Testing a picture email

This is going to be the weather in Austin for the entire summer.

Test blog post

I'm testing out sending an email to my blog from my cool new iPhone :)

E6400 Ubuntu 9.04 Install

I just got a new Dell E6400. I like it ok so far. I upgraded from an old IBM T30. The buttons are still a little better on the T30, but all in all I think I'm going to like the Dell just fine and as I type on it I think I like the keyboard better. Here's an issue I ran into that seemed pretty common, getting the NVidia driver to work for the Quadro NVS 160M (rev a1). I installed Ubuntu 9.04 without any problems. Loaded it up and the background was all grainy. I went to the System->Administration->Hardware Drivers but there wasn't anything in there. So I followed these steps and now it seems to be working just fine & there is an NVidia XServer Settings program in the System->Administration menu.

Helpful Commands

lspci -- this will tell you what video card you have
uname -r -- this will tell you the name of the kernel release

Steps

* Some other blog mentioned that you needed the kernel headers first to get things to work. I didn't test this without doing this first so I don't know if this is completely necessary but either way it's not going to hurt anything.

* sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.28-11-generic (run uname -r to determine the version you should specify for this command)

* sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-180

* Restart X

* System->Administration->Hardware Drivers

* It will search for drivers and find the NVidia ones. It found two and I picked the latest 180 that was the recommended one.

* Restart X again and then you should be good to go.

Big Fan of Dropbox

Yeah I'm not really a blogger of any sort. I stumble back to this page every now and again to see what new features google has cooked up. I found a better tool which pretty much eliminates the need to use this page. Initially, I wanted it to keep my .emacs file so I could share it between multiple machines & dropbox does that fantastically. I just figured I would add another link out there for the google crawler to help out the dropbox team. Thanks guys, it's a great product.

.bashrc file

# .bashrc

# Source global definitions
if [ -f /etc/bashrc ]; then
. /etc/bashrc
fi

# Program aliases
alias vi='vim'
alias emacs=emacs-snapshot

# Function aliases
alias cp='cp -i'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='rm -i'
alias pd='pushd'
alias pod='popd'

# list directory aliases
alias dir='ls -hF --color' # add colors for filetype recognition
alias la='ls -Al' # show hidden files
alias ll='ls -l' # show as list
alias ls='ls -hF --color' # add colors for filetype recognition
alias lx='ls -lXB' # sort by extension
alias lk='ls -lSr' # sort by size
alias lc='ls -lcr' # sort by change time
alias lu='ls -lur' # sort by access time
alias lr='ls -lR' # recursive ls
alias lt='ls -ltr' # sort by date
alias lm='ls -al |more' # pipe through 'more'
alias tree='tree -Csu' # nice alternative to 'ls'


# User specific environment and startup programs
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:$HOME/scripts
export PATH
SVN_EDITOR=emacs-snapshot
export SVN_EDITOR

.emacs file

;; .emacs

;;; uncomment this line to disable loading of "default.el" at startup
;; (setq inhibit-default-init t)

;; turn on font-lock mode
(when (fboundp 'global-font-lock-mode)
(global-font-lock-mode t))

;; enable visual feedback on selections
(setq transient-mark-mode nil)

;; default to better frame titles
(setq frame-title-format
(concat "%b - emacs@" (system-name)))

;; default to unified diffs
(setq diff-switches "-u")

;; always end a file with a newline
;(setq require-final-newline 'query)

;; this line makes the window render the font much
;; quicker on startup
(modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))

;; set the font
;;(set-default-font "-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--18-180-75-75-m-110-iso8859-1")

;; don't sound the system bell on errors
(setq visible-bell t)

;; setting the compilation window height
(setq compilation-window-height 8)

;; setting tab/spacing settings
(setq indent-tabs-mode nil)
(setq c-basic-offset 4)
(setq tab-width 4)

;; change all the yes/no questions to y/n
(fset 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p)

;; key bindings
(global-set-key [f3] 'isearch-forward-regexp)
(global-set-key [f4] 'next-error)
(global-set-key [f5] 'tempo-complete-tag)
(global-set-key [f6] 'compile)
(global-set-key [f8] 'shell)
(global-set-key [f11] 'list-buffers)
(global-set-key [f12] 'shell)

;; navigation key bindings similar to VI
(global-set-key "\M-j" 'next-line)
(global-set-key "\M-k" 'previous-line)
(global-set-key "\M-l" 'forward-char)
(global-set-key "\M-h" 'backward-char)

;; use C++ mode for .h files instead of plain old C mode
(setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\\.h$" . c++-mode) auto-mode-alist))

;; "M-x reload-buffer" will revert-buffer without requiring confirmation
(defun reload-buffer ()
"revert-buffer without confirmation"
(interactive)
(revert-buffer t t))

;; do not make a backup file
(setq make-backup-files nil)

;; add my custom dir to the load path
(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "~/emacs"))
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/emacs/plugins/yasnippet")

(require 'yasnippet)

(yas/initialize)
(yas/load-directory (expand-file-name "~/emacs/plugins/yasnippet/snippets/"))
(yas/minor-mode-on)

(custom-set-variables
;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom.
;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
'(inhibit-startup-screen t)
'(text-mode-hook (quote (turn-on-auto-fill text-mode-hook-identify))))
(custom-set-faces
;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
)

;;(set-default-font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-12")
;;(set-default-font “Monospace-11”)

First Post

I figured that it would be a lot easier to start posting my development related stuff here versus trying to keep up a blog site myself. I'm a c++ developer by day and I'm interested in Python and Django. Hopefully I'll have some informative information up here every now and again. Mostly though I'm going to use it for a repository for stuff that I continually regenerate on every machine I use such as my settings files & some shared code.