One of the default screensavers included with Ubuntu 7.10 is one that will display whatever pictures you have saved in your ‘Pictures’ folder (/home/<username>/Pictures). The screensaver will randomly display a picture from this and any subfolders.

However, there’s no way of customsing which folder the screensaver reads if you want to use your Pictures folder to store pictures, but manage which of these images is used.

A workaround is as follows:

• Create a new folder somewhere (it doesn’t have to be under the ‘Pictures’ folder)
• Open a terminal window (select Terminal under Accessories)
• enter the following:

  gksu gedit /usr/share/applications/screensavers/personal-slideshow.desktop

  (enter your password if prompted)

• Scroll down to the line (near the end) that begins

  Exec=slideshow

• Add the following after this command:

  --location=<your pictures path>

  (You will have to use standard escape sequences if you have spaces in the path.)

• Here’s an example:

  Exec=slideshow --location=/home/myusername/Pictures/My\ Screensaver

And that’s it. Save the file, and restart your screensaver. It will now only search for pictures in your chosen folder.

For those following along, on occasion I’ve mentioned a little side project I’ve been working on called Followup!, an anti-social social bookmarking application.

I’ve not done any real work on it recently, but over the past couple of days I had another look at it, and squashed a couple of annoying bugs (the double-login bug for one), as well as laying out some of the plans for future expansion.

With this, and following an earlier small post, I’m throwing Followup! open to everyone to use. Just sign up and get going - that’s it. Oh, and expect the obligatory Google ads to be installed soon too…

Time flies when you’re having fun, and I’ve certainly been having fun with Ubuntu recently. Looking back through my (not very frequent) posts, I see it’s been about 6 weeks 6 months! since I posted about installing Ubuntu as a test on my new laptop.

Since then, I can, quite literally, count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’ve booted back into Windows Vista. At the moment the Vista partition (all 20Gb of it!) serves to provide me with printing capabilities (My printer is an old Dell USB one that only barely works under Vista), and to update my iPod with some purchased music (Teeny Shiny and Bambi’s Dilemma by Melt Banana)

I have no reason or need to run Windows Vista on my laptop, and has been proven over the past four months, there is no reason I need to run Windows for work either. It’s turning out that the only reason I actually have a Windows desktop at all is to act as my games machine, since this is the one area that Linux is deficient. Whilst I know that a lot of games can run quite happily under WINE or through Cedega’s service, not all do. So for now, I have one Windows machine running XP (which will never have Vista installed on it), and one laptop running Ubuntu.

Going back to the work comment, for the past 4 months I’ve been working for as Head of Web Development for Hachette Filipacchi, the publisher of Elle Magazine, Red Magazine and Ideal Home amongst others. During that entire period I’ve been running a dual monitor desktop running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (well, until recently when I did a dist-upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon). The only time I’ve had some trouble is with project management software, which I rarely need anyway. There was nothing I needed that was Windows only. As a quick rundown, here’s the most common software in use in the office, and what I replaced it with.

Microsoft Exchange
Replaced with Evolution (through a webmail connection). Whilst it’s possible to connect to an Exchange server through IMAP, the IT department weren’t comfortable with that.

Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Visio
Replaced with Open Office, and no-one noticed. I now use Open Office exclusively.

Tortiose SVN+PSPad
Replaced with Eclipse+Subclipse+PHPEclipse. I’m finding the move to an IDE to have been beneficial, rather than just using a text editor. Combining Eclipse with a local copy of Apache+PHP+MySQL means I can do all my web development on my local machine, and use Subversion to store the code, and later publish to the live webserver in a managed way. Very handy.

MSN Messenger
Replaced with Pidgin, although there was also the option of Meebo, and to deal with some firewall issues I also wrote my own web-based chat app.

Photoshop
Replaced with The Gimp. This is perhaps the most contentious issue for some people, since whilst The Gimp isa good piece of software, it is certainly not in the same league as Photoshop when it comes to image manipulation. That said, since I’m not a designer and only use The Gimp to resize images, and perhaps create some spot graphics, it’s not an issue for me.

Winamp
Replaced with Amarok.

Filezilla
Replaced with… Filezilla. Yep, there’s a native port of Filezilla available for Linux, and recent releases have made it as stable as the Windows version of the software.

The Bat
Replaced with Firebird. I think Firebird still a little ways to go to be as useful as The Bat, but I find it quite suitable as a mail client.

That pretty much covers everythign I need on a day to day basis. Having direct access to a command shell also helps tremendously when developing websites, and I can connect to the webserver very quickly. Running Ubuntu also makes it extremely easy to install and maintain a local web development environment, so I actually do all my development directly on my desktop under Apache 2, PHP5 and MySQL5. Once I’ve done my coding, I can simply commit to my SVN repository and then check out the code directly to the live webserver. Makes developing complex websites very easy!

One perhaps under mentioned aspect of running Ubuntu (or many other Linux distributions for that matter) that I have found remakably useful - and something I actively miss when using a Windows machine - is multiple workspaces. For example, on my laptop I have four workspaces arranged in a 2×2 grid, and I can place windows within a particular workspace to organise them into logical work groups.

On my work machine, whilst I had two monitors, I retained the four workspaces (although I also ran Compiz Fusion, so I had the 3D cube rather than a 2×2 grid), again allowing me to group windows together into logical workspaces. So I would have one workspace for email clients, one for research, one for development (Eclipse, local web browser, editors etc) and so on.

