Computers
Google Chrome Extension Recommendations
Dec 9th
Recently, Google opened up its Chrome Extension Gallery for use with the Google Chrome Browser. The beta channel and dev channel versions of Chrome have had extension support for a while, but with the opening of Google’s official gallery, many new extensions have been made public. In my opinion, extensions are the main thing Chrome has been missing in comparison to Firefox so far. Here is a list of several extensions I recommend. These extensions get Chrome very close to feature parity with Firefox for my uses, with the one glaring exception of a replacement for Firefox’s NoScript.
AdThwart – AdThwart is an ad blocker that ports parts of Adblock Plus from Firefox to Chrome. It’s still early in its development so it still doesn’t compare to Adblock Plus, but so far this seems to be the ad-blocking system with the most potential on Chrome.
Bit.ly Shorten Url – If you use Twitter much, you’re probably familiar with URL shorteners like bit.ly. This extension puts a button in your address bar that shortens the current page’s URL with bit.ly. Simple and effective.
Chromed Bird – A simple Twitter client that sits in the toolbar. It updates you with new tweets and allows you to tweet without going to the Twitter website.
ChromeMilk – A great client for Remember the Milk, the online to-do list software, that sits in the toolbar.
One Number – Addicted to Google? This extension keeps you up to date on GMail, Google Wave, Google Reader and Google Voice.
XMarks for Chrome – Chrome does incorporate Google Bookmarks, but I find XMarks gives much more control on what is synced and where, plus it works on more browsers. Just like XMarks’ extension on other browsers, this one syncs your bookmarks online for free and lets you choose which bookmarks are which computers.
youTagger and YouTube HTML5-ifier – Don’t like Flash, but like YouTube? No problem! These extensions replace the YouTube Flash Player with YouTube’s new HTML5-based player. The HTML5 player improves performance of YouTube videos and makes them less likely to crash the browser. I’m currently listing both extensions because each has an issue that could bug you. youTagger works everywhere but loads the low quality version of the video. YouTube HTML5-ifier loads the highest quality version of the video, but only works when directly on a YouTube video page, not on embedded YouTube videos or on YouTube User Channels.
Hopefully, proper high-granularity content blocking will be implemented soon so that real equivalents to Adblock Plus and NoScript on Firefox become possible.
Functional Programming from Microsoft?
Nov 11th
Ars Technica reports that Microsoft will be bringing a functional programming lanaguage to Visual Studio, called F#. The language is a functional langugage that is based on OCaml and will of course link in with .Net.
I find this very interesting. Learning different programming paradigms (like procedural, object-oriented, functional, structured, logic and so on) is a good thing for programmers to do. I see this as a good thing that Microsoft is encouraging functional programming. My favorite lesser-known programming language is Scheme, another functional programming language.
One of the problems with less popular programming lanaguages (the popular ones are usually only procedural, structural or object-oriented languages) is that there are few libraries to support them so its hard to actually do something useful. Microsoft linking F# to .Net will be benefitial to the Windows world by bringing the power of .Net (and Mono, in a way) to functional programming. I have a feeling that Microsoft Live Labs has something to do with this and did it so they can do cool projects that take advantage of functional programming paradigms.
This news just shows yet again how unpredictable Microsoft is because of its size. Some parts of it are making blunder after blunder while others keep doing tons of amazing things like this.
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Ubuntu 7.10 Post-Install Guide
Nov 1st
As many of you know, Ubuntu 7.10 was released last week. I wrote up a little guide for Jonathan on some things I recommend setting up post-install and he thought I should post it here. If you’re unfamiliar with Ubuntu, read this review of the operating system. So here’s the guide, modified slightly:
Ubuntu 7.10 Post-Install Guide v1.1
Do This First — Enable All Software Repositories:
1. Open up Synaptic Package Manager (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager).
2. Go to Settings->Repositories.
3. Check all boxes under “Downloadable from the Internet” in the “Ubuntu Software” tab and under “Ubuntu Updates” in the “Updates” tabs, then press Close.
