Programming, Online Community, Web 2.0 and Sri Lanka
The iPad is here. Well not here in Sri Lanka yet. Give us a few years to catch up will ya. Its a couch computer you use on your knees.
Tablets have been around for years but this is not a tablet with a pointy pen device. This a full hands on experience. If I had one I could have written this post with the latest WordPress app for the iPad.
Popularity: 3% [?]
The state of Java and MySql are changing. In case you missed it. Sun bought MySql and Oracle bought Sun. I’ve been working on Java for over 10 years and MySql for over 5 now. I’m not happy with what is happening.
The Java and MySql websites have changed. On the mysql.com site there is no prominent link to get to the community edition. If you go to mysql.org to redirects to dev.mysql.com where you can find it.
This is not good for me or a country like Sri Lanka. Most of the solutions I’ve been involved over the years have used open source foundations. So we were able to deliver solutions to clients at a very reasonable cost. If things get too commercial I’m a afraid the licensing costs will far overtake the implementation costs.
I’m sure there will always be open source or free to use versions of Java and MySql, but with a large commercial entity backing them profit comes first then community. I don’t know I think its time to look at some alternatives.
Update: They got to VirtualBox too.
Popularity: 2% [?]
I use a plugin to post to twitter every time I post a blog post. I also have Facebook pull in my new posts and notes. This works reasonably well and I get some traffic from them.
You can also use twitter tools to post your tweets on your blog after a certain threshold. I don’t use that because I want to keep things separate. I’d rather have a block that shows my latest tweets somewhere.
There are so many ways you can cross post from your blog to twitter to Facebook and LinkedIn. For me personally this is too much cross posting of not too related content. Let me explain.
On twitter I have mostly techies, locals, bloggers and new age marketers. On Facebook I have friends and family who for the most part are not techies at all. On LinkedIn I have co-workers and professionals.
So for me at least these networks mean different things. I saw a tweet yesterday on LinkedIn it was a personal quote about love. Also when you see auto posted blog posts with tweets and link bits it seems less personal and mechanical. You know the blogger hasn’t taken the time to write something.
I prefer to post separately to each network depending on what I have to say. This is except for getting link backs for my blog posts which I mentioned first.
I’m sure there are people with a consistent profiles across networks that pull this off well, but I’ve yet to see one.
My 2 cents is keep things simple and think of the audience for your post before you setup automatic cross site posting.
Popularity: 2% [?]
I’m moving to Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) on my home pc. Its a big honking DELL Studio 1555 compared to my work MacBook 13. But hey it sits at home most of the time and grinds away at anything you give it.
It came with Vista. Hmm ya that wasn’t going to last. Within a few weeks of purchase DELL announced they would give a free upgrade to Windows 7. Ya I missed that. Within about a 1 1/2 months after buying it Vista got stuck and didn’t boot. I booted with a Ubuntu 9.04 cd got my files out and tested if it was worth moving to Ubuntu then. At the time the web cam didn’t work and I really couldn’t spend a lot of time hacking it back into existence. I did a DELL factory restore back to Vista and just waited.
Windows 7 came out. The upgrade was too expensive for a Vista user. If it was 50AUD or so I wouldn’t have minded. But 160-180AUD just for a upgrade was out. In the early stages there were not enough info about doing a clean install from an upgrade cd as well.
I didn’t want to do a in-place Vista upgrade and bring all that crap along, so that was out at the time, so I waited.
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala came out. Got it, put it on a flash drive, booted and loved it. The web cam works now. Only thing I noticed was that it didn’t power down when it was shut down.
So I waited a few more weeks, backed up everything and installed Ubuntu 9.10 dual-boot. I applied the latest updates and that fixed the previous shut-down issue.
So far so good, moved my Firefox profile over and installed a bunch of apps I needed.
KeePass – password manager
sudo aptitude install keepassx
FileZilla – FTP client
sudo aptitude install filezilla
F-Spot is okay but I had some meta data on my photos with Picasa so I’m going to use that.
Skype sees my web cam it should work fine.
Popularity: unranked [?]
I just setup a secure email account for myself. I needed one to exchange some passwords etc with a friend. Here are a few links that will help you setup one.
First you need an email client. My choice was Thunderbird. The rest of the setup depends on this so if you pick another client the next steps will vary a bit.
You can get Thunderbird at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
Now you need a Thunderbird extension called Enigmail https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/71
Enigmail helps you with the PGP tools within Thunderbird.
Now you need to download GnuPG http://www.gnupg.org/download/index.en.html which is an open source PGP tool.
I got version 1.4.9 Windows command line installer gnupg-w32cli-1.4.9.exe.
How to do this in detail is on the Enigmail quick start guide.
Secure email is a good thing to have even for personal use. Most emails travel as plain text and get stored on servers for a long time. By using this setup you can exchange public keys and encrypt mails before sending. Only your private keys can open them.
I sometimes get spam or phishing mails from my friend’s computers. Those are from bad bots that got into their computers.
Also anyone can set the from field to any other email address and impersonate another person.
Using PGP you can sign your emails as well so the receiver can be pretty sure its you sending the mail.
Read more about PGP on Wikipedia.
Popularity: unranked [?]
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