digitalself

Big Buck Bunny was released on May 30th. It’s great to see that not only operating systems can be open source. I really love the open source model. This movie is the result of a Blender Foundation initiative know as Project Peach. The movie is licensed under the Creative Common Attribution 3.0.

Download and see, hey it’s free. I was thinking of getting the half HD version, since my screen doesn’t do Full HD, but what the heck, live a little.

Don’t forget to buy the DVD if you want to show your appreciation.

Where can I gen some cool podcasts for my new Ipod ?

And the hits just keep on coming. This time, a gift from a “special someone”. An Ipod Nano Silver. It’s actually quite pretty, and I love it. It’s one of the best gifts ever. Somebody is nurturing my inner geek, and it feels so good.

As for the gadget itself, well, of course there were quirks. I managed to crash Rhythmbox a couple of times. After a lot of trouble trying out Virtualbox with USB support trying to get iTunes to work, I gave up and went to my sister’s which runs Windows natively, and managed to register the IPod there. So it seems, that you need to register it first. After the registration and firmware update, Rhythmbox worked flawlessly and I’m off listening to some tunes. I haven’t tried photos or videos, but all in due time, since I have to jugle this with a Playstation 3, and a newly borrowed F1 game.

I need some time of work to play with all of this. Dgeez…

This was a full weekend. I bought a new gadget, a Sony Playstation 3, which is actually not just another gadget but rather a full fledge media/computing/gaming rig. At least I hope so. I already have PS3 buddies, ps3 downloads, and what not. And all of this in between breaks of Grand Theft Auto IV. Ain’t it cool ?

The gaming experience exceeded what I was hoping for, but the SIXAXIS so far seems to kinda suck. I’m only playing it on a 22″ inch Half HD screen, which isn’t that bad. All around, I’m pretty happy with my new kickass setup. I’ll try to put some Ubuntu Linux magic running on it, but only when I get a break from GTA. I’m still deciding whether to plugin an external hard-drive or to stream from my Linux server, so I can watch some movies/tv-series. But all of this in later posts probably.

Most of us just subscribe away at services that either give us feature or fun. What we end up with is a huge amount of profiles, with different user names and passwords (maybe not), where we provide the same information, such as email, birthday, photo, etc. This poses many privacy threats that most users aren’t aware of, such as linking all of those profiles or accounts together, revealing that a Facebook user has a Flickr account and likes to listen to music on LastFM.

IdentiFight aims at raising user awareness towards how much privacy is being breeched right now, just by using common identifiers e.g. an email address, in different profiles at different websites. In their own words:

Given an email address, IdentiFight searches as many sites as possible and finds accounts that are linked to that email address. It then presents a bit of information about each account, plus details for how to change the privacy settings for each site. There are also links to each site’s privacy statement.

So it seems that another year has gone by. Time to blow a couple of candles and worry about things to come. This year I took the time to make some personal resolutions, because birthdays are kinda like New Year version 2.0, full of promise. Don’t tell anyone but they are really a day like any other.

I think I’m getting older… But, then again, aren’t we all ?

Following up on a new and improved work method based around local servers and git, I sat down to put theory to practice and began working on an improved theme for this blog.

The new workflow really allows me to pay attention to detail, enabling a trial and error methodology without fearing breakage, on code or design. The new theme really feels more polished, at least to me, when comparing to the old design. I can now post images that actually blend in to the post content, or enable tags and categories that provide useful information.

The theme is still entirely original with the exception to the icons that are designed and distributed for free by Go Squared Ltd. I really like their simple iconsets.

Comments are very much appreciated. I still think the site needs some bling. What say you ?

Following my previous post on Web Development Workflow, I decided to be done with my procrastination and setup a local workflow, which keeps me location independent and autonomous.

The work flow is simple: Develop and test locally, deploy remotely. I’m currently applying this towards the development of an improved theme for my blog, which is basically this one, plus minor adjustments.

My setup is an Apache 2 webserver, with PHP and mySQL. On top of this I enable user dirs for the webserver, and deploy a local wordpress, which in fact runs a backup database from my production site.

First , install apache2,php and mysql support:

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server

Now enable user directories support (things like localhost/~jonhdoe which actually live in /home/johndoe/public_html) and create the public_html folder:

sudo a2enmod userdir
mkdir $HOME/public_html

Another twist, since this is my main workstation and I don’t want an apache+mysql setup running all the time, is to remove all of the startup scripts from the default boot runlevels:

sudo update-rc.d -f mysql remove
sudo update-rc.d -f apache2 remove

I then run a script to start my environment when I want to code some web bits:

#!/bin/bash

/etc/init.d/apache2 start
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Don’t forget to make the script executable:

chmod +x bin/start-web-dev.sh

After all this I just installing web apps locally. In my case I just install Wordpress by uncompressing it into public_html, creating a DataBase using phpmyadmin, and running the install. After that I went to my production wordpress exported the DB, and imported it on the local wordpress. And I’m done.

As a finally twist I created a git repository of my theme, so i just modify+commit+push, and pull on the main website. Since I can push only when I need or can, this setup is really working for me.

Any further enhancements are welcome, so feel free to drop some suggestions to improve on this.

So It seems I have a new friend, which was a present from a special someone. I like new friends. I like penguins. I love Linux. And by the looks of this one, it seems that he’s into extreme programming.

And now a challenge:

How many penguins can you see in the picture ?