4. Press Reload button to reload the repository cache.
Recommended Software Packages to Install, In No Particular Order:
ubuntu-restricted-extras — A collection of common “non-free” software, like flash, mp3, dvd playback, java, rar, microsoft fonts and lots of codecs.
gnome-themes-extra — More themes for gnome
nvidia-glx-new — The latest, greatest nvidia driver for the 8000 series of cards. Ubuntu may prompt you to add this during the install, which takes care of this for you.
amarok — An excellent music-library-based music player similar to iTunes (except that it doesn’t suck like iTunes).
audacious — A simple winamp-style music player.
jokosher — An excellent audio editor.
ardour-i686 — An excellent audio editor, optimized for i686.
armagetronad — Tron light cycles in 3D!
vlc — A simple and effective video player just like the windows version.
mplayer-nogui — A GUI-less video player. uses the keyboard for controls. very 1337. 
warsow — You already know what this is! 
kate — The text editor of choice (though GNOME’s text editor “gedit” is of comparable quality these days)
k3b — A CD/DVD burner similar to Nero that’s better than the one installed by default.
emacs — Just kidding! I’d never recommend that!
katapult — A keystroke application launcher, similar to Launchy on Windows or Quicksilver on OS X. Add it to the startup items by going to “System->Preferences->Startup Items” and adding the command “katapult” after installing it.
deluge — Excellent bittorrent client, comparable to uTorrent on windows
Notes:
1. I’ve never used jokosher or ardour, but they’re supposed to be the best out there for creating/mixing audio on Linux. Ardour is the more powerful and complex of the two. Give them a try for making your music. Check out http://ardour.org and http://jokosher.org for help using them.
2. If these packages prompt you that dependencies need to be installed, just ok it.
Compiz Fusion in 5 Easy Steps:
1. First you need the nvidia driver installed, as recommended above. So install nvidia-glx-new and reboot. As mentioned above, Ubuntu may prompt you to add this during the install, which takes care of this step for you.
2. Some of compiz will already be installed, so just install compizconfig-settings-manager and emerald from Synaptic Package Manager (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager)
3. Go to the Appearance Settings (System->Preferences->Appearance) and go to the Desktop Effects tab to enable compiz.
4. Run the Compizconfig Settings Manager to configure compiz.
5. Enjoy!
Common Things to Explore and Tweak:
Desktop Theme Options — found in System->Preferences->Appearance
Display Options — found in “System->Administration->Screens and Graphics” (only needed if it didn’t autodetect the right resolution/refresh rate)
Firefox extension browser and install wizard — in Firefox, go to Tools->Add-Ons, go to the Extensions tab and click on the “Install Ubuntu Add-ons” link on the bottom right.
Install some programs — either via the “Applications->Add/Remove Programs” fancy user-friendly interface or the “System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager” powerful list interface.
Changing default program for a file type — right click on file, go to Properties, go to the “Open With” tab in the window that pops up and select the program.
Installing a printer — Just plug it in! That’s all!
More Information:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org — Excellent user forums
http://www.ubuntuguide.org — A huge how-to for everything.
http://screencasts.ubuntu.com — Screencasts that give how-to’s for various linux tasks.
Sour Apple
Sep 14th
Sour Apple? No, not a Blow Pops commercial from the 80’s, this is about Apple Computer Inc., er… Apple Inc.. Yeah it’s been a long time since I’ve posted something. I’ve considered posting here for a while and for some reason an article I saw on Boing Boing compelled me to do so.
