Last week I reinstalled my aspireone, which I’ve had for quite a while but which is really excellent for events. I put the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix onto it and it installed like a dream, with peripherals and powersaving all working correctly. It says something about the positive experiences I’ve had with *buntu installs lately that I even did this over the wifi!
The weird thing was that I don’t really use Gnome on other machines as I prefer KDE, and I hadn’t seen the Unity desktop before (as I understand it, this is a lightweight gnome replacement – it still looks and smells like gnome to me), so there were a few things that were “missing” as far as I was concerned. Easily the most annoying is the Alt+F2 shortcut, I don’t really care what GUI I’m using, I mostly just run things from that! I also realised that I now had workspaces, but that there was no keyboard shortcut to switch between them (I don’t use a mouse, so it’s keyboard or nothing for me).
Enter a wonderful utility called gnome-keybinding-properties.
Continue reading
I was at the conference to give a keynote with ex-colleague and good friend Ivo Jansch. We gave our new talk “27 Ways To Be a Better Developer” in the opening keynote slot, which was a lot of fun (even if I did freak out slightly and hide in the middle). Ivo and I have lots of experience of working with developers, recruiting, running teams, and we had a great time working out *which* 27 items to include and how to tell the story. It was a little bit hectic since we had about 50 minutes to give the talk but we had some generous reviews and so many people have come and told me about one or two points that have made a big impact on them. These are the slides:
Thanks again to all who made this event what it was – organisers, sponsors, speakers and attendees!
sudo aptitude install s3cmd
Once installed, I found s3cmd --help was surprisingly helpful. To start with you need to set up an access key on AWS (Amazon Web Services) using your amazon user credentials, then supply this to s3cmd by using s3cmd --configure and following the prompts.
It’s a very traditional granny square crochet blanket, I love these because I can take a ball of wool and a hook with me to anywhere and just make another square or two when nothing else is happening, but I never have to carry around the full project until I’m assembling it right at the end. The border is one round of trebles and another of double crochet – as simple as anything!
If you just need a beautiful graph to put into a document or post, then the Chart Wizard is the best place to start. You simply choose the type of chart you want, input your data and choose the colours, labels, settings etc, and the wizard generates the URL for you to copy and paste!
The charts are highly configurable and can easily be changed by editing the URL to the image (view the source of this page to see the URL for the chart shown above). This makes it really easy to generate similar-but-different charts in your web applications, by using the wizard and then replacing some relevant parts of it.
As mentioned above, it is very simple to generate charts with Google Charts API – and all the information for generating the chart is on a URL which returns a png file of the resulting chart. This makes it ideal for integrating into our dynamic web applications and charts that are generated are almost overwhelmingly configurable. That said, there are a few key options that will get you started quickly so let’s take a quick tour.