IncentivesPro make a product I recently used for a Virtual Desktop Thin Client Implementation. That is USB Redirection for Remote Desktop. It uses a proprietary client/server and so I used Windows XP embedded thin clients to redirect specialised USB Thermal Laser Printers to the Vista Virtual Machines. The website looks a bit underwhelming but the product is flawless and it’s priced much better than their competitors. If you have more time than I did, it’s likely you can get the Linux client working with Thinstation

For the other desktops, I used 2x’s Thin Client Server that use PXE (or USB / CDRom) to boot the original desktops over the network, essentially converting the original desktops into diskless thin clients. It’s a shame you can’t build your own images or add your own software to 2x’s desktop as I really didn’t like having to implement the Windows XP embedded thin clients.

As it’s a small environment, we are using VMWare Vsphere 4.0 free version. I was aiming to use Xenserver 5.5 but it doesn’t natively support Tape Drive passthrough to the client and I wanted to easily accomplish this without kernel rebuilds, as it is possible to achieve this with Xen by recompiling the kernel with ISCSI support and making the Tape Drive an ISCSI target.

Some other useful software was SplitView, allowing the accountant to use Dual Monitors. RDP  5.2 only allows to use the mstsc.exe /span option which spans the monitor across two screens. Splitview allows you to manage those windows as individual desktops. The only issue I had was with Adobe Reader 9.2, I had to add it to the exceptions list in Splitview otherwise it would crash.

Technorati Tags: vmware, vdi, virtual desktop, remote desktop, rdp, thin client

I have previous written about PDF Editors for Windows and Linux here and here, so this is, in effect Part 3.

I have used OpenOffice PDF Import Extension, PDFEdit and numerous other tools listed in my first posts but nothing works as well as the latest Inkscape. It has one downside though, right now. That is, you can only edit one page at a time.

So here’s a random PDF I found by googling for random PDF ;). Here’s a shot of the first page in my PDF Viewer (evince).

Now we open Inkscape click File -> Open and you will see the following dialogue box where we can choose which page to import.

Now you can see that the page imported perfectly into Inkscape and objects are editable.

and finally, here’s our slightly edited, more up-to-date version.

A few other tips.

Inkscape won’t import encrypted PDF’s. To get around this you can use pdftops .pdf which turns the PDF into a Postscript file. You can then use ps2pdf .ps to return the file back into an unencrypted pdf.

On Linux, you can print to PDF automatically. On Windows, you will want to have installed a PDF Printer, like PDFCreator and on Mac OSX, read this tutorial about setting up a free PDF printer.

If you need to merge multiple PDF’s into a single PDF, there is a nice tool called PDFtk that can do that for you which is available for Windows, MacOSX and Linux.

Technorati Tags: open source, pdf editor, pdf editing, inkscape, pdfcreator, pdftk, ps2pdf, pdftops

Skype for Asterisk has been released at last.

A new Skype for Linux Beta 2.1.047 has been released which fixes CPU problems with new PulseAudio and works brilliantly and also adds SMS support.

Also, I came across a very Rapid Application framework for building Ajax web apps called Wavemaker. They have an open source version and an Enterprise Version. Watch one of the videos where he builds a searchable client database in 10 minutes while explaining concepts.

Also, an announcement from Netenberg, the people who make Fantastico for Cpanel have announced that they will be open sourcing their AccountLab Plus application in Jan 2010.

Technorati Tags: cpanel, web hosting, skype, ria, javascript framework, open source

Chromium is the open source version of Google Chrome for Linux. It’s still in alpha stage but it’s been very stable for me. The biggest downside is lack of Flash support for things like Google Analytics and Youtube.

For Ubuntu, install Chromium like so:

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main #chromium-browser" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chromium.list
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

to get Flash working:

cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins
sudo ln -s ../../flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

Screenshot running on 64bit Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope. Watching this was consuming approx 25% cpu in a single chromium process instance:

Flash for Chromium on Linux

I am now likely to spend most of my day in Chromium, though extensions are working in Chromium, my favourite part of Opera is native mouse gestures. I tested a few of the mouse gestures available for Chromium but none are working very well at the moment.

I will still use Firefox for it extensions like Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar & Yslow

Today, I came across a document where I had to type a degree symbol in Linux. Thanks to this post at Arch Linux Forums, it was painless to find out how. So here it is:

In windows, apparently you hold down Alt+0176.

Linux is different and to achieve the same, hold down Ctrl+Shift and type u+00b0, though if you are writing for html, the correct symbol is

°

Alternatively you can copy and paste it from this table on wikipedia, which includes other useful symbols like Pound, Registered and Copyright.

