A Bit of Sense

Here I talk about my expericne with computers, software and computer programming. Let me warn you that some of this stuff will be technical. I'll aim to give you fair notice for technical posts.

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Location: Massachusetts, United States

Monday, January 30, 2006

Laptop Struggle


I bought a used laptop two weeks ago. I asked the sales person at the store if I could do compatibility testing for Ubuntu and they said sure. I poped in my bootable live CD restarted the machine and in about 5 minutes I was running Linux and able to test the system for compatibility. It worked great. One thing I noticed later on was that Linux couldn't read the level of the battery. This could be a big problem in the future if I can't get this to work.

At first it seemed to be running fine, and then all of a sudden it stopped working. I was about to take it into the shop when all of a sudden it began to work again. I began to notice a problem that the laptop would charge for a while and then stop. The AC adapter was still plugged into it, but it was not charging. I found that unplugging the adapter and replacing after a few seconds it will begin charging again. I took it into the shop and hopefully they'll be able to figure out the cause. ...Very strange...

While, I was figuring this all out I was able to begin to configure the system the way I wanted it. My initial plan was to resize the existing WinXP/NTFS partition to make room for Ubuntu. I quickly discovered (as I had guessed) that NTFS is not supported by gparted that comes with Ubuntu Linux. My second option was to buy a copy of partition magic online and use this to resize the drive. However, before getting this far I began to get the "Blue Screen of Death" each time I attempted to use the wireless network card. I had already noticed some odd things that made me think that the company that sold me the laptop had not reinstalled Windows for me. In retrospect I think perhaps it was wishful thinking on my part to think they would.

I decided in light of these two problems (difficulty changing the partition size and problems with the installed version of Windows) I would just repartition the entire drive and create partitions for Ubuntu, Windows and additional partitions for other Operating Systems I might choose later on. (I created a FAT32 filesystem for Windows so I could access those files from Linux.) Quite to me surprise installing windows was a pain. Installing the driver for the wireless card caused by computer to freeze and then several of the windows updates would not install and I searched through help docuementation and microsoft forums to no avail. Installing Ubuntu, was a breeze. The only issue was when it asked for a WEP Key there was no space to specify the type of encryption like 64bit/128bit/256 etc. I'll need to figure that out when the system comes back from the shop.

All in all, I am starting to wish I had just bought a new fully (GNU/)Linux compatible Laptop and saved myself some trouble. On the other hand it was kinda fun in a geeky sort of way. ;) If they still haven't gotten it fixed when I call (tomorrow?), I think I'll ask them if they'll return my money.

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Thursday, January 26, 2006

Quicker Tag Generation

Quicker Tag Generation

When I was creating the last post I was thinking writing out a long list of tags is a pain in the neck. For one or two tags this is easy especially when I can copy and paste from my previous post. However, when adding more tags then this the process starts to get awkward. I've come up with a quick and dirty solution to this problem. I've used the python programming language to create a very quick 'script' to get the job done.

Here it is:



tags = raw_input("Enter a list of tags separated by commas:"
).split(',')
html = [
'<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/%s" rel="tag">%s</a>'
% (t.strip(), t.strip()) for t in tags]
open('tags.txt', 'w').write(
"<b>Tags:</b> " + ", ".join(html
))


Given a line of text like such as "security,windows,install,software" the script takes this list of tags and adds the HTML tag code around the list. It then saves the list to a file called tags.txt.

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Software I install to protect my computer online

I am no expert on computer security, but since I've installed these measures my computers have yet to be infected by a worm or virus, and I find I get less spyware and only the tracking tracking cookie type.

Here are the steps in the order I take them when I (re)install windows on a home PC.

* Get a firewall. (I use Zone Alarm personal) This isn't the easiest to use product in the world, but it should be straightforward to anyone with a fair amount of computer experience.

* Get an Anti-Virus product. (I use AVG Free Edition) This program is a real snap to setup.

* Get Service Pack 2 if running Windows XP.

* Get all outstanding windows updates and do this regularly or automatically.

* Get a web browser that isn't Internet Explorer (I use firefox).

* Get software to help defend against Spyware, multiple tools work better then just one. (I use Spybot-SD, Ad-Aware & Spyware Blaster.)

All of this software can be downloaded for free.

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Monday, January 16, 2006

Technorati Howto - Part II: Tag your posts & ping your blog

This post is slightly technical

(Continued from my post earlier this morning)

Now that you've claimed your blog you will want to start tagging. Here is an example tag:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/mytag" rel="tag">mytag</a>

When you add it to your post it will look like this:



When you create a tag replace the word 'mytag' with the name of the tag that you want to use. Replace both of 'mytag' in the text the first one is what counts to technorati and the second is what your reader's will see. You should add code like the above for each tag that you create. [Since originally posting this I've created some lines of python code to automate the embedding of tags in the html markup above.]

You can select one of your existing posts, edit it and add tags to it to see how this works. You can also use the tools to add a technorati search box into your blog - see their website for details. I've got one myself.

