http://cro.alienpants.com Musings on Digital Identity, and other things Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:50:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The recent release of the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron beta prompted me to investigate, and run the dist-upgrade. The Gutsy Gibbon beta release and subsequent upgrades was a relatively painless process, and Ubuntu gets better with every release. Two things that did concern me, as they seem to impact every time ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2008/03/31/presario-f500-wireless-and-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron/ We all like friends, and having the ability to add and remove friends within a social network is critical. How you deal with managing friends from a design point of view is an interesting one. There are many approaches, depending on the type of information you want to store about the ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2008/01/04/social-network-friends/ 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 ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2008/01/04/customising-the-pictures-folder-screensaver-in-ubuntu-gutsy/ After fiddling about all last night trying to get the laptop to boot, I gave up around 1am and went and played some World of Warcraft. Then just before bed I checked the Ubuntu forums again. A bit of searching for my laptop name and model led me to a ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2007/12/09/laptop-hardware-upgrade-part-2/ There comes a time when the 20Gb partition you set aside on a dual-boot system to run Ubuntu just isn't big enough, so the idea of upgrading to a spanky new hard drive with a little more room becomes very attractive. This is a path I started down this afternoon on ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2007/12/08/laptop-hardware-upgrade/ When looking at the development of a social networking site, there are a number of fundamentals that I think need to be implemented before you can consider that you have the basic framework for a social network. Basic Information The absolute basic building block of such a site is the user ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2007/11/28/social-network-fundamentals/ Social Networking is something of a pehnomenon at the moment, with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo (amogn others) leading the public perception of what social networking is all about, although there are many, many others - including the one I wrote for Pitch and launched a little over a year ago. It's ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2007/11/28/writing-a-social-network/ 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 ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2007/10/31/followup-opens/ I saw on the Ubuntu forums a comment about getting the NVIDIA drivers working with the Compaq Presario F500, so I thought it might be wortwhile posting my entire xorg.conf - since I know it works :) This configuration also supports compiz fusion, albeit slowly but you can, if you ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2007/10/17/xorgconf-for-compaq-presario-f500/ 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, ... http://cro.alienpants.com/index.php/2007/10/17/a-month-6-months-of-ubuntu/