Monthly Archives: October 2010

Meego Redux: 1.1 Released

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If you recall, I fell in love with Meego a bit ago. Then, we broke up, and I left Meego for Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR). Guess what? Yup, just like the title of this post suggests, I’m back to Meego. Yesterday was their 1.1 release and the netbook flavor with Chrome is ready for the Live USB Key, easy install testing. I skipped over the live USB thing and cut right to the chase to install it over UNR.

I went to go install some of the key apps that I use and bumped into a few problems. I’ll sketch ’em out here in case any one else is an early adopter like me:

  • No more yum: Well, yum is still available to install, but it’s not there by default. Instead the fine folks at Meego are shipping ZYpper instead. Works just the same, but for the not so distro savvy nerds like me, I had to search around in the forums to figure what was what. Thanks physalis!
  • KeepassX: The next problem I found was that Keepassx’s download page had 404 links for the fedora packages. When I found that Fedora 12 page DIDN’T 404, I downloaded THAT version of KeepassX. Welp, that version didn’t like the current version of QT that ships with Meebo. Finally, I searched around and found a slightly out of date version at hany.sk
  • Dropbox: Nothing really tricky here. Their download page has a “Fedora (x86 .rpm)” package. For both KeepassX and Dropbox, it looks like this to install it :
    sudo zypper install nautilus-dropbox-0.6.4-1.fedora.i386.rpm

For those keeping tabs, I did do a write up on configuring Meego mail and calendar which appears to all be the same in 1.1 as it was in 1.0. At first blush, it seems a little tricky to set up with Google Apps, where plip.com’s mail is, but we’ll hack away.

Next up: Installing Skype. Happy Meebo-ing!

Update: Skype installed no problem, and QT warning seems to be around fonts. A forum tip around font hinting worked wonders to make Skype and KeepassX look sharp (actually, look anti-aliased).

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Apple’s fancy monitor cheaper than Dell’s

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For a long time now I’ve been a fan for Dell’s monitors. I was one of the first folks at work who suggested we cut over from Apple’s expensive (and prettier) monitors to Dell’s cheaper (and more utilitarian looking) monitors. This is all due to my obsession with hi-res and large monitors.

Very recently, I noticed something odd: Apple is now cheaper than Dell in the big monitor game. The new hotness is IPS for high contrast and great viewing angles (here’s the crappy wikipedia IPS link). Yup Dell’s 27″ U2711 is $1100 or their 30″ U3011 is $1500. Apple is no longer selling (or not really trying to sell) their 30″ and their (only?) monitor, the very same one in the iMac, is a 27″ LED Cinema Display for $999. Black is white, up is down and dogs are living with cats.

This all said, you’ll have to deal with super future thinking Apple and their mini DisplayPort only monitor. However, it does come with speakers and nice webcam. For now though, I’m still gonna stick with my 24″ Dell I’ve had for the last 4 years or so. Frickin love that thing.

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Wayback machine, privacy and old plip.com

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This post is a short parable told in three lessons:

Lesson 1: The web is not as temporal as you might think!

Recently a co-worker was travelling and was unable to access her work based email. Instead, she directed folks to email her at her personal email. Being a curious fellow, I clicked over to her personal site to see what she had to say. All I found was “Site in progress, check back later” and link to a very outdated resume. Well, that’s just no fun! Enter the wayback machine! Using this fine site, I was able to see all the text, photos and links she had long since redacted. The wayback machine never forgets, so don’t you forget that.

Lesson 2: Robots.txt can pull Jedi mind tricks.

A natural response to seeing the archive of other sites, is to see what dirt folks might find out about me via the same method. Sure enough, there’s some good stuff! However, the more interesting fact I learned is that my robots.txt of today redacted the archive.org copy of yesterday! This is cool! A while ago I took down my resume and some older, more personal content and as well took a sec to make some broad strokes of search engines shouldn’t index. It was these actions that archive.org took note of. With a wave of my robots.txt hand, indeed these are not the pages you’re looking for.

Lesson 3: The wayback machine is way cool.

Ok, this parable kinda peters out right about here, but still, the wayback machine is way cool. Check out the rad looks plip.com has had over the years! Hrm, maybe that should be “rad”. You decide.

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The 404er: Now in your blogs, googles and plugin directory

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I’m still very much enjoying coding in the WordPress plugin world. I just added a very simple admin interface to The 404er. So, ya know, for all those tons of readers, go install this on your blog already!

After getting a kick that over 20 people have downloaded the 404er, I got another kick out of the fact that we’re the number one hit for “The 404er” at the time of this publishing.

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How to fix Zend 5.5.1 in Windows 7

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For those still addicted to Zend Studio 5, like I still am, but can’t figure out how to make her go, take note: It is easy to run this app in Windows 7.

When you first install it, you can launch it fine, and the splash screens shows, but that’s it. The process is listed for a second and the whole thing disappears. I’d read one some site that it involved extracting the installer and making a copy of the JRE. Maybe this is true for some folks, but all it seemed to take for me was to go into the properties for the binary (ZDE.exe) and choose “Vista”. That’s it!

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