Darius Aliabadi » Linux

Taming the Python

Darius — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:32:58 +0000

Hey Guys,

I’ve been learning some python over the last few weeks, thought I would give it coding a Openbox Pipe Menu a go. It’s not very useful and some of the guys in the Crunchbang Forums helped me to fix my bugs. Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/env python -W ignore::DeprecationWarning
import sys
import cgi
import twitter

if __name__ == "__main__":
 twit = twitter.Api(username="", password="")
 status = twit.GetFriendsTimeline()
 print ""
 print ""
 print"    "

 for u in status:
    tweet = u.text
    tweet = tweet.replace("\"", "'")
    tweet = tweet.encode("utf-8")
    tweet = cgi.escape(tweet)

    print "    " % (u.id, tweet)
    print "         firefox http://twitter.com/%s/status/%s\   " % ( cgi.escape(u.user.screen_name), u.id)
    print "        " % (cgi.escape(u.user.name))
    print "        " % (cgi.escape(u.relative_created_at))
    print "    "

 print ""
 sys.exit(0)

I don’t suggest you make use of it, this is the alpha version but I intend to add some conversation thread and caching into it at some point. I’m also learning some perl but I haven’t really made anything other than programs to test things.

I’ll try and post something tomorrow, after all the site is called Wednesday Morning.

Darius

“Working” From Home

Darius — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:09:05 +0000

“Working” From Home, let me explain that to begin with. I’m a student, I don’t actually have a job however I’ve just started my Third Year at university. I am about 1 month into it and I’ve noticed the transition from being taught to learning on my own. My lectures tend to feel slow and pretty simple, this is probably because I picked modules I’m interested in and thus have some understanding of the subject already. The most important part of this year is the third year project, something which you will hear about in posts to come. This takes up 1/3 of my work per semester. I spend “12 hours” a week doing it (not yet but I have a feeling after the research is done I will be making it up when I have to document). This means I’m spending a lot more time working from home this year. I am in fact only really in university for 2 days a week. That leaves 5 days of home study!!!!

So I want to pass on some advice to those in the same situation or are facing it in the future, I think this subject is widely opinion based. I don’t know any facts, I just know what works for me. So lets set the scene, your a dashingly handsome computer science student studying 4 modules a semester. You also have a rather large individual project to do this year.

Rule One

Rule One: Know your working habits. I get easily distracted when I’m doing something that I find boring. Example, I am doing this instead of writing a Management Essay (well this is a break from it)don’t. I have lectures and then a meeting on Mondays, I know through experience that anything I assign myself to do when I get back probably won’t be done at 100% because I’m tired. So If I assign something, I do something that I know is either right or wrong. This tends to be coding practice, there is no ifs or maybes when it comes to writing a program. It either works how you want it to or it doesn’t.

Schedules

I’ve already mentioned it but I think it is important to schedule things in advance. I drew out a table on OpenOffice with hour blocks and just printed them out. It’s stuck on my wall, it is so easy to lose an hour just deciding what to do. You will end up regretting that as coursework deadlines come up. I schedule my day from 9:00am – 22:00pm, now this sounds a little long but I do take time off during the day and try my hardest to get my work done during weekdays. Looking at this week, I’m taking 3 hours off a day for lunch and dinner and then stopping at 10pm to spend some time with my girlfriend before we go to sleep.

You may be thinking “wow, how does he keep to that everyday” by now. Simple answer is I really don’t, this is why I tend to over schedule a task. Add an hour to it, if anything it just means you get your stuff for the day done before you expected and you get longer in the evening to enjoy yourself. A word of warning: don’t go over the top with over scheduling because you do still need to complete your goals for the week.

Creating the Schedule

How do you know what you need to do? I tend to use to-do lists for this, whenever I get a coursework deadline I put it on the to-do list and simply order it by hand in date. When it comes to writing my schedule for the next week I can simply look at what I have done that week and pick off the top few “to-do’s”. I would suggest using toodledo.com, It has a great iPhone application that doesn’t require you to have a premium account with them.

