the code so that anyone using this plugin can benefit.

Most of the instructions I've seen for upgrading Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) to Intrepid Ibex (8.10) involve firing up a GUI and clicking a bunch of mouse buttons. That's fine and all if you've got a GUI but if you're on a server then that just won't work. Following the same set of instructions that you did for upgrading Gutsy to Hardy also won't work. Why? Well, Hardy is a LTS release so it won't really say there's a new release for you until the next LTS which is still a few years off. If you're intent on upgrading to Interpid Ibex anyway (I would leave your critical servers at Hardy..) then please read on.

It's been a couple of days since a few upgrade have come my way. On the mobile side my HTC G1 finally got the new r29 release. Previously, for my Nokia N73, a firmware update would required downloading the entire firmware updater application again, physically connecting the phone to a windows computer, reinstalling the USB driver for it, and finally starting the upgrade. When it was done, it would remove all in-memory applications and wipe everything else of use (e.g. contacts). In comparison, the HTC G1 is a dream.

There have been plenty of articles where people have talked about the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) and all the fun it *could have been*. We users are rarely satisfied and gripes have been plentiful. I've got my own items as well and I thought I'd compile everything (not just my wants) into a single easy-to-access list. These are in order of possibility/realism as I see it. The funny thing is that there are things not on this list that will actually become features. Does anyone care about video capture?

There will be many great applications for the Android platform.. I'm hoping to release one or two of those eventually myself. But today I found the ultimate app.. and it's free. It's called ConnectBot and it's an ssh client for your HTC G1. Now you can ssh into your servers from anywhere. How do you get it? Head on over to their site for full details but basically just enable non-market applications, click on the Market application, and then browse through until you find it. Install it.. wait a bit and then you're good to go.

A while back I wrote an article on how to get going using Git on a central server. Over the past months I've been using Git more and more frequently and have gotten more proficient with it than I ever was with Subversion. The other day I was talking to a fellow coder and I was surprised to hear he hadn't yet delved into Git at all. So for him and all the others who haven't yet given it a try, here are 10 good resources for getting started with Git.

A while back I posted an entry about a ruby script to convert MP4 videos like Railscasts into a format friendly enough for the PSP. I've made some improvements to that script so that it can now also support converting video in a resolution that will play nicely on the HTC G1 (Google phone), the new Android handset.