Tag Archives: Ubuntu

OS Tryouts 3: ElementaryOS

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The start of ElementaryOS is quite like Linux Mint 17, as they are both based on Ubuntu Linux. One notable difference is that Elementary prompts you by default to choose whether you wish to use the LiveCD system or install it on a computer, whereas Linux Mint 17 simply brings you right into the LiveCD system and provides you a link to install it on your computer, as a shortcut on the Desktop of the LiveCD system.

ElementaryOS requires less space, by about half than Linux Mint 17 does. That’s remarkable but not really a stumbling block since most modern computers all have more than 10GB of primary storage just to start. The installation was really quiet and direct, a pleasant change from PC-BSD for sure. Updates were slipstreamed into the installation routine so there shouldn’t be any need for them once the system is up and running.

The primary login screen is remarkably beautiful. The graphical login has my full name with a place for my password and a Login button, and to the right of that is todays date and time styled in a very appealing way. There also appears to be a “Guest Session” which I will have to investigate, as Linux Mint 17 didn’t include that. Looking around the basic OS I am pleased to see many “Look and Feel” similarities to my beloved Mac OSX. After starting the software update app I expected all the apps to be updated however that wasn’t to be, there are 347 updates pending – so that’s the first thing that needs to happen. Since I have the updater open, clicking on “Install Updates” should get that ball rolling. True to form, the updater is quietly processing it’s duties without user intervention beyond the authentication for elevated privileges that all updaters require in Linuxland. One really neat thing to note in this review is that the devs for ElementaryOS wrote a kernel extension driver for VirtualBox all by themselves. The activation was very straightforward, that’s very impressive. Almost all other OSes force you to install the VBox addins from VBox itself.

The installation of optional software is easily found through the Software Center, it’s icon is a big friendly downward pointing arrow. Many of the apps I would figure would be installed by default, like Firefox and Thunderbird and LibreOffice are not, but they are available. That’s perfectly fine. Having a lot of apps delivered by default only adds to the size of the installation media and can complicate the installation routine if one of those other projects doesn’t behave properly upon installation.

It’s really a toss-up so far between Linux Mint 17 and ElementaryOS. My bias for the Mac OSX interface pushes me ever so slightly over into Elementary territory personally because it isn’t hamstrung by an impossible to eliminate Gnome prime panel that you just can’t get rid of, Elementary comes with a Dock by default. The only irk that gets me about Elementary is that the Dock has no mouse-sensitive effects, but that’s the weakest of quibbles. So far for machines that we’ll end up surplussing, Linux Mint 17 wins for work, but if I were to buy one of the surplussed machines I’d go for Elementary OS instead. It’s mostly just a matter of taste. I could just as easily live with Linux Mint 17.

Slogger

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Memories.Slogger

Every once in a while I run across something I’ve seen before but ignored accidentally until I see it in great big headlines and neon and stop to pay attention to it and discover that it does something I really really want. This particular afternoon it was the product Slogger from Brett Terpstra. The software is a Ruby script, and Ruby is a delightful programming language that I’ve had the pleasure of dabbling in. Nowhere near the level of Brett and the people who help him, but here and there, little things.

The need came from a simple Google query, IFTTT and Day One. Looking for some way to bridge that divide between the automatic web service that I’ve fallen in love with, IFTTT and Day One, the journaling software that works quite well and renders DropBox a “Killer App”. Dropbox is the glue that keeps my Day One system together, on my laptop, my desktop, and all my mobile devices. When I found Slogger it was a definite Eureka moment, the answer all in one place. I downloaded the code as the author describes and tried to set it up.

Monumental fail. Pieces everywhere, error codes puking on the screen faster than I could read, pages and pages of interpreter and compiler errors, all surrounding one “Ruby Gem” module called hpricot. I knew why this was fail-town for me, it was because I had installed XCode CLI tools in order to get the mac_google_authenticator PAM module built. That CLI package rendered my system retarded when it came to processing gem requests. In the Ruby world there is a system established for distributing software written in Ruby, it’s called ‘gem’ and you run it much like apt-get in Ubuntu, it’s really quite straightforward and never has given me fits – until. Everything was complicated by the fact that I couldn’t really find where XCode was on my machine, all the likely targets to search didn’t have anything relevant and my find command returned pages of errors and I didn’t have the patience to pick through a thousand lines of “Permission Denied” to find the one spot where the file was hidden.

