First Video Post!1!

I seriously gave hours for publishing this single, 8-minute long clip of me rambling about random stuff that could have much more easily been rambled about in a blog post. So I seriously hope that you enjoy the video below. Lucky me, Xubuntu apparently can't record audio, so I was forced to record my audio with my new iPhone (talked about in video), convert the file to a .wav, convert the video to a .avi, join the two together, export it, and upload it to vimeo. By the way, thanks to the conversion process the video quality is horrible. Just thought I'd warn you ahead of time.

Exams are over. Any good games?

So exams are officially over for me, as of the 4.5 hour AP Chem exam. Not enjoyable, and I really don't think I did well at all, but we'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I tried out Minecraft, and the concept looks all right.... the only problem is that it makes my computer go insane. My CPU maxes out at 100% and my memory is 75% occupied. A bit much for just a bunch of cubes, no!? It could be just because I'm trying it out on Linux, but thanks to its intense memory usage it rendered itself and my computer unusable within just a few minutes of playing. So I guess I'll just stick to programming.

Speaking of which, I've decided to rewrite most of my code because it's turned into a bit of a mess already, mostly because we're constantly introducing all of these new ideas and libraries and I'm trying to update it to allow support for the old stuff. So rewriting so far looks like a good idea, and it's going smoothly.

Xubuntu > OSX

Ok I realize that a lot of you probably aren't going to do this, but here goes: I've replaced my OSX with Xubuntu altogether as an experiment. So far I'm not suffering, although midway through the install I realized that syncing my iPod should be rather interesting. All I really use my Macbook Pro for are web development, word processing, email, music... nothing like gaming that would really require a Windows system (all the better... less distraction!!). So I'm pretty much okay there.

I absolutely love Exaile, the media player that comes with Xubuntu. It's light, fast, and best of all includes a file browser, which means that playing a music file doesn't add it to the music library. Why is this a good thing? Well, when you've downloaded an audio file and simply want to listen to it and not deal with the hassle that is managing a heavyweight audio player like Rhythmbox or Amarok, which I do rather often, Exaile is the perfect solution. Mind you, it still has the option for libraries, and still allows playlists and live audio streams, which you can easily download from many of your favorite radio sites like NPR (for my STL readers, visit kwmu.org and click on the Listen Now button -- click on the Streaming MP3 option).

I'll admit that this post was a distraction from the massive studying that I'm doing right now as a result of the AP Chem final that's looming over my head (tomorrow at 12h00... wish me luck), but hey. This is just a study break. I had my English final today, and it wasn't half bad. The best part was when I tried to submit, which I can only guess involves some kind of FTP or SMB connection to some server somewhere on campus, and the submit operation failed. I got to go to the helpdesk and they resolved everything, but they quickly found out that everyone was having this issue and that the school's own firewall was blocking the submission process. Funnier still was the karma: the software admin was against this firewall addition, and the hardware admins were for it. The software admin pushed this "Electronic Bluebook" software to everyone's computer, and the hardware people then had to deal with the huge mess that they had caused as a result of their firewall blocking the exam submission process.

I had a talk with the software admin later on, and joked with her about the firewall and how pointless it was to install it in the first place, saying that I could get around it easily and that I frequently did. "Exactly," she said. "We're constantly spending money on firewall systems just to get you guys to find a new way to get around them!" I suggested to her after that that we should try installing Linux on the school computers. Here began my sales pitch: It's totally free, it's completely scripted so it's 100% customizable, it's incompatible with 99.9% of the viruses on the Internet, and it isn't Windows-compatible, so students can't waste their time playing games and pirating Windows software, potentially getting my school into legal trouble. She said that she'd see if she could get it installed on a machine so that she could play around with it a bit, so we'll see. But how cool would that be!? I also told her that she should talk with the sysadmin at Whitfield, who runs a one to one laptop program and uses Ubuntu instead of Windows on all of the systems. Should be interesting to see how that unfolds!

Still saving up for that Das Keyboard... I'm also thinking about upgrading this compy's RAM and HDD to 4GB and a 120GB SSD. Speed should be amazing considering it's running Xubuntu, has all of that RAM and blazing fast read/write speeds! This thing is becoming by dream machine. After extensive amounts of typing, I've realized how much I've missed this keyboard. I have my awesome bumper sticker stamped on the back of it too, thanks to Randall Munroe's wonderful xkcd store. It's big, blue, and has OPINIONS! on it in bold white letters. I was at the Boston Logan airport and this lady pulled out her white MacBook with all of these "Go Wildcats!" and "Stop Abortion" bumper stickers plastered on it, and I gleefully pulled out my laptop... she glared at me for a few seconds and then put her laptop away. It was awesome. This baby hasn't let me down yet... I'll tell you guys how the Linux-only testing goes!

