Nomachine – FreeNX fullscreen switching

Something that was not obvious to me when using NX client was the ability to get out of fullscreen. I initially thought that they just hadn’t implemented it as yet.. but we are now on version 3 and I thought that the mere oversight should have been fixed by now.

Well, I don’t know if it has always been there but there’s two ways to switch between the remote desktop session and your local session when using NX

You can switch between full-screen and your original desktop by clicking on the ‘Magic Pixel’ on the top-right corner of your screen. Just move to the top right corner of the screen and left-click.

If, for any reason, your remote session is not responding, you can switch by pressing the sequence ctrl+alt+shift+esc.

Hope this helps..

Technorati Tags: , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.

Amarok, Listen, Exaile!, Banshee and Last.fm

I am very much into music (and I don’t own an IPOD!) and not quite your normal, radio delivered stuff either – I have a passion for World Music – here’s a bit of a list of some of my favourites – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Fela Kuti, Orchestra Baobab, Fania All Stars, Tinariwen, Cesaria Evora, Hector Lavoe, Africando, Afro-Cuban All Stars and in the english speaking world I like Miles Davis, Tim Buckley and the Godfather of Soul – James Brown.

I have used plenty of different music players. Back in my windows days, I was stuck on Winamp for years when finally I started correctly tagging my mp3 collection and made the move to MediaMonkey. My folder/file layout has grown from it’s original incarnation to it’s current manageable format, which is pretty much as follows:

/genre/sub-genre/artist/album/artist-album-track-song

Obviously, some artists (like Tim Buckley) changed genres a couple of times through his career, so the top level “genre” is rather loose – 60’s and 70’s and no, I don’t have an 80’s & 90’s collection because that music was mostly lame though the good ones for that period – or better said “the ones that bring back memories” all get wacked in the “pop” folder, which is pretty much the “mainstream” folder.

Anyway.. on both KDE and Gnome, there’s quite a lot of choice when it comes to music players. I first started out with XMMS until I found out about Amarok. Amarok was a revolution for me as it was my introduction to Last.fm a very, very cool site that “scrobbles” each song you listen to from your collection and creates a “music profile” about you – that is, Amarok (and others) reports back to Last.fm each track you listen to and begins to build a personal profile about the music you listen to. You get your own “Top 100” charts, all time charts, favourite artists charts, weekly charts, top album charts – you can publish your charts to your website – show off your ultra-hip listening tastes

Anyway, it was a lot of work to get it to where it’s at today and I have about 7000 mp3’s – not huge but it mostly consists of music I listen to reasonably regularly. I have used many media players: Winamp, MediaMonkey, Itunes, Windows Media Player, Amarok, XMMS, Exaile! and Banshee but a few months ago, I began using Listen. Most of the players (at least the Linux ones) have the ability to communicate with Last.fm but Listen goes a step further than just reporting the music you listen to. It actually has a mode where you can load up 3 tracks or more and as it plays those tracks, it looks up Last.fm for similar songs and artists that belong in your music collection. Listen then adds those tracks to your playlist and repeats the process for each new song it plays so that you can have a continual flow of music the slowly deviates away from your first three tracks to others like it.

I’d love to see this expanded on because it has one slight flaw, which is that it naturally gravitates towards playing more and more popular music – so you could start with some really far out African stuff and then it finds someone who listens to some french african who listens to some french music, then selects some english music and next thing you know, you are listening to Pink Floyd – why? because it’s popular.

So, I would love to have some extra settings in there to help Listen select which “direction” I want to go – ie: play tracks that only include these tags – or play “least popular” instead of “most popular” – things like that.

Regardless, it’s a great music player – I don’t think I can remember it ever crashing (unlike Amarok). I believe it’s easily installed from Automatrix on Ubuntu but’s it’s written in Python, so shouldn’t be too hard to install on any other gnome based system.

I also have been getting into using Democracyplayer (recently renamed to Miro ) for videos and movies – you can get it here

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.

Open Source Hardware Projects – Home Fabrication (Part 1)


If personal computing revolutionised the 80’s and the Internet revolutionised the 90’s then I would dare say this decade will (almost) be revolutionised by home fabrication & rapid prototyping. I say almost because, I think it will take 4-6 years before it’s potential is fully realised but I think it holds massive potential.

The number 1 hold back factors are “materials” – ie: the types or range of materials that are available for home fabrication is rather limited at the moment. Home fabrication has it’s foundations in Rapid Prototyping, which is essentially a three-dimensional dot-matrix printer.

So let’s get to it, and see firstly, what’s now available and then look at the future of home fabrication.

Fab@home

Conceived by Prof. Hod Lipson and designed by Evan Malone, the Fab@home project allows people to begin to produce three dimensional objects right on their desk.

The two main drawbacks of the system in it’s current state are resolutions (3dpi) and suitable materials.

The resolution can be related to the digital photography. That is, when you zoom in on a low-resolution image, you see pixelation. The current 3D printers are much the same, in that you see the general shape but there is kind of “pixelation” in the edges of the shape.

