mateo's musings » Geek

Must-Have Windows Programs

matt — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:24:20 +0000

I’m midway through my semi-annual wipe-the-computers-clean-and-start-fresh season, and I thought just for funsies I’d detail the list of programs that go on immediately after Windows.

Office (2010 in this case)
Antivirus (Sophos since these are work computers)
Firefox
- Adblock Plus (duh)
- Firebug (so I can pretend I know what to do with code)
- Download Statusbar (should be integrated into FF by now)
- Xmarks (synchronize all bookmarks, passwords, tabs)
- IE Tab (for lame sites that require IE)
- Mouse Gestures (rocker-gestures FTW)
Dropbox (synchronizes all my important files between all my computers)
FileZilla (I move a lot of files around)
Synergy (two computers, one keyboard, one mouse)
Putty (can’t live without SSH access)
Pidgin or Digsby (IM programs, depending on my mood and beefiness of the computer)
HeidiSQL (best free MySQL front-end GUI, period.)
MySQL ODBC Connector (so Excel can become even more useful)
Notepad++ (for syntax-highlightiness while hacking)

So there ya have it. What’s on your list of must-haves?

NumLock broken in Ubuntu

matt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:55:37 +0000

I recently had the very unpleasant experience of not being able to use my number keypad on the side of my keyboard, whether NumLock was turned on or off. I’m currently running Ubuntu 9.10 and apparently I’m not the only one who ran into this problem. I found the fix buried in a forum from a user called bluefrog.

Ctrl + Shift + NumLock

That’s all it took, and I was back in business. I’m not entirely sure how I fat-fingered that in the first place to disable the keypad, but I’m sure glad to have it back. Thanks, bluefrog!

Code Collaboration in Google Wave

matt — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:14:45 +0000

I finally got a Google Wave invite, thanks to my cousin Joel Runyon, and one of the first things I want to do with it is collaborate on projects that involve code.

I went looking for a plugin that would make it nicer (syntax highlighting, etc) and first came across the KaSyntaxy bot, which was ok, but I was hoping for something a little more robust.

Enter the Code Snippet gadget (wave link <- you have to have Wave access to get to it). It’s absolutely perfect. Very simple to insert code in many languages, syntax highlighting, and the ability to lock the code so others can’t edit it. Here’s a little sample of what it looks like inside GWave.

Uninstall Office 2010 Technical Preview (Mondo)

matt — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:49:35 +0000

Apparently I’m not the only one who checked out Office 2k10 Technical Preview (Mondo) and was then unable to uninstall it. When trying to remove with Add/Remove Programs, I would just get an error that it was corrupt, and I had to re-install from the CD or file. Re-installation did nothing to fix the problem, but a bit of searching turned up this little gem in a help forum:

To uninstall Office 2010 14.0.4302.1000 if you have an uninstall error message “This product installation has been corrupted”.
The Problem is a missing file in the installation folder of office 2010. Office 2010 has an Setup Controller directory and uses the directory to check the installed components. please check the directory “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE14\Office Setup Controller\Groove.en-us\”. if you have no “Setup.xml” file there please copy the file from the “Groove.en-us” directory of the source files to this directory and test the uninstallation again.

Many thanks to Vikas Narula at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/ for the amazing fix.

A Whole Lot of Nothing

matt — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:25:43 +0000

Well, I’ve taken quite a break from blogging obviously, but just about ready to hop back in the saddle. For various reason, I’ve also been taking a break from linux. I was quite happy with the Release Candidate of Windows 7, and ended up with it on the two computers I use the most. Then I got really busy and I didn’t have time to get Linux on anything so I just kept the status quo for a while. Finally the other night I had the feeling that enough was enough, I needed some Linux, and Windows 7 was pretty and all, but it just wasn’t cutting it for me.

I’ve been ‘borrowing’ a tiny Lenovo X41 from the IT department, and have been very happy with the portability. Just to get a quick fix, I dumped Windows 7 for Xubuntu 9.04, but then something else caught my eye. It’s called Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix, and I’m about to give it a whirl on here and see how she handles.

gwibber, the one I’ve been searching for

matt — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:18:33 +0000

In my quest to use Linux full-time, I’m building a list of “equal or better” Linux programs to replace the ones I used in my former Windoze life. I think many others are on that same quest.

When it comes to chat/social network all-in-one clients, nothing can compare to digsby. Unfortunately, although we’ve been promised a native Linux version for quite some time, it has not yet been delivered. As such, I’ve been quite happy with Pidgin for a chat client, but have been looking everywhere for a decent standalone twitter client.

I’m not sure why I never found it before, but today I found gwibber hanging out in the Jaunty repositories. A ‘sudo aptitude install gwibber’ later, I was very pleasantly surprised.

As you can see, it has a very smooth interface that blends quite well in gnome. What sold me on it though, was how nicely it integrates with Jaunty’s new notification system. I have it set to check every 5 minutes, and when new updates come in, they show up in the now-familiar fade-in-fade-out-overlay in the top right corner of the screen. I like it.

I Love the Internets

matt — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:11:24 +0000

For a while now I’ve been dual-booting Windows 7 and whatever flavor of Linux I’m currently interested in. I feel like I’ve really settled in with the release of Ubuntu 9.04 and I wondered if there was a way for me to easily get into my current Windows installation without having to reboot my computer (a la parallels). Well, a quick google on the internets turned up a very helpful article which stepped me through creating a virtual disk which was really my physical hard drive, and the rest is just standard stuff.

I booted my virtual/physical disk, was very careful to only select the Windows installation from GRUB (see warning in article), and Windows came up like a champ. I didn’t even have to do the extra steps outlined at the end of the article, but I may go back and do them as a safeguard… hopefully not borking my install in the process. The good news for everyone is that VirtualBox is free/open and available for all three major platforms. Look out, parallels…

Beautiful, isn’t it? I’ll be able to work much more quickly and efficiently now, and that’s what computers are all about, right?

Mark Shuttleworth » Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software?

matt — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:56:11 +0000

WOW! I just read a great article by Mark Shuttleworth discussing the pros/cons of short/long release cycles. The ensuing debates in the comments section are just as enlightening as the article itself.

Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software?.

Looky What I’ve Got

matt — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:26:06 +0000

I’ve got some shiny new ISOs to try out. I downloaded the Ubuntu and Xubuntu 9.04 BETAs that were released yesterday. w00t! Look for a review in the near future.

presto=meh

matt — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 13:23:34 +0000

I’m thoroughly ambivelant about Presto. It’s fine. It does what it does. It took a lot of good ideas from other distros and combined it into a great netbook OS for your grandma.

Sure, it boots sort of fast, but honestly not noticibly faster than CrunchBang, or a lean-and-mean Ubuntu install for that matter. You really can’t call it an instant-on OS in my opinion. Sure, it’s got an “app store,” but it’s really just a nice web interface for a very limited repository (and nothing we haven’t seen before, right PuppyLinux/Linspire/etc.?). They made it only available as a .exe installer, which is useful (again, not new at all… see wubi) on the one hand, but frustrating to me that I couldn’t just do a clean install on an old computer if I wanted to.

I think the best thing it’s got going for it is that there’s no way a beginner/novice user could possibly screw this up. I saw that they ported it to ARM as a netbook OS, and I think that’s where it should stay.