I love Conky

Okay, I realise that this is probably the millionth post on the Internet about Conky, but I just want to shout it out there: I love Conky. Conky is an incredibly customisable system monitor that allows you to display pretty much any value on your system, let it be the current track playing on your xmms2, audacious, or mpd media player, the temperature of various thermal sensors in your computer, the disk i/o, graphs, rings, or bars of your cpu, memory, disk, or network consumption... if they don't provide an option for it natively, you can always devise a method of your own by ways of the ${exec} variable coupled with a custom script. Let me just show you my desktop as of this moment:


In case you're wondering what the font was, I'm a huge fan of the Inconsolata fixed-width font. The weather data comes from a script that I made myself, mostly because I didn't know about the ${weather} option until it was too late... Oops. In any case, what it does is parse out a specific web page on the data from a weather site every 10 minutes. Overkill? Probably. Anyway, here's my .conkyrc:



Also, user chorny has provided me with a bit of help on the Pastebin API. Apparently uploading to pastebin is as simple as installing the App::Nopaste library from CPAN, something that I didn't know anything about. You can also install it as a cli command by running

sudo apt-get install nopaste

on Ubuntu.

I'm also on the market for a new keyboard because I'm really not a very big fan of the one on my Thinkpad, it's a bit cramped. I realise that Thinkpad keyboards are some of the best on the market, but I'm fairly sure that this one was not famed for its keyboard. All kinds of gunk keeps getting stuck between the keys, thankfully whenever I want to do some serious typing I switch over to my MacBook Pro, whose concave keys I find marvelous. I don't think I'd ever want to move to a Unibody model because I love this keyboard so much. Anyway, I'm thinking of buying a Das Keyboard Ultimate Silent for several reasons:

1. A regular Das Keyboard is too loud, I wouldn't be able to do any typing during the wee hours
2. I like the idea of having actual key-switches instead of plastic domes, plastic domes are mushy and feel like pudding
3. It's unmarked, so I get serious geek cred for being able to type on an unmarked keyboard, and I don't have to deal with the OCD stress of using a Dvorak layout with a QWERTY layout marked on my keys.

Alright, back to studying! English exam tomorrow at 8h, AP Chem the day after that at 12h. Wish me luck!

Exams

Soo linux is looking pretty good. My .tar.bz2 archive of my partition is a grand total of 978MB, something that I'm incredibly proud of. I would have gone with Slax and have a 200MB install, but the problem with Slax is that it doesn't save you radata; it has to be manually saved into a module file. Otherwise, all data is reset upon reboot.

So should end my ranting about linux. It's time for me to panic about exams. The only exam I'm really worried about is AP Chem, other than that all should go well. All the same, I have a lot of catching up to do with Chem. As of late I have a solid B in the class, which I hear is fantastic given my circumstances. A lot of my classmates can barely pull off a B-, so given that I've managed to score a B in Chem just from flying in abroad mid-term (and mid-year) is considered a feat in and of itself. Now to bring it up to an A!! :)

I'm annoyed about the pastebin code that I published. It worked at first, but then pastebin got wise and started asking for a captcha code, which my perl script could (obviously) not decipher. So now I'm off to try and figure out a way of using curl to publish my stuff, which I'm not entralled about. At least I found out about cpan, which allows me to install perl libraries from the command line. I couldn't find a way of installing the curl libraries before, but now that I have cpan it should be a bit easier.

In case you're wondering how to install libraries using cpan, go into your terminal and type:

That code was not published using my script. I've had to go in manually and install it. I'll see if I can find the time to rework it using curl later on.

Happy studying to all! And jealousy to mes amis en France qui ont finis leurs compos. Extreme jealously.

Perl and Pastebin.com

Yes, this is me posting at midnight. Yes, my postcount has been skyrocketing, probably because I've been trying to distract myself from the huge stress that is exams. Yes, it's working. Yes, that is bad.

Anyways, I googled around trying to look for a good perl pastebin uploader and couldn't find one, so I adapted one that I found to actually work well. It's about as simple as it gets, fellow perl readers should be able to look through the code that I'm about to paste in (thanks to my shiny new perl script). My code is far from perfect, I'm planning on perfecting it by allowing me to not have to run any commands at all, which would be great considering the fact that I'm having to generate the filename (which is currently in the format of date +%m-%d-%y.title), pipe the command to the perl script (which chops off newlines and transforms my code tags into pastebins) and upload it from GoogleCL (which, by the way, is another amazing command line tool.)

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for, my code:

Blogging from the Terminal

So I guess this would count as my second post for today, but I just found something so incredibly cool that it'll knock all of your socks off. Okay, probably not. In any case, here goes:

So I was blogging from nano today (this involved my last post in the car) when I realized (after having posted) that nano does this really annoying thing where it adds in these line breaks at certain intervals in the text when word-wrap is turned off to allow for the word-wrap to appear to work. Why use word wrap? Mainly because it bugs me to continually type all on the same line and not be able to see what I was typing a bit further up on the page. But now it's adding line breaks. What do? Well, you see, I had actually developed a perl script to get rid of these pesky line breaks and retain the double-line breaks, and thankfully because of my packrat nature I was able to recover it. Helps to be a packrat, you know?

Later on, I actually started getting into pastebin, although I can't say I'm an avid fan of using it. I mainly just realized that I could use pastebin to embed source code on my blog. Why is that cool? Well, you see, I figured that eventually I'd get into posting code on my blog, and instead of creating my own blog and developping all of those features, I can just upload the code to pastebin and use an iframe to display it. Huzzah!! So just to show it off, here's the code I used to get rid of all of those extra newlines that were in the post that I just typed:



EDIT: Unfortunately, the API doesn't like the way I code (apparently I'm supposed to use curl, but I really don't want to...), so my code is actually currently being impeded by a captcha field.