It will actually type the u00b0 until you complete and then it will form the degree symbol like so: °

Technorati Tags: html, unicode, linux, degree, symbols, typography

Anyway, my sister-in-law purchased a Mini-DVD Sony camera. It just so happens that Linux doesn’t support this format at the moment (though Windows 2003 doesn’t natively either), so be warned. Anyway, we managed to use Sony’s software to dump it to a Windows 2003 server and pulled it across to my Ubuntu machine. All I wanted to do was to grab these 5 movies and put them into standard DVD format. I wanted to do both PAL and NTSC because these DVD’s are going to South America and although they use NTSC there, it’s nothing to burn both just in case there’s some issue with one or the other.

So.. how hard could it be to do this? It turned out to be quite difficult using the Linux tools I could find..

First, I came across a post that uses DVDStyler, it’s not in Ubuntu repo’s but they have some deb packages so I download and install them. They are only in i386 architecture, so I –force-architecture and they install. Go to load it and I get this:

dvdstyler: error while loading shared libraries: libswscale.so.ld: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I run ldconfig and still the same error message.. It’s 9:30pm, I want to have a playable DVD by 10:30-11pm. Let’s try something else.

So, I then come across any2dvd - usage: any2dvd [ options ] [ -i ] [ input_file1 input_file2 ... ]

It’s claim to fame? A script to transform PC multimedia file(s) in any format, into a DVD complete with menus & suitable for playback on a standalone DVD player.

Sounds good.. let’s try it –

/usr/bin/any2dvd: 337 : let: not found
/usr/bin/any2dvd: 369 : Syntax Error : “(” unexpected

Again, I have no desire to go debugging this or reporting a bug and waiting for an answer. I just want something that works, tonight and gives me what I want.

Next!

I read a bit about dvdauthor and it seems like it’s a bit more mature (and has 1000 options like most video editing apps) and see there’s a gui for it also called Qdvdauthor AND it’s in Hardy’s repositories, so I apt-get install dvdauthor qdvdauthor.

Kick off qdvdauthor. Ok, this loads and looks fine. I go to add the video files as suggested.. All the thumbnails read “Error” . So I hit the website, find the forums and lo and behold.. I find this post describing my issue.

I really don’t feel like compiling both from source, so it’s about 10:15pm now. I decide that I have been defeated due to lack of time and my trusty Linux desktop just can’t achieve such a task easily, so I decide to look for a Windows application that can do what I need. If you have never seen it, the website “The Free Country” is generally a trusty website to find good, free tools. So I thought.. why not try and run one of these under wine. So, I download two of them. Video DVD Maker, which installed but didn’t run and then I installed DVD Flick, which is actually an open source project host at Sourceforge. DVD Flick installed and ran perfectly on my Ubuntu 64bit Hardy Heron. I selected it to create an ISO file which I then burned using Brasero. DVD Flick is as simple as you can get, load it, select your video files, add a few titles if you like and away you go. by 11:15pm I had my DVD playing on the DVD player.

An ironic sidenote is that DVD Flick installs ffmpeg.exe and uses the cygwin.dll to call it. Using wine to call cygwin to emulate linux – crazy.. but it works.

Here’s the traditional screenshot to see it’s simplicity.

Dreamweaver was a slightly different story, especially as layouts became more complex and the html grew in size, it had a tendency to crash under wine in these circumstances. I run a horizontal split window of the design view and code view. Sometimes, it’s easier to achieve what you want in one or the other.

Until recently, I was unable to find something that a) Performed the job as good (or close to) both Dreamweaver and Fireworks and b) Felt natural to use and learn.

For imaging / design: “The Gimp”
Web ‘development’: Screem or Bluefish

For numerous reasons, these never cut it for me. I am not a fan of Photoshop / The Gimp interface and while I was able to get around and do things I needed to do, it felt slow and awkward. Both screem and bluefish had no way to quickly view your changes in the IDE or to make changes visually.

That said, all three programs are very capable it’s just that they don’t suit my way of doing things.

I now am slowly migrating to two new tools for web development.

Replacing Fireworks – Inkscape has come to the rescue.
Replacing Dreamweaver – Kompozer is here to help.

Inkscape

Just the last 2 weeks I have really begun getting into Inkscape, an amazingly capable and well designed vector graphics editor that (apart from the odd crash – though it manages to save your work) is proving to me to be even better than Fireworks. It’s like Freehand and Fireworks all in one beautifully wrapped package – that can even be scripted in Python.

I am certainly no graphics guru but I’m definitely above average compared to most non-professional graphics users.