Didn’t need to complain, as I knew the solution. Download XCode for real. So off to Apple, download the monster and install it. That satisfied hpricot, and everything else installed quite nicely. I set Slogger up, pointed it at my Dropbox and configured the plugins that I wanted. The initial run crashed and burned but I figured out why, it was an errant space in the line that points to the Day One folder, a symbolic link fixed that and I was again off to the races. Of all the plugins that I configured these were successful:

  1. BlogLogger
  2. facebookifttt
  3. goodreadslogger
  4. lastfmlogger
  5. pocketlogger
  6. rsslogger

Then there were the plugins I tried to configure but couldn’t:

  1. fitbit
  2. flickrlogger
  3. getgluelogger

The primary problem with the fitbit plugin was that fitgem, the Ruby assistant program that you have to install is a phantom. You install it, it’s successful, and then it’s gone. No trace of it exists. You try again, poof, nowhere. Plus for the plugin setup there are API codes, User codes, and oAuth codes. I get the reasoning behind all of them and getting most of them was not an issue. I felt a little awkward creating an “Application” for just myself, it seems kind of a waste of effort to ferret all these bits and peices into a semiformal request procedure, but doing it wasn’t hard or cost anything, so what the hell. The part where it all falls apart for fitbit is where you have to get the oAuth token, since fitgem never worked and it’s invocation from slogger should have opened a web browser and asked for my approval, all of that never happened. I tried to be sporting and do the heavy lifting myself but all I did was irritate the API for fitbit and I figured, what the hell, I got most of what I was after and moved the fitbit plugin into the “unused” folder and forgot all about it. Abandon ship, y’arrrr!

Flickr is a pain in the ass. It’s Yahoo and as such, it’s kind of an Internet leper. You need your Flickr number, there’s a site that makes that easy, except it doesn’t work. Flickr username? Feh, either the one in Flickr or your linked Yahoo ID is meaningless. I half figured it was in the URL anyways, but then I thought about it and I don’t really use Flickr all that much beyond a solitary IFTTT rule and that’s precarious as it is. The only attractive part of Flickr is they gave out 1TB of storage. Still lepers tho. So, abandon ship! Y’arrrrr!

GetGlue was the last great effort. Much like Klout, it’s a site that makes sense sort of, but the name is utterly silly. GetGlue. What the hell? Why? Glue has nothing to do with TV or Movies. The only connection I could think of was celluloid and horses-processed-into-glue sort of connection. They give away stickers, what a wonderful bit of pollution that is, and as a gimmick seems dumb. The plugin needs an RSS feed for the GetGlue Activity Stream. It appears as though the GetGlue folks have moved away from RSS and towards “widgets” which seems stupid as in this application RSS is the answer and widgets are worthless. Alas, Google searching for the RSS feed method was fruitless. I was half hoping for something like http://getglue.com/user/bluedepth/feed.rss, where I could just craft it up and be on my merry way. No. You have to “View Source” to find it, which is stupid because that is so full of CSS flotsam and jetsam as to be utterly incomprehensible. Again, my ardor for that particular service was fog on a hot day. I don’t need it. I don’t use it. Whatever! Abandon ship! y’arrrrr!

So I tried the slogger script, it failed, tore out fitbit goop and then it worked. Then I went into my Day One app and mopped up all the mess that testing had made. The only oddity I noticed was the BlogLogger completely missed out on the text on my WordPress site that was between pre tags. Meh. Not really a reason to kick the entire thing to the curb, just something to honestly stop using. HTML is a right bastard, almost all of the time. CSS is a filthy abomination, but we won’t go there.

I would say that tonight everything will work as it should for Slogger, but I have to race to work tonight to turn everything off because work is going to exit-stage-left when it comes to the Internet. They are turning the entire thing off, at least for a few hours. I can’t wait for tomorrow, there will be lulz.

So, to Mr. Terpstra, thank you for slogger. I’m sorry the plugins didn’t work, that fitgem was a phantom, but at least most of what I wanted worked. So we sound a victory cheer, sort of. Yaaay!

Williamsburg – November 15th 2010

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Today was the official beginning of the Sage Millennium Symposium. This is the direct result of all of the user base griping about how we missed this place and how we wish we had a little conference all on our own, like the way it used to be. Much like a magic genie, Sage granted us our wish and here we are again, for my coworkers who joined me in this trip it’s old-hat to them, it’ll be my first time staying at Kingsmill Resort.

We arrived last evening and I found this place to be very expansive, definitely charming, and a great place to “Get away from it all”. The price tag, well, that’s definitely on the high side, but the quality is unmistakably there. My room is laid out very spaciously and everywhere they could have skimped out they did not, which earns my respect.

Last night we went to the Red White and Blue, which is a Blues-themed Memphis style BBQ Rib restaurant in Williamsburg. The food was okay, the ribs were done well. What more can you ask for while traveling into a tourist trap?

Overnight everything went well, my iPad doubled as a noisemaker/alarm clock very nicely as well as a book, a newspaper, a game of Uno and a window into the world of all my collected RSS feeds that I aggregate through Google Reader.

In the morning we all visited Colonial Pancake House. We’re in the middle of Pancake House Central and this one got a 5-star review so we decided to give it a shot. There wasn’t much that was remarkable about the place, the food was good, the atmosphere was what you’d expect and the prices were fair.

