Mega-ZBlog

I just finished up the newest version of my screenshot tool. Give it a try here. I’m getting good feedback about it. The changelog is here.

I made a bunch of changes that will allow it to be easily incorporated into my newest tool, which is a plugin-oriented system tray tool. Basically the idea is you can mix and match the modules you want to have easy access to through a system tray icon. Right now all I have is a processes menu for killing and process priority and a services menu for stopping, starting, etc. I plan to add a more complex plugin that will allow for you to group processes and services together into tasks… and you can start/stop them at whim. I would use it to start/stop the firewall, anti-virus, Apache + MySQL, UnrealIRCd + Anope, etc with a click for each “task”. I had a similar tool but it used a dialog and it had all the “tasks” hardcoded into the app. I think doing it again as a system tray icon would make it easier to use and more likely I’d use it.

Much better.

That is all.

So I’ve been messing with Ubuntu on and off for some time now and the new version 8.04 came up yesterday. I upgraded but I experienced some problems along the way I think others should know about:

• Free Space: Depending on how many extra packages you’ve installed since installing Ubuntu originally, you may need 1.5gb free as I did for downloading. But the unpacking phase ended up taking 1gb more… and left me with as little as 70mb free at one point! I’ll need to expand my partition I guess and shrink my Windows’ partitions. But just be sure you have enough free space.
• Drive mounting: You will probably have to edit your /etc/fstab to fix drive /dev addresses. All /dev/hd* have been changed to /dev/sd*, bumping existing /dev/sd* up and out of the way. Also disc drives are now /dev/scd0, scd1, etc.
• If you use Truecrypt and you can’t mount drives after upgrading, do an apt-get remove truecrypt and then go to the official site and follow the download instructions. Extract the .deb file and do a dpkg -i on it to install it, and truecrypt should work again.
• Upgrading may destroy custom mouse and monitor configurations in xorg.conf. You did make a backup of all your important changes there, didn’t you? This is only a concern if you use multiple monitors (it doesn’t set them up right when upgrading) or if you have a mouse with more than three buttons, since both cases usually require a little surgery on this file to get working right.
• Compiz settings will revert. Use ccsm and set them back manually. ccsm is a bit easier to work with after the upgrade.
• Emerald themes won’t apply to compiz anymore unless you specifically use emerald as your window manager instead of compiz. Weird. Also emerald might hang when you run it… delete ~/.beryl and ~/.emerald/settings.ini, go back into Emerald Theme Manager and reapply your settings, then it should run fine. You probably want to put “emerald –replace” in your startup items under the “Sessions” Administrative thingy so your theme will work on startup.
• There doesn’t seem to be a Wine 0.9.60 build for Ubuntu yet. Maybe in a couple days.

Well everyone seems to be doing this so I guess it’s my turn.

This is from an SSH shell into this webserver. I’m not booted into Linux on my desktop machine at the moment so this will have to do.

[mzzt@server1 ~]$ uname -a
Linux server1.sorrowind.net 2.6.9-42.EL #1 Sat Aug 12 09:17:58 CDT 2006 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
[mzzt@server1 ~]$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
149 cd
127 ls
56 rm
44 ln
42 exit
35 chmod
16 pico
11 mv
8 cp
3 put
[mzzt@server1 ~]$

So I had checked my comment queue before and there was a bit of spam, and some “borderline spam” remains even though I already had a spam plugin installed as long as I’ve been using Wordpress. I wasn’t really going to do much about it, but then I found Spam Karma. [Read more →]

I need to force myself to post more often. When I end up posting like now I end up having a lot to talk about. Maybe if I post right when I wake up, or make a set time for posting every day or something. [Read more →]

I have been doing quite horribly for the past 26 hours, yay.

At least now I can sit up and use my computer.

Someone just asked me (well that asked me on Dec. 12th but I didn’t spot their forum PM until today… oops) how I make my animated GIFs so i might as well share with everyone!

[Read more →]

Well I should probably start blogging again.  I’ve gotten the ScribeFire extension for Firefox which seems to be better than the last time I used it, although I lacks a “more” insert which of course allows me to put a “More…” link there which links to the individual post page with the complete post.  I think I didn’t like that before, but having a browser-based interface would make me more likely to post.

[Read more →]