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Windows vs Linux

I was wondering if Linux finally will break through. Now HP also started offering Linux computers it won’t take long before all major computer vendors all will be offering Linux computers IMHO.

I’m pro Linux and I do think it is a better OS than Windows but I’m just wondering if it will gain more market share. And if it does if the reason will be that it is free,better,… or just because MS dropped the ball with Vista … If you look at the news sites, you get a lot of messages saying people want to downgrade back to XP. I wonder how the IT world will look the next couple of years.

As much as I’m pro Linux I actually don’t hope that MS will get broken down (like SCO). You might think ‘WTF’ but from my point of view MS doesn’t create that bad tools. I for one am pro VS.NET, I really like it as an IDE. In my dayjob I’m a JEE developer but at night I put on my black cape and mask and develop dotnet solutions for customers. You might ask why ? But the answer is actually very very simple. I yet have to find a tool that let’s me create a solution as quick as VS.NET. So if Linux will prevail (I do hope so) I actually also hope MS will become a tools vendor on the Linux platform and make there dotnet environment fully Linux compliant.

In short let’s just all live happily together 😀

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IBM Lotus Symphony

As most people probably know by now, IBM has released Lotus Symphony. But what’s the idea behind it? Okay it’s based on the Eclipse RCP, supports ODF and is free (not sure if it’s opensource). The also announced thy are backing Openoffice but why create a new office suite if you already support one? Why not focus on Openoffice, maybe even create a paid version (like the do with Eclipse and WSAD)? That would make more sense to me … Anybody got some more information on this ?

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Quicksilver on Linux

Another thing that got mentioned on the user group was the lack of a Quicksilver copy for Linux. As I find it hard to believe this didn’t exist for Gnome, I searched a bit and it seems Deskbar is doing this kind of stuff. I just put it on my top menu and I think I’m gonna use it a lot. It really looks nice, eve the del.icio.us plugin is nice.

Probably it will add a lot of extra load on your network with all the web calls it does. But hey I don’t have any limit so … 😛

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Ubuntu getting momentum

Today I joined a small Java user group meeting. We discussed DWR and GWT. I already had investigated a bit both toolkits, I even used DWR in an application for a customer. The session still was interesting, although I knew most things. But there was one thing that was remarkable. Last time this user group was held, I was the only one who actually was using Linux on a daily basis (all my systems here are on Ubuntu, all my servers are running some flavor of Linux).

But today it seemed that more guys switched to Ubuntu. They preferred it over Windows. Okay, I know these guys are also programmers, and have some level of geekness. But they weren’t using it half a year ago, so there is momentum. Maybe not yet as mainstream as we would like, but Rome wasn’t build in a day either. And hey you can bet if a friend of these guys asks him to help him with computer trouble they will start advising Ubuntu over Windows. I can’t even count the number of computers I had to fix due to some kind of spy-ware. And I really am getting sick of it, and so will these guys probably.

\o/

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Switch from hunderbird back to Evolution …

Today I switched my default mail client back from Thunderbird to Evolution.

Why???
I installed Beagle and I want all my mails to be indexed for searching. I lost 10 minutes searching for a stupid mail today (yeah, it’s really stupid heaving 5 large mailboxes that you use frequently)

After installing I started replying some emails and I noticed that my Nautilus mounted SSH folders were included in the add attachments screen. sweet The Thunderbird version didn’t have that option and that was pretty stupid. I had to copy the files locally and then attach them 🙁

I did notice however that the response off Thunderbird is much better than Evolution, but hey at my customer I’m have to use M$ Outlook so I’m glad when I’m back at my office using Evo.

I also stopped using Amsn, I also fully switched to Gaim. Okay the integration with the MSN messenger service isn’t as good as Amsn but Gaim also gets indexed by Beagle. I was already using Gaim for my Jabber and Gmail friends but not yet for my MSN friends. So you guys are now on my Gaim list and are being indexed 😀

You get the point, my whole entry is about indexing. Lets see how much more efficient I get in the future.

On a side note, I now seem to have my spelling checker enabled in Firefox. So I’ll pay more attention on my writing skills as some of you seem to have problems with my bad English!

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Streaming media -> youtube style

Wouldn’t it be nice to create your own youtube movies and host them on your own private server? Why you ask, well maybe it’s content you don’t want others to view. Prolly this can be done using youtube, but hey I have my own servers and I want it where I have full access! (as do many companies actually).

So how do you do this using opensource tools? Actually very, very simple

I started from this blog entry. But as I’m using ubuntu dapper, I have the nice debian apt tool 🙂

So in short here is what you do:


apt-get install mencoder
apt-get install ruby
apt-get install flvtool2

And I had my tools install (maybe you need some extra depencies here) don’t know actually.
Then the commands like in the previous posts


mencoder \
orig_file.ext \
-ofps 25 \
-o dest_file.flv \
-of lavf \
-oac mp3lame \
-lameopts abr:br=64 \
-srate 22050 \
-ovc lavc \
-lavfopts i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames \
-lavcopts vcodec=flv:keyint=50:vbitrate=300:mbd=2:mv0:trell:\
v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3 -vop scale=320:240

and


flvtool2 -UP dest_file.flv

And you have your indexed flash movie. And may I note the importance of the indexed in the sentence once more. In the past I tried this with a long avi and believe me its no fun if you can’t forward or rewind!!

