Why read Ubuntu Hacks?

1. If Ubuntu is the entry-level Linux distro, then Ubuntu Hacks is the book that helps the entry-level user take advantage of the great software and tools Linux has to offer.
2. I would have saved myself a lot of effort if I owned this book on the day that I install Ubuntu on my machine.
3. In many ways, Ubuntu Hacks is an introduction to the software available to all Linux users. So, if you are looking for some “real Ubuntu hacks”, you may be disappointed, _{but that is ok; that just means that the title of the book is a bit of a misnomer, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the books isn’t valuable.}
4. Some subjects (like kernel building) aren’t really examined with much detail and refer users to seek help elsewhere.
5. The command-line based instructions are great for those new to using the terminal. There are quite a few hacks that provide visual instructions only, but Ubuntu Hacks had far less GUI-based instructions than the other Ubuntu books I perused at the bookstore.
6. If you aren’t a techie, but you want to explore Linux and its myriad of software options, Ubuntu Hacks is for you.
7. A lot of the hacks in Ubuntu Hacks you can figure out on your own or find on the internet.
8. Things that I would like to know about Linux/Ubuntu that weren’t addressed in Ubuntu Hacks:
   • File system organization… whys and best practices (i.e. Hack #101 – Get a good visual picture of the linux file system in your head)
   • A brief history of Linux, Debian and Ubuntu (i.e. Hack #102 – How to tell friends & family about Ubuntu in a non-freakish way)

While opening my computer up to put more memory in, I found a small moth.

Even though the term bug may not have originated with the computer bug that Grace Hopper supposedly found, I still giggled as I told myself the story of the first computer bug.

My moth appeared to be significantly smaller than the first ever computer bug…

1. You can’t really crop in Inkscape. :-( But you can change the size of a svg drawing to get some perspective on how large or small the drawing will be after it is exported.
2. Ctrl + Alt + A opens align window in Inkscape.
3. To create Stylish Text with GIMP create a new layer, select a portion of the text to make shiny from original layer, copy and paste selection into new layer and change the color of the pasted portion.
4. This is how good iterative web design goes.
5. Y Combinator is now accepting applications for summer 2007 funding. Aahhh, if only I were confident and had a partner.
6. There are a number of sites that support OpenID. What prevents someone from claiming your site as their own (other than it being against OpenID’s policy)?
7. On the Rails deployment learning front, I discovered that ‘require_dependency…’ lines go in environment.rb and not in the controllers themselves (at least for how my hosting company has things set up).

Use Rubyful Soup to get all of the hyperlinks on a page…

soup = BeautifulSoup.new(page_content)
result = soup.find_all('a')
result.each { |tag| 
  urls[i] = tag['href']
  if urls[i].to_s.slice(0,1) != 'h' then
          #add first part of url to href link if link is internal
          urls[i] = home + urls[i]
  end
  i = i + 1
}

My “go to” sites for one-liners…

1. HANDY ONE-LINERS FOR SED
2. HANDY ONE-LINERS FOR RUBY
3. Linux Shell One-Liners
4. Save time with text editing one-liners: Fast editing examples using cat, ed, and sed
5. One-liners 101: Perl as a command-line utility
6. The one-liners I use the most

My problem

• Had an external hard drive that I used with my MS Windows machine.
• Got a new linux machine.
• External hard drive did not allow linux machine to write to it – because hard drive is NTFS.

How could I write to external hard drive from linux machine without re-formatting the external hard drive?

My solution

• Follow this tutorial on How To Use NTFS Drives/Partitions Under Ubuntu Edgy Eft

The only instruction I would add to this tutorial is that you must have properly ejected the external hard drive from your Windows machine in order for Edgy to mount the drive.

I have discovered that mac ipods (those that have been restored to factory settings on a mac) are read by Ubuntu as read-only, which means you can’t change the music on a mac ipod from a Ubuntu machine [1]. Alternatively, windows ipods (those restored on a windows machine) are read/writable, which means you can upload new music to that ipod.

I figured this out after reading the ipod linux (a version of linux that runs on your ipod) installlation instructions. ipod linux requires that the ipod you want to install ipod linux on is a windows ipod. Since we don’t have a working windows machine at my house, I used a windows machine my husband brought home from work and restored the ipod to its factory settings on it. Thinking that the reason that ipod linux requires that windows ipods be used, I plugged my ipod up to my linux machine and tada, it wasn’t read-only!

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1: I didn’t think about this until later, but I am guessing that I could have changed the device’s permissions using sudo. I thought I had tried that, but I guess I didn’t do it correctly.

I finally got around to generating a sitemap for this site. I used these instructions for creating sitemaps in rails. Very simple and straight forward instructions.

Unfortunately, the sitemap created isn’t valid according to google. The xml document created has <link> tags instead of <loc> tags which google webmaster requires.

I am guessing that these errors mean that my sitemap is useless to Google. Still looking for a solution and will post an update as soon as I find one.

mouseHole is a personal proxy server written in ruby, allowing you to…

rewrite the web as you view it, altering content and behavior as you browse. Basically, it’s an alternative to Greasemonkey, which does similar things from inside the Firefox web browser.

To get mouseHole up and running, first install the required gems (json and sqlite3) if you don’t already have them installed. I encountered the following issues while installing those gems…

Installing json

lib/json/editor.rb:977:50: ’:’ not followed by identified or operator

The solution is to remove the colon from line 977.

Installing sqlite3

The command for installing the sqlite3 gem is gem install sqlite3-ruby and not gem install sqlite3.

Lastly, if you are running Debian or Ubuntu, visit http://localhost:3704 instead of http://127.0.0.1:3704 after starting mouseHole.

Ok, the idea for this very lazy post came from this site that has a very cool collection of movies available free on YouTube and similar sites.

Pirates of the Silicon Valley in its entirety is on YouTube. Enjoy!