LinuxPlanet Blogs

I just finished going reading Beginning Python - From Novice to Professional, 2nd Edition by Magnus Lie Hetland:

Overall it’s a very good book to get you going in Python if you’re a noobie or a programmer coming from another language. Magnus does a great job of explaining the nuts and bolts of python and how to tie the various pieces together. He covers scripting tasks, gui application development, working with databases and python based web applications. He has numerous application projects sprinkled throughout the book that guide you along the path to python programming. The only thing I would of liked to see more of is advanced topics and projects that a real world application developer might encounter. To his credit the author can only cover so many topics in 656 pages. I would love to see a sequel to this book going into further detail of the advanced topics. This still a great book for someone new to python programming or programming in general and highly recommended. Python truly has become THE language to learn.

Hmm.. Having recently discovered #hashtags on twitter, I’m going to be twittering during my imminent trip to India.  Best way to follow it is to visit the http://www.hashtags.org/tag/IT2008 site.

I hope it works !

I cannot seem to stop collecting miscellaneous computers and other hardware. These boxes are serving me well, but it's starting to get pretty loud and hot with everything running. And the electricity bill seems to keep climbing as well.

So, I started looking around at these tiny linux pc's that seem to be cropping up everywhere and found one that looks great: the fit-PC. For about $300, you get a tiny box the size of an iPod with a 500Mhz Geode processor (x86 compatible), various USB ports, a VGA port, internal wireless, 512MB ram, a 60GB hard drive, and Ubuntu and Gentoo preinstalled. It uses about 4-6w of power consumption! I also read that OpenBSD and many other Linux distributions work well on this thing. This little box would be great as a simple web server, router, or general purpose home server. I could easily replace one or two boxes at home with one of these fit-PC's. Who knows, maybe Santa will get his elves to snap one together for me for Christmas. And if not, maybe I'll have to pick one up myself. :-) Let me know by email if you have any other tiny PC recommendations.

I wrote a little bit ago about my writing a little service monitor script, OpenServerMon, yes, I know the name has changed already. Well, the reason I wrote the script initially is I wanted to be notified when my home internet service went down. Wouldn’t you know it, it worked…. A LOT!

Apparently, I put this thing into place right at the right time because my cable modem started to go on the fritz. My service shut off sometimes several times a day, and each time I was paged. Obviously, this means my script works great, however, I became quickly annoyed about my crappy cable modem, and it was only a year and half old. Well, tonight after resetting it twice, I finally hit Walmart, where I bought a nice Linksys cable modem.

To my amazement, this is the very first time I called Comcast and dealt with someone who wasn’t a complete idiot. I got a nice fellow in the phone who simply added my mac address and I was up and running. Now hopefully this will be the end to my home internet problems, and the annoying 3am pages about my service going down too!

Now as far as the OpenServerMon, I promise, I will be putting that up to share as well soon I would really like to see someone else use/test it before I make it available to the masses though (if you want to beta for me, shoot me an email).

Episode 076 is available for download.

In it I walk through the steps on how to create a snowboard and apply a grunge pattern to it made in Gimp. This is our longest screencast to date clocking in at 32 minutes. I figured using Gimp to create the grunge pattern was the fastest way to get it done. One can make similar patterns completely in Inkscape but it takes a little longer, at least for me. Sometimes using a raster program in tandem with your vector program makes life easier.

I hope you enjoy it.

One thing the 'blogosphere' provides is a place for ideas to be voiced early.

In doing so, presumably this establishes 'prior art' when the idea is widely adopted.

In the spirit of this... I make the following prediction.
Ubuntu 9.10 will be "Killer Kangaroo", "Kinky Koala", "Kissable Kitten" or "Kinetic Kestrel" (or some combination thereof).

Personally I like Kinetic Kestrel the best - "I'm running Kenetic" has a certain ring to it.

Two days ago I decided to take the plunge and switch from Linux Mint 5.0 (Elyssa) to something more current. In my search I found out about Arch. Arch is based on its own package manager (Pacman) and offers up new unmodified applications as they were meant to be used. After downloading the rather small ISO (150 MB!) and burning it to a CD-R I was ready to roll. Rather that using a simple installer it drops you down into a text based installer with multiple options. Partitioning, Setting default repositories, Selecting base packages and other customizations are done from the installer.

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Hope everyone had a good turkey day.

I had some free time today and installed Ubuntu netbook remix on my Aspire One. So easy even a caveman can do it! I first installed the remix image located here to thumb drive following the instructions located on the Ubuntu netbook remix page. I then rebooted the aspire with the thumb drive plugged in and about 20min later had a working ubuntu system. WIfi works without any problem (although the wifi indicator lights don’t work.).

The only thing that didn’t work was the sd card reader on the right side. The one on the left side seems to work with no problem. I also applied a fan mod found on this page because by default the fan seems to run continually. This simple mod shuts down the fan until the temp reaches 70c.

Once I find the fix to the card reader all will be perfect! I recomend everyone give this a try if they have a Aspire One.

So this year was pretty bad as a worker at a Wal-Mart died after being stampeded in Long Island. Then there’s this video showing people fighting over an X-box. People are such savages. You couldn’t pay me to do that shit. I rather be home in bed and spending the day with my family.