After breakfast we talked for a little while and then my coworkers settled on hitting the local outlet mall. I didn’t have anything else better to do since the meat of the convention wasn’t due to begin until 2pm, so I tagged along. We found it easily enough as the two coworkers who had been here before knew the path to the outlet mall very well. I pulled in and parked, scanned the shops and immediately noticed the kitchen outlets, which are (I think) identical to the ones in Michigan City. We only had an hour and then one of my coworkers who knew I was fond of Under Armour pointed out that UA had a factory store in this particular outlet mall. UA is kind of like my Kryptonite, I’m quite fond of their clothing and seeing the store put a foolish grin, even for a short flash, on my face. As we walked along everyone sort of split up and went their separate ways. I joined my boss on a search for a replacement tote-bag to replace the flimsy bag provided by Sage when we registered the night before. We weren’t able to find anything for her and as we walked we met up with our other coworkers and while they went looking in a nearby shop I decided since there was only about twenty minutes left that I should at least check out the UA shop. It only took me ten minutes to pick out some things I liked and went to try them on. I did buy some Under Armour, but it was on the clearance rack, $10 off plus 20% after that so I wasn’t feeling too upset about the cost. Under Armour is mighty expensive stuff, but it’s durable and it’s one of my few vices that I get to indulge in from time to time.

Afterwards we put all our winnings in the back of the rental SUV and headed back to Kingsmill. We heard the welcome song-and-dance from Sage regarding their database software, Millennium, which powers our alumni and donor record database.

Sage laid out the Millennium roadmap for us, telling us what to expect in the future and some of us were mildly jilted that they delayed the “Rip out that damned Java!” request we lodged with them last year. Now we’ll have to wait for version 8 to roll around, we’re currently on 7.6.1 and we’re dallying with the notion of upgrading to 7.7.1 or 7.8, maybe on the outside chance, 7.8.2. This software is very competent at what it does, there have been some missteps and from what I can perceive they essentially rushed a RDBMS product into a “web enabled” paradigm by using shortcuts. In the short-term this worked great, they were able to convert their Windows only application interface with one that worked via a web-browser. On closer inspection this greatness tarnishes because you can only use IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, not Windows 7. (Windows Vista works, but it’s abomination, so we don’t speak it’s name). The key sticking point is that the software relies in very specific and vital parts on loading the Java runtime library. In ways, they cheated. They got a product rushed to market and it worked well as long as you had all these backup-singers in place to provide the parts to make the entire production work. This would be not-an-issue if it wasn’t for the fact that in order to use this core-to-our-business-case software, we are effectively stuck using Java 1.5.11. This in and of itself isn’t harmful, but this old copy of Java is vulnerable and opens up computers to a heaping batch of security vulnerabilities, add to that damning fact that another piece of software we use, BSR’s Banner requires an updated jInitiator and JDK update which forces a machines JRE to the most updated version, breaking Millennium. So we have two products we need so that we can do our jobs and Java is the pinion of suck that we’re stuck upon. Removing Java is only the first step, as they really ought to only push their web-based product (and it’s the only thing that they can really push, so get to it!) and that product really ought to be W3C compliant. If that was the case then all my users could have the freedom to select whatever operating system they liked to interface and use the database. They could use Chrome on Ubuntu or even Safari on the Mac. The benefits of switching out Java for AJAX and Javascript are pretty compelling, even as such that by doing so they would effectively enable other non-Java OS’es to be able to login, such as iPhones, iPads, Galaxy Tabs, and Androids. Technically one of our staff could query our database on a color Nook. It’s not the particular devices that I’m in love with (despite the fact that I am quite smitten with my iPad) but rather that standards are respected, that the software follows a logical and plain design and works well, simply.

After the chat and the disenchantment discovering the delay with tearing out Java we waited around for the Welcome Bash at 5:30pm. Sage puts this welcome on whenever they have an event like this one, open bar, nibbly bits, the works. I chatted with a new Millennium client that’s coming out of Boston, MA. The school starts with a B, I’m terrible with names unless I have business cards and as dumb luck would have it, I totally forgot to bring business cards with me on my travels this week. Duh. We waited and schmoozed until about 7pm when we had to gather everyone up and head to an Italian restaurant here in Williamsburg called Donelos or something. We did more eating, more chatting, and only now did I have any time to myself. I was going to call Scott and relate to him the days events and then I looked down at my watch and felt wrong to make a call after 9pm. So, instead of a call, I thought I would write a blog entry and share this with all of you. Tomorrow we’ll have presenters and I’ll write a lot of ‘neat ideas’ that ‘I’m definitely going to get to work on’ until I actually get to work and that occupies all my time and this entire batch of ‘neat ideas’ falls by the wayside. It always seems to happen this way. When I don’t have life pushing me around I can get all creative and clever with the database, but without fail, life butts in and I’m right back where I started.

On high notes, I have discovered Whitley’s Virginia Peanuts. These are hand-picked giant peanuts in a variety of preparations. I ended up buying two little 16oz. sacks, one Honey Roasted and the other Honey Toffee. They will serve as snacks during this week when I can’t get free of my meetings and end up missing the snacks they lay out for us just outside our meeting halls. These peanuts are exceptionally good and the lady in the little shop we went into had a great sense of humor.

I’m thinking about contacting my family out here and see if they’re available Tuesday or Wednesday night, perhaps I can manage to get the rental SUV for the night so I can get down to VA Beach and then back up again, we’ll see how my coworkers feel and if my family has time.