What to do on those days “when you can’t be bothered”

Well if I had a good answer to this one I would be a much more productive man. On days like this the battle is already over really, your the only one that can make you work. You may want to retouch the schedule to space out the work for that day. Remember that means you will need to make it up later. You may want to try changing subject or working on something else to get yourself to concentrate. I just try to force myself to do as much as I can, I usually find I get very little done but it is better than nothing.

Now to the interesting part, making use of Technology!

Doing stuff on the move

Yes, I’m talking about my iPhone. It makes email, social networking and general life easier. I am so much more organise since I got this thing. I spend around 45 minutes traveling to university on the days I go in and about an hour on the way home. I usually take this time to do things like emails and catch up on facebook/twitter. This is an extra 30 minutes I gain when I get home, these small things really do mount up.

Dual Screens

Currently, I’m running a dual screen setup along with my netbook as a terminal pc (just a single terminal on the screen, usually sshed into my main machine). This additional workspace makes you more productive, this is a simple fact. I even make use of the additional desktops provided to me by openbox. What I would really like is to be able to have separate desktops on each screen but no Window Managers or even operating systems seem to make use of dual screens properly.

I tend to have my left hand screen as my main screen, I usually have the document I’m editing or the code I’m focused on displayed on this one and use the other screen for reference material. It does take a little while to get productive in a Dual Screen system but you will really miss them when you work on another machine.

Working Environment

Now there are several things you need to consider when creating your Working Environment:-

File Organisation
File Distribution
Software

File Organisation

Okay, now everyone says this but actually doing it is really important. It’s more about finding something in a year or two’s time. You need to keep it consistent, if your at home most of the time but are using a machine in University to work on now and then you’ll want to be able to know where something will be regardless of the machine.

File Distribution

I’ll be honest, emailing yourself a file doesn’t really cut it. Check out Dropbox or Ubuntu One, I personally use Dropbox because at university I can’t always use a Linux Machine and even the Linux machines don’t run Ubuntu. You could consider other types of cloud storage too but Dropbox is also intelligent enough to detect symbolic links so it doesn’t need to disrupt your Filing System.

Software

When running windows software was painful, you have to download them all and then install them separately. With Linux you can just go ahead and sudo apt-get install list of awesome open source software. You can even copy across your dot files with Dropbox using symbolic links.

Finally

Your working environment is something very personal, I would be interested to hear about what you guys do. Please leave a comment about it.

Thanks,

Darius

Happy Linux Birthday to me!

Darius — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:19:03 +0000

Hi,

Well, i’ve re-skinned this thing again. I’m going to endeavor to post something “useful” each Wednesday from now onwards. Now this is probably not going to happen but who knows. I really want to make more use out of this space. Well today is my “Linux Birthday”, 1 year ago today I installed Mandriva on my eee-pc to give it a go for the first time. This started my love affair which ended up with my deciding to swap to Linux as my sole operating system. I have been learning all this year and I still learn things all the time. I’m proud to say I’m still using Crunchbang Linux. It’s based on Ubuntu and runs the Window Manager Openbox.

Check out my latest desktop picture, I’ve spent a little while putting it together and it’s just comfortable for me.

My Current Desktop

I’m sorry for the hugeness of the image, If your interested I currently have 2x 19″ screens (1 wide and 1 normal square, don’t ask me why. just the screens i’ve got). I will be posting my conky setup on the site. I based it on a setup by someone else, I’ve heavily modified it since then but I will try and find a link to theirs.

I’m going to be updating categories and tags across the blog to utilise this fantastic theme. I hope you enjoy the new useful stuff I will post, any suggestions would be great.

Bye!

Conky Update

Darius — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:14:07 +0000

Hey Guys,

I was looking over some of the search results for the blog at the moment and a lot of people are looking for conky. So my current setup looks like this.