So then you put the flv file on your server. Now all you need is a flash movie player for playing your content. And I like the flowplayer. You download it, setup a small page like this


<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="FlowPlayer.swf"
width="320" height="263" id="FlowPlayer">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="FlowPlayer.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="scale" value="noScale" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="flashvars" value="videoFile=dest_file.flv"/>
</object>

Et voila, you have your own streaming video. Now put it into a web application and you have your own streaming media center!!

OSS == SWEET

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Opensource security monitor

In my always continuing search for nice opensource tools I sometimes stumble upon some real jems. And I found one (again) 🙂

I have a webcam and I wanted to keep track of what was happening in my appartment when I’m not there. First I tried motion. You start it from the command line, it starts a small web server and there you can configure it. I set it up that on every image that was taken I got notified. After one day I had +2000 mails in my mailbox. 🙁 Hmmm, I need to tweak it a bit. But then I came a cross zoneminder, it really is a nice application. I grabbed the ubuntu debs and installed them with the dependencies and had it up and running in notime!! Only thing I had to do was grant the www-data user access to video hardware. (took me quit some time to figure that one out!!)

Now if something happens I get alerted and a nice movie gets recorded. For anybody who wants some security stuff, really check this out. For a home user this is more than enough imho!!

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Radeon Xinerama

Yesterday I put a new graphics card into my desktop machine (a CGA-P1652 RADEON X1650PRO 512MB) . I hooked my 2 big screens on it and rebooted. My ubuntu dapper couldn’t start gdm (ffcourse). So I apt-getted the ATI drivers and did a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-org, still couldn’t boot. So I started searching, after a while I found the aticonfig tool, one word sweet. I ran it witht he option for dual screen setup and he made a template xorg.conf file.

After adding the Xinerama option and setting the resolutions, I now have a nice widescreen view of my desktop and I can drag my windows over both of them. Life is great! I really believe that multiple screens do increase performance. I also liked the fact that my dapper box now has the ability to modify my screen resolutions using the gnome tool. The last time I did the dual screen setup with ubuntu, the app crashed, guess it wasn’t ready for dual screens. Now it works like a charm!

So people out there with radeon setup problems, one tool : aticonfig

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Topreader Desktop Development (2)

This weekend and this evening I did some more TopReader development. I got stuck on the right mouse click popup (context menu) for creating folders,adding feeds, … I asked #gnome and Murray pointed me to the UIManager class. I have to say this is a nifty thing!!

For those out there who (like me) didn’t know about this Factory, it reads an xml file like the following

<ui>
  <popup name="channelpopupmenu" action="channelpopup">
    <menuitem name="MarkRead" action="MarkRead"/>
  </popup>
  <popup name="folderpopupmenu" action="folderpopupmenu">	
    <menuitem name="CreateFolder" action="CreateFolder"/>	
    <menuitem name="AddFeed" action="AddFeed"/>
  </popup>
</ui>

In your code you just do this for initializing it

uim = new UIManager ();
uim.AddUiFromResource("FeedMenu.xml");

And if you want to show a context menu, you intercept the right mouse click event on your widget and do this little piece of code

Menu w = (Menu)uim.GetWidget("ui/channelpopupmenu");
w.Popup();

The widget is retrieved by the tagname or its actual name
As easy as that!!!

Now we take it a step further. During initalisation we do this

uim = new UIManager ();
uim.InsertActionGroup (group, 0);
uim.AddUiFromResource("FeedMenu.xml");

Where the action group represents a group of Action objects (Duh)

ActionEntry[] entries = new ActionEntry[] {
    			new ActionEntry ("MarkRead", Stock.Cut, "MarkRead", null,
                     "MarkRead",
                     new EventHandler (OnMarkRead)),
                new ActionEntry ("CreateFolder", Stock.Cut, "CreateFolder", null,
                     "CreateFolder",
                     new EventHandler (OnCreateFolder)),
                new ActionEntry ("AddFeed", Stock.Cut, "AddFeed", null,
                     "AddFeed",
                     new EventHandler (OnAddFeed))
                   };

I haven’t configured them as you can see, all are the Cut Stock item.
So we linked the selection of the context menu item with the designed EventHandler.

One word: SWEET

What can I do so far with my app, well I can create folders, add feeds, read feeds, mark a whole feed as read. In the backend the feeds get updated automatically. As I mentioned everything is stored in a small sqlite3 database, for 318 items it’s 600 k, not tho much if you ask me. I wonder how much feeds I can archive before I reach the limit of sqlite (thought that was 2 gigs,but not sure)

I’ll keep you posted (offcourse it’s gonna be opensourced, LGPL probably as I like it more than the GPL)