The article is about Apple adding a cryptographic block to their new iPods to prevent them from syncing with anything but iTunes. While I understand that they probably want to make it harder for competing online music services to get their music onto the iPod. They’re trying to look out for the iPod/iTunes brand but they somehow completely missed the point. Part of the iPod’s continued success is that it is now so ubiquitous, everything is compatible with it. By doing this, they not only made it so fringe users like me are less likely to buy it because we run a flavor of Linux or BSD or Solaris or whatever and use programs like Amarok or GtkPod to transfer our songs, but it makes a large portion of people who use OS X and Windows less likely to buy it too. There are currently many many alternative solutions for syncing music on Windows like Anapod Explorer and Media Monkey. I’m confident that there’s numerous solutions on OS X too. iTunes really isn’t that good of a program. Those alternative solutions make an iPod a viable choice even for those people who don’t like iTunes, of which there are many. Once Apple makes it absolutely necessary that you use iTunes with their device, a lot of people won’t be happy.
Personally, I switched back to Creative players with my last mp3 player purchase this April and bought a Zen Vision: M 60GB, after owning an iPod Color that finally died after a good 2-3 years of heavy usage and even surviving my car accident. That said, an iPod was always a viable option that I considered. After seeing the new iPod Touch, I even had been thinking that my next mp3 player may be a 3rd generation iPod Touch 2-3 years from now, once the capacity of a flash memory based drive gets up to where hard drive based players are today (60GB+). If Apple continues to cripple their products like they are, an iPod won’t even be something I consider. Sure, there will be hacks to make it work, especially for Linux, but sometimes it’s not worth the hassle and I certainly wouldn’t want to support these types of practices by buying such a product.
With this issue and recently reading about the cable fiasco surrounding the new generation of iPods, maybe PC World is right in suggesting the Apple is becoming the new Microsoft.
Seamless Virtualization (or, the new “Coherence Mode”)
Apr 23rd
For a while now, despite the fact that I’m not a fan of Mac OS X, there’s been one thing I’ve been envious of. Parallels Desktop… or more specifically, its Coherence Mode. Parallels is a virtualization server that allows you to run one OS in another. That alone isn’t very special. There’s tons of programs that can do that in linux, like VMWare, VirtualBox, KVM and of course QEMU. The special thing that the Mac OS X version of Parallels has is coherence mode. This mode allows you to not show the entire Windows desktop. You can view individual windows as just windows, so it is as if they are running natively under Mac OS X. This is an excellent feature that makes virtualization even easier and quicker (less processing of unused desktop space and windows). Parallels has said for a while that they’ll update their linux version to add coherence mode, but it doesn’t seem like they will do so anytime soon.
Fortunately, that no longer matters. With a little trickery of QEMU, the kvm paravirtualization drivers in the latest linux kernel (2.6.20 as of this writing), and a little program called rdesktop, linux can do the same. The Ubuntu Wiki details setting up Windows XP in QEMU (for the creation of the virtual machine) and then setting up rdesktop (for the creation of our very own “coherence mode”). It must be noted that these walkthroughs on the Ubuntu Wiki are designed for Ubuntu 7.04 only, because it is the first version to include kernel 2.6.20 and its paravirtualization support.
I can’t say yet how well it works, but I plan to set this up once my projects are over next week and I’m “studying” for exams. I’ll report back on how it went.
Firefox Search Keywords
Apr 18th
I was talking with Jonathan about search keywords in Firefox today and said I’d send him my search keyword bookmarks file because he hadn’t used them before. This is one of those things that is too valuable to not share, so I’m posting the info here. The Firefox search keyword is an excellent feature that unfortunately few people know about. It’s basically an extension of the bookmark. Here’s how it works: You can assign bookmarks a keyword. You can then type this keyword into the address bar and the browser brings you directly to the bookmarked URL. In addition to that, there is a special identifier, %s, that you can insert into the address of the bookmark. Then if you put text after the keyword in the address bar, the text will be inserted into the URL where the %s was.
Here’s an example: If you have a bookmark of “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s” and give it a keyword “g”, then typing “g linux” into the address bar will bring you to “http://www.google.com/search?q=linux”, which is a Google search for linux. That’s it.
Here’s a bookmark file that includes the search keywords I use: Kevin’s Search Keywords
Just import that into Firefox to use them. After the cut is a description of each included search keyword.