Current Conky Setup

I’m currently running two conkys on my main machine, one is for the machine I’m using and the other is for another machine in my home that I keep on 24/7. I did update it this morning when I got up so you now all know it takes me ~ 4 minutes to get from my bed to my computer in the morning. There isn’t anything special here, the servers online thing is just little script that pings and parses. You can get some useful conky scripts on the Ubuntu Forums (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3222199&postcount=523).

My Tattys are done!!

Darius — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:36:26 +0000

Hey guys,

Well anyone wondering what a tatty, its a potato. It’s nothing terrible and yes it was just something to get a catchy title with . Can’t blame me thought, can you?

Well its been weird to get back into blogging, I’ve had some blogs every so often. Never many people reading them and I’ve grown to not care too much about that and more about doing it. Firstly I’m going to talk about my tatties and then move onto some of the tech news thats interested me the last few days.

Well thats me outside, the fire has since died down and my potatoes are done. I was planning to blog while I cooked but found I got far to distracted. So I just enjoyed myself instead. I don’t know how many of us that gave up the bright scary world for things that go beep know the subtle art of trying to get a fire going but to tell the truth two days ago I didn’t either. My girlfriend however seemed to know what shes doing and now I’m pretty good at it myself. Some things to remember, at least in Britain. If your burning wood from the garden, chances are its dampish and is going to smoke like anything so use firelighters to get it going because at the end of the day you’ll only end up with a headache from smoke inhalation if you don’t. Another tip, stick some larger pieces by the sides when you’re getting started to let it get warm and toasty. Now this stuff is obvious but when you’re getting going and only want to see stuff burn it doesn’t always come to mind.

Well the end result was some tasty baked potatoes, I enjoyed them and will defiantly be doing this again. For these medium sized potatoes it took only an hour to get them nicely done however the smokey wood has caused some carbon on the skin but its all goodness from the garden .

Nom Nom Nom

Away from the world to tasty treats to the world of beeps and gadgets. Lots of things to pick, as like everything in computing the news is fast paced. Well the biggest story of the last day and a bit would be that Snow Leopard, I don’t like macs really. It’s Linux on extremely expensive hardware and as my friend put it yesterday it combines the worst aspects of windows and Linux, you don’t get the open, flexible working environment of Linux and you don’t get the software and hardware support of windows. Now I would agree with that but I’m not mac expert, anyway if you’d like to read more about that then I’d check out http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/08/25/preview_os_apple_snow_leopard/ . Another Mac/Snow Leopard related story that is quite interesting is that Apple are releasing an Anti-virus with their newest OS. I’m considering this prudent planning rather than expecting a lot of virus’ on their platform, Mac’s are becoming more popular and thus may be the target of malicious users however just to point out the obvious, this is all speculations I haven’t seen apple confirm it yet but It’s not difficult to imagine (http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/08/25/1839246/Report-That-OS-X-Snow-Leopard-May-Include-Antivirus).

Well speaking of virus’ it seems that Jessica Biel is now in the lead nfor the most dangerous malware celebrity, so if your thinking about getting a sexy screensaver then think again! (http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/08/obsessions-with-jessica-biel-lead-to-a-world-of-malware-hurt.ars). These things honestly make me wonder why people would think to download these, then again we live in a world where computer literacy has large divides and some people just seem unable to learn or keep up. Linux is always a good solution to your virus worries apart from the quite major security holes in it over the last few months it is relatively safe from attack and a good linux to start with is Ubuntu. Interesting stuff happing with Ubuntu these days as Thursday is the feature freeze (http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Thursday-is-Feature-Freeze-for-Ubuntu-9.10) and as always there are a few changes to be made. It was announced a while back that banshee would become the default media player for Ubuntu which caused the “Mono Wars” to burn a little harder and now it seems they’re sacking Pidgin for Empathy.

I’m going to end on a funny, It seems that Microsoft have had a little blunder in a photo (http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/25/microsoft-sucks-at-photoshop/). I’ll leave it up too you to see whats happened but lets just say that a company worth as much as Microsoft could have at least taken more than one photo for different regions.

Until next time

Darius