Category Archives: Technology

System Admin Notes

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Windows 10 is, in some ways, worse(!) than 8.1 was. (Really!)

Since I don’t have time to keep sinking into Windows, here’s what I’ve been doing:

Once you’ve done all that, remember to install an ssh server:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Also, install rbenv (and ruby-build) and a ruby or two. Plus your favorite gems.

Tech Links

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OOPS. I periodically publish a tab sweep. Sometimes (like now) I draft and forget to publish it. This post should have been published in mid-June.

MuPDF is a better PDF reader because it opens large PDFs faster than evince.

Geeqie is an image viewer that offers side-by-side comparisons of images.

Apple announces Swift 2 with new language features, open source. I looked it over, and I think I still like Ruby better. But it’s clearly an improvement over [[Objective] C].

A gallery of everything new in iOS 9. The Podcast app might not be quite as aggravating as before. And they’ve realized that iOS 8’s version of a shift key was a disaster.

Cute: the old After Dark screen saver implemented in CSS.

Datamation: The best features of Libre Office Writer. After using Word 2013 with it’s worst-idea-ever “Ribbon” I’m thinking of switching.

Tech Tab Sweep

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Krita appears to be Gimp spelled sideways, but cross-platform, or more accurately, Gimp:Photoshop::Krita:Painter.

OpenSSH best practices. Mac OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” takes SSH security so seriously that after you upgrade, you can’t log in remotely. Even if you tell it you want to.

Use Ruby to make your graphs look hand-drawn, like the ones in XKCD.

Via RubyFlow: A set of step-by-step TDD tutorials, a library for importing real-world CSV data.

Gruff: a library for creating beautiful charts in Ruby.

Honeybadger.io: Use capture3 instead of backticks: capturing I/O from shell commands. I should be using pry instead of irb, and when I switch, here’s how to work with exceptions in pry.

Microsoft promises that you can clean install Windows 10 after upgrading. Hanselman confirms, but look at the questions in people’s comments. Someone at Microsoft should be asking, why don’t they trust us, and what do we have to do so they start?

Google’s new build tool: Bazel. What are the odds I’d switch when I’m still learning Rake?

Tech Links – May 29

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Three open-source Python shells.

Don’t catch Exceptions. I must have known why I always do rescue => boom to catch exceptions. The reason is that Ruby makes that shorthand for rescue StandardError => boom. Nifty.

libgrader: find quality gems for your next project. It knows about two of my favorites gems: pericope and titleize. (Unlike awesome-ruby.)

Sequel: the database toolkit for Ruby. (Here’s an introductory screencast at RubyTapas.) I keep thinking I should do something with sqlite. Well, really I think I should do something with a database, but I’d rather put it on Drobox than try to figure out how to have a mysql server out on the internet and not regret it.

The reason? Once you’ve used a join you’ll never be content using a spreadsheet for a database. Here’s a quick introduction to joins.

Mac audio graphing tool FuzzMeasure updated. I didn’t remember that it had a name of its own. I thought it was just SuperMegaUltraGroovy. Anyway, every time I look at this I think to myself about the software I wrote in the mid-90s and all the cool graphs I’d like to have implemented.

Tech Links

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Simple Audio Conversion with FFMpeg. Is that still a thing? I can’t keep up with all the forks.

On-demand System Tray. I can’t stand the Unity Panel. Give me back my WindowMaker. (Like that’s going to happen. Even MacOSX is disowning the awesome NeXT UX.)

How to add extra airplanes on FlightGear Flight Simulator. I’m not much of a gamer so I didn’t know there was such a game. But, judging from the screenshots, Linux games have sure improved.

Windows 8 Setup (Continued)

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I’m moving from a Mac to a Windows PC at work, and I’ve been blogging some of the things I’m doing to set up my computer.

There’s two things I wish I could just set up: rsync and a decent command shell.

Rsync

I don’t know how you write a server for Windows, but it’s amazing to me that Rsync hasn’t caught on there. Especially since it was developed by the same guy who gave us Samba. (Maybe that’s the point. Note the direction of the copying arrow.) (Don’t tell me about DeltaCopy. It may be great for moving things between Windows machines, but I’m not hoping to do that a lot. I want a cross-platform solution. I need to explore cwrsync.)

Shell

Cygwin gives you a pretty good set of proper command line utilities. The biggest problem is that it needs a command-line tool like apt or yum to keep it up-to-date. I’m looking into apt-cyg.

But a shell needs a terminal emulator to run in, and Cmd.exe doesn’t cut it. Again, I’m puzzled by the dearth of alternatives, especially since the one Microsoft included was so crappy. There are probably a dozen decent terminal emulators in the Linux world, and a couple for Mac OS X.

So right now I’m trying to figure out cmder. It appears to be a fresh implementation of a terminal emulator.

Windows PC Start-up List

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Download a copy of PC-Decrapifier (or Decrap) and Should I Remove It. (You’ll need to get other things from Ninite (below) but start by getting Revo Uninstaller in case you’re having trouble decrapifying something.)

Product Key Finder by Magical Jellybean.

From Ninite.com create installers for:

  • Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. You can’t have too many alternatives to Exploder.
  • Dropbox and Google Drive.
  • Notepad++, Python, WinSCP, Putty, and WinMerge
  • LibreOffice

vim and gow (Gnu on Windows) and maybe Cygwin.

Ruby Windows Installer.

pdftk

Telegram Desktop

MarkdownPad (or pay $15 and get Pro)

Be not slow to consult Alternative To.

And when you’re ready, make a backup image using Clonezilla. Or at least a system restore point.

Tech Tab Sweep

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It’s time to upgrade your Ubuntu machines.

8 things to do after installing Ubuntu 15.04. One of the items is to add a tweak tool, which reminded me of Unsettings.

I’m working on a similar list for Windows, except (a) nobody gets to install Windows, you have to buy a PC with it preinstalled, and (b) there are about 300 things you have to do next.

Speaking of Ubuntu…. I barely know what a .deb is, so this article was complete gibberish to me, with all this talk about Snaps and Snappy for future releases of Ubuntu.

Bjarne Stroustrup outlines changes in store for C++ in v17. I can barely remember how awesome I used to think C++ was back in 1986. And compared to C, I guess is was, then. Today—forget about it. Just give me a scripting language.

Finally: During the 1990’s I used to be a DIY system builder, but the past decade or two I’ve been too busy and too impoverished. And there’s a lot to be said for buying something small. Still, I might get around to building something again someday. This sounds like fun: