Posts for the 'Ubuntu' Category (Feed for this category)

Life Status Update

Posted time 2nd July, 2007 Post categories Blog, Life, Ubuntu, University, WWW,

With my last blog entry being back in March, back when I was just starting my last semester of Uni, a lot has changed, and that semester of Uni is now over, so I thought I would give a kind of status update.

University

The current semester is over, and it will most likely be my last semester at Uni at this time. I did my last 40 credit points (4 units), this semester, so now I just need to wait on results, and make sure that I have passed everything. If I didn't, I am going to have to go back for another semester, but at this stage, everything looks good. fingers crossed.

Work

Still working with the same company, and still enjoying it. Just last weekend, we had the Guns 'n Roses concerts in Sydney, which were an interesting night, but fun none the less. On Saturday is Live Earth, which means a full day for me, hopefully without too many dramas.

Coming up in the next few weeks is Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani and Disney on Ice. August is set to be big as well, and most likely will be a busy end of the year.

New Phone

I made mention to a friend a while ago, that I would discuss my new Phone, so now's the time.

Just before the Sydney Royal Easter Show, my Motorola V3, which I had for almost 2 years, suffered a painful death after a night alone with the condensation off a McDonalds drink container.

But thankfully for insurance, I was able to get the same phone, but in black for $0, or pay the difference in cost between that phone and a phone I wanted, and get that instead.

So, naturally, I chose the later, and for now almost the last 3 months, I have a Nokia E61, a great Phone/PDA.

While it does have a few quirks which I can easily live with, it does make a great phone for someone continually on the go. ATM I use it to store rosters for work (as the .xls it comes as, as well as in the calendar), documents and contact info.

I also have PuTTy for Symbian loaded on to it, so i can use its inbuilt WiFi to connect to a box at home, or elsewhere, if I have internet access. Saves carrying a laptop in case a server dies.

The phone also has a SIP Client by default, which means it can also do VOIP calls. I have it set up at the moment, to be a client for my asterisk box at home, which it connects to over the wireless. This means I always can have my Phone book in one place, and with me. Security is not a problem for the WiFi, as it has support for WPA, which I use for all communications.

The keyboard did take a bit of getting use to, but it really is quite easy and friendly, once you use it for a bit. And boy does it make typing a SMS fast. The wide screen is great for playing games (while travelling on trains), and surfing sites (tho that is still costly to do all the time).

It has a Mini-SD card slot for storage, apps or files, and also has a movie and media player, as well as voice recordings.

I really love the phone :)

SCM

Source Code Managment rocks. I don't know why I didn't set one up earlier, as it has really helped with me being more energetic to get this new site up and running. Not sure why, but it just has, and that is for the better.

*

As mentioned above, I set up a asterisk server recently, and It now handles incoming and outgoing calls for both my VOIP line and PSTN line. Wasn't easy to get started, as came to a few problems with Arch Linux's asterisk packages, not really being up to date, or complete. I tried out both TrixBox and Elastix, neither of which I liked, and in the end, installed Ubuntu Server, and tried again with what on Arch Linux, and it worked, first time.

Future

While I am still doing my casual work, as noted above, it is almost getting to the stage, especially once my grades come out for this semester, and I graduate, that I will need to start looking around for full time work, hopefully this can be in the same industry/employer as at the moment, tho I feel that I may need to look outside it.

I am looking at getting some of my projects which I had planned under way, hopefully including some stuff which may generate income.

That is enough for a recap for now, does feel good to blog again, and to have the new site up and working (which you should check out if you are reading this via a RSS Aggregator - www.nullis.net.

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Ubuntu Bugs

Posted time 7th October, 2005 Post categories Ubuntu,

It seems that even the most perfect of Operating Systems, Ubuntu Linux, has a bug.

Details of the bug can be found at Launchpad.

Thanks to Pascal for bringing it to my attention. I really do think some close attention does need to be paid to this bug by the Ubuntu developers, as well as the LoCo groups and the Ubuntu community as a whole.

(yes I did giggle.)

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GNUpod

Posted time 24th August, 2005 Post categories Life, Ubuntu,

Since buying my iPod Photo months ago, I have never updated the songs on it, because I haven't been able to find a decent tool for Linux that works well (atleast for me).

I had tried GTKpod previously, but had found that it overall, it didn't work as well as it should, or maybe it was me not understanding its functionality right.

Anyway, skip forward to the a few days ago, and I was finally getting sick listening to the same songs (and podcasts), over and over again. It was time to change the songs on the iPod. I gathered this meant one of two things; installing gtkpod and trying to get it to work, or borrowing a friends computer with windows on it, to copy on some songs.

Deciding against the later, I was going to install gtkpod again, when i realised that gnupod was there. Tho it is text based, i decided to try it out.

After some minor difficulties with the scripts, mainly relating to case sensitive nature (see the end for more info), due to the default ubuntu flags when it mounted, i finally got the scripts working, and I must say, I am impressed. The advantage is they are perl scripts, so they are changable to customise a bit how I want them.

So this weekend, I might actually put some new songs on my iPod, and be able to listen to fresh G'Day World podcasts on the train each morning.

Note: The problem was because of the default Ubuntu settings for mounts. I didn't have my iPod set up in fstab, so whenever it plugged it, it got these default settings. To fix, it was as simple as adding the "check=r" flag to the mount options, either in fstab, or mounting it manually. See this email thread for more information.

Also, Ubuntu also by default adds the flag "iocharset=utf8", when mounting. It seems that this flag, overrides the check flag. So for now, I have simply removed it. If anyone has a solution to this, would be great, thanks.