development fun

Testing a picture email

2009-06-21T09:56:00.001-07:00

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

Test blog post

2009-06-21T09:53:00.001-07:00

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

E6400 Ubuntu 9.04 Install

2009-05-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-12-22T13:52:00.000-08:00

# .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

2008-12-22T13:49:00.000-08:00

;; .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

2008-11-24T18:38:00.001-08:00

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.