Apart from the user interface being well thought out, the other great things about Inkscape are:

1. Excellent Tutorials and Resources
2. Keyboard Shortcuts for almost anything.
3. In-built access to Open Clipart (0.46 Linux only)

Here’s a quicklist of places to find great inkscape tutorials:

• Inkscape Tutorials
• Heathenex Screencasters
• Inkscape Docs (in 12 languages)
• Nicu Bunu
• Inkscape Book

a feature I would love to see is the ability to automatically download any open source fonts found in your Inkscape document, so that sharing files could be easier.

Inkscape is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and can be downloaded here

It is available via apt-get and yum repositories in their respective Linux distributions.

Kompozer

Kompozer is an unofficial bug-fix release of ‘Nvu’, which was born out of Mozilla’s Composer. The advantage of this is that Kompozer uses the gecko engine to render Kompozer’s layouts within itself much like you can with Dreamweaver (ie: without opening an external browser to view your layout). Additionally, it has very good support for CSS, XML and Javascript editing and a built-in W3C HTML Validator.

I have had Kompozer crash on me, usually when pasting in a large HTML page from elsewhere but other than that, it is an extremely user friendly and capable HTML/CSS/JS editor.

It is not an ASP / PHP / Python IDE and doesn’t make any attempts to be one. From that perspective I feel it encourages clean separation of code and layout.

Once again, Kompozer is also cross-platform and is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X

My list of different time tracking / logging applications:

Preferably looking for a desktop application (multi-platform) like Rescuetime that reports application usage to our own centralised server. Desktop client would have prompting and automated features like CaptureWorks and Allnetic to minimise discrepancies and increase workflow.

Any comments, please leave them below. Would love to hear of others.

As per some previous posts, I like to be able to jump seamlessly between platforms. I don’t want to be tied down to anything if I can help it. This is why I wouldn’t buy an Ipod and like Mark Pilgrim, I don’t get the iphone phenomena. I want to use my application online, offline seamlessly. I want to have the same experience, no matter where I am, what I am doing etc. Software like NoMachine’s NX server give me this ability. I have a ultra-portable laptop I bought for $280 on ebay, I have Three wireless, which means I can be a passenger in a car / train / ferry / bus nearly anywhere in metro-Sydney and still have access to my Ubuntu desktop.. that’s frikkin’ cool.

But what about when I don’t have internet access? Well, I previously used Ifolder to keep all my files in sync (which uses mono btw) but ifolder has to be the worst managed open source project I have ever used. Trying to keep a client / server combination that worked together proved to be a feat for me too many times and finally I went in search of something else. I then switched over to Mindquarry (I could have just used svn with some python scripts that watched folders and syncs when it sees a change, I guess) but Mindquarry actually offers a few more features than svn or Ifolder alone ie: Tasks, timeline, wiki and teams.

So, now we have our files synchronised and I use imap, so we have mail synchronised and I have used sitebar for bookmarks for a very long time but there’s something more. What about my feeds in opera? all my vim settings? my bash_profile alias? This is where I think Conduit will be able to help me out eventually (one of the reasons I looked forward to moving to Gnome)

Now, I am really raising two separate issues here. On one hand, I am talking about syncronising two separate computers and on the other, I am talking about a seamless experience between online and offline applications. I think the first is mostly being taken care of. The second issue has some solutions becoming available also. This is where I see stuff like Google Gears, Adobe Air and db4o especially their db4o replication systemproving to show their usefulness.

Sidenote: In the Enterprise Data Centre, Lefthandnetworks has some very similar concepts happening for data virtualisation for online / offline drs solutions as db4o has for persistance – and more importanly for me, their new VMware product looks very promising for high availability + drs soutions using vmware.

So, now I bring up my original point in my posting. Let’s say we develop a desktop applications using db4o (mono bindings available) and I think we could even do that using the .Net python-like language called Boo – the developer of said language happens to also be a developer of db4o. Now, we take said winForms application and deploy it to the web using Visual WebGui. Now, I know the web purists might find this all very freakish as I haven’t done a W3C Validation on it, but I am half-certain something will be wrong and it’s not the sort of thing you are going to be delivering to blind people. I am talking about applications with a specific user base, something like a Mobile Lender, Mobile Salesperson, Microfinancing in remote areas etc.

In my post A Case for Learning Python I put forth my reasoning for deciding to spend all energy learning a language in Python – I don’t think any other language can offer the same access to so much for so little (time investment) as Python.

I will add something to the original list: Windmill is a web testing framework intended for complete automation of user interface testing, with strong test debugging capabilities and of course, it’s written in Python and uses CherryPy.

Also, in the same vein are WebUnit and Twill (both written in Python)

Technorati Tags: python, ajax, winforms, mono, django, visual webgui, mindquarry, gnome, conduit

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