Materials –

For example, you are currently not able to print an object in steel, alloy etc. – though you may be able to print a shape in another substance, that you can then make a mould of, that you could then pour steel into, but you cannot print directly into steel. There is no doubt though, that give 2-10 years and there will be materials that when set will have similar properties to steel, in heat resistance, strength etc.

Reprap
The idea was originally though out by Adrian Bowyer a  Seniour Lecturer at the Univeristy of Bath in this article. The reprap project uses a process called fused deposition modeling.

Reprap is based around:

Linux operating system for PC’s 
Java programming language for PC programming 
Art of Illusion 3D modeling system 
Small Device C Compiler (SDCC) for firmware programming 
KiCAD circuit design system

The budgetary estimate for building a Reprap is $300-400

http://www.3dreplicators.com
3dreplicators.com is the home of the Tommelisa,  a spinoff of the reprap project. It varies a little in that it uses a Windows-based Visual Basic Software rather than Linux and Java, it also uses a different microcontroller that uses a basic compiler rather than the C compiler used in the Reprap.

Additionally, it also has a lower budgetary entry point, estimated to be approx. $125-175.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.

Google on Steroids or vi for search engines – Yubnub

Seems I am a bit slow to the party on Yubnub – I guess I kind of see it like a cross between the unix command line and the vi of search engines – it has modes, commands and even split screens:

For example: ls australia gives you all the yubnub commands that include Australia.

Here’s some of my favourites:

gaus <searchterm> – Google.com.au Australia localised search – pages from Australiagau
ebayau <product> – Ebay Australia search
auspc <town> – Australian Postcode search
shopbot <product> – Shopbot search (Australia’s equivalent of pricewatch.com)
seek <job keywords> – Search Australia’s #1 Jobsite
seekit <job keywords> – As above but specifically for IT
ypau <business name> – Search Australian Yellowpages
wpau <name> – Search Australian Whitepages
tvoz <program name> – Australian TV guide

Some other commands I use often:

whois <domain or ip address> – Whois lookup for a domain or IP
slg <searchterm> – Search Windows Live and Google in a split screen
pycook <searchterm> – Searches python cookbook
kodpy <searchterm> – Searches python snippets on Koders.com
py <module name> – Searches python module documentation
tiny <url> – Creates a tiny url
gim <search term> – Search google images
gvid <search term> – Google video search
gl <search term> – Google linux search
en2sp <word> – English to Spanish translator
spanish <word> – Spanish to English translator
wiki <search term> – Wikipedia (english) search
gmt <location> – Local time in Location

Of course it also covers many that google has already:

calc, define etc.

Anyway, I am loving it.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.

SONOFON Australia sales technique – Swear at the potential customer

Conversation went like this:

Him: Can I speak with “Insert name here”
Me: May I ask who’s calling
Him: Stuart(?) from Sonofon
Me: Can I ask what it’s regarding?
Him: Some people from our office came out a few months ago and showed him some of our products (complete lie) and I am just calling to let him know we have some great deals on at the moment.
(Staring at www.sonofon.com.au by now)
Me: Is it regarding phone or pabx products? Because if it is, we are not interested and we only have 4 phones anyway
Him: Is he busy at the moment? Because I can call him back
Me: He’s always busy, there’s no use calling back because we don’t want anything.
Him: But how would he know if he doesn’t know what we’re offering.
Me: Because he didn’t go looking for you. When he needs something, he goes and looks for it.
Him: Can you pass on a message to him?
Me: Yes
Him: But are you going to pass it on?
Me: No, I am going to pretend to take the message and then forget you ever called.
Him: You’re a fucking wanker mate..

At this point in time, I had wasted enough time with Sonofon sales techniques and hung up. So I sat there wondering if he was having a bad day or that my voice just pissed him off? At least the Indian call centre people don’t get upset when I tell them no and no again.

Too bad I was the guy he was asking for huh?

Maybe if we met under different circumstances, it wouldn’t have been this way – if he came to sell me some uber-cool open source pabx that we could do really cool stuff with..maybe.

Anyway, it’s exactly the reason I am not in sales.. I take rejection a bit personally also – maybe one day I will get over myself and become the world’s best BDM.. who knows. Until then, I would probably feel the way Stuart does and maybe I would be pushed to the edge also by some wanker who doesn’t do what I want him to do and actually give smart-ass replies also. Who knows what life holds for us.

Now, if we weren’t going to buy anything from Sonofon previously.. you know what? We might just change our mind now – Thanks Sonofon.

You’re welcome to share your own stories about super-slick sales people also.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.

Professional Accounting Software on Linux


We have just taken over the accounting from someone who was using Quickbooks (US version) and we had no way of reading the files without going out and buying Quickbooks ourselves.

I had a trial version which lasted 30 days, but of course we didn’t perform reconciliations prior to the expiry finishing. Left with little choices, I realised Quickbooks has an online version which could import all our current Quickbooks data.

After using Quickbooks online for >12 hours I can say it’s a brilliant web application – it says it requires ActiveX, which of course requires Internet Explorer.. but ie4linux seems to allow the ActiveX component to install fine and everything I have tested has worked fine so far.

After such a good experience with Quickbooks Online edition, I am not considering moving our accounts to NetAccounts . Their web interface doesn’t look as user friendly as Quickbooks but their Free Accounts are pretty impressive.