Once you've completed your post you will need to ping technorati to let them know that you have made a change to it. Instead of pinging every time you make a change to your blog you could just automate the process. Use this link for automatic pinging: http://www.technorati.com/developers/ping/ Select the publishing tool that you use for your blog and follow the directions. If you do not want to automate or you are unable to then use this link http://www.technorati.com/ping.html

You will want to manually ping yourself the first time since you have already published your post.

Ok, thats it. You are done!

If you haven't yet implmented Part I by claiming your blog you can do that now. Click Here

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Technorati Howto - Part I: Claim your Blog

This post is slightly technical

Well Woman asked me how to setup Technorati tags so I went in and figured it out. While I setup my second blog I will explain what I am doing.

A how-to is an informal, often short, description of how to accomplish some specific task. They are generally meant to help non-experts, and may leave out details that are only important to experts, and may be greatly simplified from an overall discussion of the topic. See procedural knowledge for a discussion of what sort of knowledge is imparted, and how far it can be imparted, in how-tos. taken from Wikipedia

"Claim your blog" (This step is optional)

go to http://technorati.com/. If you have firefox middle click this link to open technorati in a new tab. This will make it easy to refer back to the instructions.

Search for the text 'Claim Blog' on this page (control-F on most browsers). Click on this link.

Create a new account entering in the required fields.

(I had a problem that technorati was redirecting me back to the index page when I did this. I found that somehow I had configured firefox to disable cookies to this site. When I re-enabled cookies it worked fine.)

Now you should be looking at a claim your blog page. Enter the URL of your blog into the text box that displays. Mine is http://bitofsense.blogspot.com/. Press the "Begin claim" button. Use the quick claim if it is an option and enter your blogger username and password. Press the button to claim "now".

Enter a Description, I used the same text as my blog. You may need to shrink it down a bit in order to fit their limited length. Select the language you will use as your default language. Select some keywords to use for your blog. Be creative.

You may choose to "Show Technorati Embed on my site" (I did and choose to add the "Technorati Search Box" on my pages by clicking the checkbox next to this item.

There is a bit of java script code here in a text box that you will need to add to your template.

Something like:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://embed.technorati.com/embed/rfyd5diuig.js"></script>

Details of installing the script:

From firefox press control-T to open a new tab or open a new window in another browser.

Sign in to edit your blog in this new window. (I will give instructions for blogger.com.) Click on your blog. Then template. I copied my template into textpad (you can use notepad or whatever you have or just edit in the browser). Find the HTML div id="sidebar" and insert the script somewhere before the /div. Copy this text back into the template and click 'Save Template Changes.' Click the republish your blog button.

(Optionally you can look for the java script in your page source after reloading to make sure it is there.)

Finally hit "save changes".

Congratulations! If you have followed these steps you have done the first and largest step of the process to setting up technorati for your blog.

When you are ready for part II. Here is the link.


Sunday, January 15, 2006

Where in the world?



create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

Where have I been?

Here is a map of all of the states that I have visited. I may have missed a few, but this is the general idea.



create your own personalized map of the USA
or check out ourCalifornia travel guide

Ubuntu: Getting Serious

This post is moderately technical

I've been meaning to install Linux (some call it GNU/Linux, but I don't want to get in to politics right now)on one of my computers for a long time. However, when I first started this was a difficult thing to do. One had to know all the ins and outs of the computer in order to tell Linux which device drivers to load and how to load them. I think this was back about 1998 or so.

Almost a year ago now I decided that I was really going to try and switch over this time. I got out a copy of Debian GNU/Linux and installed it on my old machine and I managed to get it running somewhat, but there were a few issues. Debian is one of the distributions of Linux. You can think of a distribution as a flavor or variety of Linux. Here is a list of Linux distributions.

I found a local Linux users group and started attending. The leader of that group introduced me to the Ubuntu Linux distribution and I was hooked.

I installed Ubuntu on my secondary (and very old) computer. It took some effort to get the hardware recognized, but a lot easier then in the "old days". Hardware issues can happen with any Operating System, but since Windows comes pre installed on computers this is rarely an issue for causal users of Windows.

The collection of software offered for Ubuntu is pretty impressive and it is a lot more up to date then what one might find in Debian. Installing new software is a snap. You just need to find the applications you want in a list and then check them off and then press an apply button and Ubuntu will install the software automatically with reasonable default settings. It is a snap! I ripped a number of CDs as well. The ripping software is installed by default and was easy to use. I did however, not have the choice of ripping to MP3 format. This seems a little silly to me since MP3 is the most type of music file. Even if it is a little old.

I've setup this secondary computer of mine to have three different Operating Systems: Windows XP, Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu Linux. I've had some trouble getting it to work the way I want it to and I think part of the problem is the age of the hardware. Currently I boot to Boot Magic, then I can select Debian which loads GRUB and from here I can pick Debian or Ubuntu. For some reason the Ubuntu GRUB does not display the start up menu even though the configuration is the same and Ubuntu Grub is a higher version.

I am planning to purchase a laptop for Linux soon. I'll give an update when I do. The Ubuntu home page is http://ubuntu.com/.





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