Setting up a password protected channel on freenode involves wrestling with ChanServ, and if you don’t have sacrificial goats handy or an advanced degree in 8th level rune reading, you may be scratching all the hair off your head as you ponder the help that appears during any reasonable google search. You read the page [...]
Today’s simple Debian packaging task was adding a little C program and Makefile into an existing package that didn’t already compile anything. Through the magic of debian/rules, all I had to do was to write a top-level Makefile in the package directory, which would simply recurse into the subdirectory and invoke make there. Assume a [...]
mom and dad love rick steve Recently, I performed some over-the-phone tech support to get my Dad going on Ubuntu, and thought sharing that experience might be interesting. A little bit of background: Dad is 62 years old, technical but not necessarily computer savvy (chemical engineer), has always used Windows, and English is his second [...]
Serengti pumbaa (yes, I’m recycling photos…) I joined Canonical in April, as my loyal blog readers (best looking people on the planet!) know, and immediately, I was drowning in the deep end. I left the relatively safe and sane sandbox of the kernel and tried to choke down two huge pills at once, one called [...]
For some insane reason, Slate decided to add something horrible called “meebo” to every web page. Here’s how you block and hide it using the Adblock extension with Google Chrome. Manually edit your filter and add these lines: meebo.com ##div#meebo.meebo-00 The first line prevents you from downloading content from the meebo website, but sadly, [...]
If someone wanted to ransom every picture you ever took and all your music and your thesis to you, and you didn’t have a good enough relationship wtih Chuck Norris to ask him to hunt them down and roundhouse kick them into infinity meaning you had to pony up, how much money would you pay? [...]
Loyal readers of this blog have been enjoying Platypus Friday for a while now. Today, I’m introducing a new weekly item called Tech Tuesday. Wait wait, don’t run away! My goal for Tech Tuesday is not just to nerd-herd everyone into the deep end, but rather to cover a broad spectrum of topics in a [...]
Folks reading my blog via an RSS reader probably haven’t noticed, but I’ve recently refreshed the look of chizang’s web 6.0. If you haven’t seen it yet, come on over and check it out. It’s a lot shinier! While the base theme (Fontella) was a nice start, one thing it lacked was WordPress widget support, [...]
The problem with being a nerd is that you’ve had a peek into the sausage factory and you can see that they’re pumping out oodles of delicious looking meatamins so you think about running over and just sticking your mouth at the end of the line. But you know that at some point, the [...]
A while ago, Mark blogged about the new Ubuntu branding effort that was introduced in Lucid and will continue to be carried forward for future releases. Notably: On the consumer/enterprise spectrum, we took inspiration from the aerospace industry, and identified a texture of closely spaced dots. When you see more of that, it means we’re [...]