If I had more time, I would be taking a serious look at implementing TinyERP but I just don’t have the time to spend nor do I feel confident enough in my accountancy skills that I can rest assure the system is doing what’s it’s supposed to do.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.

Django, VIM and SnippetsEmu on TTYShare


I remember watching the first screencasts of Ruby on Rails and seeing class structures appear as the author was typing and it was almost like “fill in the blanks” – then I found out it was Textmate, then I found it was a Mac only thing.. that left me out – anyways (Nacho libre spanish accent), who cares I am a systems admin right?

Yes, I still trudged around in my daily grind jealous of the textmate crowd and waiting for something similar… then e-texteditor appeared for Windows and Scribus appeared for Linux – the Textmate equivalents for each respective OS.

I have now used them both and I find them too slow – I had been using Notepad++ & Gedit which are both quite fast.

I have been spending more and more time with vim ever since I read this great introduction to what it really can do. So today, I was looking for some Django + VIM goodness, which led me to this from the Django Site, which led me to this (emulate Textmate’s snippet expansion), which led me to this:


All are great links on how to use vim with textmate style snippets for Django. I imagine a wxpython one probably isn’t too far away either. I recently switched to using Gvim on Windows in my continued search for finding tools that I can use wherever I am. So, I haven’t set snippetsEmu up yet but I will report back when I do.

It also answered another question I had about recording tty input – that site can be found here

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.

Vim – Toggle between vertical and horizontal window layout


I keep forgetting how to do this – Note to self. Make a

How to change from a horizontal list to a vertical list of windows, and vice versa:

—————————
horizontal list of windows
to vertical list of windows
—————————
    W|W|W
to
    W
    W  
    W

    :windo wincmd K

—————————-
vertical list of windows
to horizonal list of windows
—————————-
    W
    W  
    W
to
    W|W|W

  :windo wincmd H

Powered by ScribeFire.

Vim != usability plus a bit of Unix humour


I came across this link today..the title of it says –15 Years of Vi + 5 years of Vim and still learning

maybe it’s my sick sense of humour but I like it plus it’s a great vim resource I need to keep track of.

The question is, is it a usability issue or is it just that it’s so powerful and so many features that it’s an endless learning curve?

On the topic, there’s a very funny book from 1997 called “The Unix haters handbook” I came across while visiting a local TAFE library with a friend who needed some books. The link takes you to Wikipedia where you can download a copy in PDF format. Some of the issues have been addressed these days but some still exist.

It covers some of *nixes great, scary anomalies – I am sure we all have our favourites.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.

Nomachine NX – Desktop Sharing & Shadowing now available.


Wow.. a great week it has been in the enterprise Linux world.

Last week, we had:

  1. Mindquarry 1.1 released
  2. TinyERP released a web client and a new version
  3. OpenBravo 2.30 released

and while it’s not truly open source, NoMachine released V3 of their NX server and finally, they have introduced

desktop sharing and session shadowing

Now, if your an admin, it’s a no-brainer to set it up – you can either do it from NX Manager (make sure you have V3 also) or you can edit /usr/NX/etc/server.cnf

You can checkout all the directives from the Admin guide at this link.

And here’s what the Administrator’s Guide says:
The desktop sharing and session shadowing functionalities are enabled in the default configuration of the server. Desktop sharing allows the sharing of any of the native displays on the node, while session shadowing allows the sharing of any of the NX sessions running on the node. By default, it is up to the owner of the native display or of the master session to accept/deny the user’s request to attach to the display/session.

Now, here’s the $20,000 question – how the hell do we mirror a session or grab a console? I have both the Windows Client AND the Linux client and nowhere is there any option to shadow a session or grab a console.

If I try and login to an existing session, it logs off the original user and logs in the one trying to login.. so wtf?

I have read the docs – oh, I had to google for the page that lists all the docs, so here they are.

Additionally, I personally think the US $750 for the Small Business Server is a little too high as an entry point – or at least expand the free server beyond 2 licenses..

Even a 5 user (+ pay-per-incident support) for $300 would likely make NX a more palatable option for young startups or those wanting to offer a SAAS setup.

At the moment, I am just keen to find out how to test the mirroring or grabbing a console… anyone??

OK, I worked this out:

Then, when you start the session, it will display the sessions that are available to connect to – the default setting is to prompt the user to authenticate you. To change this, edit using:

vi /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg

and change on Line 563 from:

EnableSessionShadowingAuthorization = “1”

to

EnableSessionShadowingAuthorization = “0”

Save it and exit [esc]x! or [esc]wq! in vim

I restarted the nxserver daemon just in case, which will disconnect your NX session if you are connected already.

/etc/init.d/nxserver restart

BUT – the problem I had is that my remote screen resolution is 1440×900 and my local screen resolution is 1280×1024 – so when I try and connect to my local console, NX fits the width in the 1280px by squashing up the 1440 remote image, which presents a barely readable screen – and it makes the height 900px leaving a gap (which is no big deal). It also seemed much slower than a regular nx session.

I will keep playing around but I will probably stick with my current: pkill <program> setup.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.