The new version of Ubuntu is due for release tomorrow, and having been using it for the past few weeks, I think this is the next major step forward for Linux - it does just work.

As a last note, a lot of people I have spoken to claim that it’s almost impossible to get support for Linux, which is why they don’t use it. I did some checking, and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, provides commercial support for Ubuntu via email and telephone - and you can buy support for an entire YEAR for £150…

Just a quick post on some recent work I’ve been doing. Those interested in fashion may have noticed that the past few weeks has seen the various Fashion Weeks being held in New York, London and latterly Milan (and with Paris rounding out the season starting tomorrow).

As part of the coverage, Elle UK launched a special Fashion Week microsite.

I developed the site, along with Jon Ramster and Jason Newington. The underlying data structure contains support for an effectively unlimited number of designers, fashion shows and images (OK, so the directory structure for the image server only supports 8,000,000 images…), and also allows almost any node to be ‘bookmarked’ by a user, all within the application. The site also has a comprehensive CMS behind it all, including FTP-based file upload (fashion shows generate a lot of images), which allows the Elle editors to update the site whenever they want, whilst also pulling in the latest available images from the latest shows.

So check out the Elle UK Fashion Week microsite and let me know what you think!

Update! In January 2008 I went back to Elle for a week to work on updating the site’s code for the new season of fashion shows. New design, new featrues, but the same underlying data structure as the previous incarnation, so all previous content is available in the new design.

In conversation today, I was asked what the first computer I ever used was - so I dug up a link:

Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P (Scroll down to the one at the bottom)

Well, this was certainly unexpected! It seems that the Mobile Weblog (which is the blog I write for on occasion) has been named in The Times’ list of 50 Best Business Blogs!

Internet blogs are taking on big corporations and winning. As the bloggerati continue to set the agenda Times Online provides the first full list of the 50 top blogs, corporate and anti-corporate alike.

Guess I’ll have to post some more now!

I’ve noticed an increase in comment spam in the past few weeks - not much, but a bit. Of course, since I have moderation turned on, the chances of a piece of comment spam actually making it through is zero. Which doesn’t bother me, as every piece of spam that someone attempts to post here is a failed spam attempt and a waste of their time, which effectively means less spam posted elsewhere. And since none of the links ever make it to a live state, there’s absolutely no benefit to be gained from continued attempts to post comment spam as it’s the same as dumping links into /dev/null.

I’m opening up one of my services to anyone who wants to get involved on a limited beta basis. To participate, drop me an email and I’ll give you a link to the signup page. I will be after feedback from anyone who participates.

So, a brief description:

Followup is a social bookmarking service without the social aspect. It is a web-based service that lets you bookmark a page you are looking at so you can come back to it later - and, in a nutshell, that’s all it is.

It was born out of a desire to keep a track of interesting pages to come back and read later, alongside using several different machines and operating systems, making it impossible to use the browser’s standard bookmark feature. Since most other bookmarking services are all about tagging and sharing, another thing that just seemed to waste time, Followup was designed to work in a very simple way: Bookmark the current site, then go back - no tagging, no descriptions, no sharing at the point of bookmarking. This is achieved through the use of a bookmark button that can be dragged to your browser’s toolbar - or all yourbrowser’s toolbars, on whichever machine or OS you’re running. Since the bookmarking is based on your logged-in state alone, as long as you’re logged in (or have logged in using that browser, under that OS, on that machine), any new bookmarks will be added to your list.

Followup does have a more social side, with automated links built in that allow users to submit their saved links to a range of popular social bookmarking/listing/linking sites, but this is a secondary service, and certainly isn’t the primary focus. If you want to share your links, or look at the pages you’ve bookmarked, go to the Followup site. All your links will be listed, along with various things you can do, including the all-important delete function.

So, if you’re interested, drop me an email.

The more I use Windows Vista, the more I hate it. The latest bugbear for me using Vista has to do with the way files and folders are viewed. I am yet to find out how I can tell Vista to stop being ‘helpful’ by ‘identifying’ the type of folder by the content, and just please remember that I have manually set what information columns I want, and to please use them from now on for all folders? Including the ones I manually reset and you overwrote?

This is really starting to become incredibly annoying, and far from being helpful is actually making it harder for me to work with the OS, as I have to spend time resetting the view every time I set down to work with some files, as well as resetting the columns.

The single most useful piece of information I find in the file column view is ‘last modified’, and the least use are ‘tags’, ‘rating’ and ‘date taken’ - yet for some reason Vista insists that it knows what I want, and resets all folder views to show ‘tags’, ‘rating’ and ‘date taken’, and removes ‘date modified’.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that Vista likes to decide when I’ve finished using Windows Explorer by helpfully closing it, without warning. Here’s something you can try for yourself, and this is a change in behaviour from Windows XP:

Put a DVD or CD in your DVD drive. Open Windows Explorer. Select the DVD/CD from the left-hand column so you can see a list of files on the DVD/CD. Now press the Eject button on the front of the DVD/CD drive, and watch Vista close Windows Explorer. You were finished with that program, weren’t you? (For the record, Windows XP would automatically select the next available device/folder further down the tree, rather than closing the program).

I thought I’d try something different and install Debain, but I ran into the same problems as Ubuntu with the machine freezing. I did some digging and found a fix of sorts, so now I can boot into Debian quite happily (an environment I am using right now!)

The problem seems to be generic, so I’ll try installing Ubuntu tomorrow with this fix and see what happens…