Francis Shanahan[.com] » linux

Adobe and Wikipedia

Francis — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 06:31:00 +0000

This website is primarily for my own gratification and rarely do I presume to think that it’s a valuable source of information. On the other hand, I do occasionally put forth the odd interesting nugget of information that you won’t generally find elsewhere.

Hence it’s always gratifying to come across websites that link to mine as a point of reference. Today I came across two such instances. The first is Wikipedia on their Live USB page [LINK] referencing my post on how to install and boot Linux from a Creative Zen MP3 Player [LINK].

The second is actually Adobe’s website[LINK], referencing my Zuggest [LINK] experiment. Zuggest was one of the first non-Google examples of Live Search using AJAX and it’s funny how Adobe refers to it as "Zuggest type results".

I have come across a few other Universities linking to this site which is terrific. Hopefully that indicates I’m putting out some useful information and somehow influencing the technology minds of the future.

This Blog Nominated in Irish Blog Awards

Francis — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 06:25:00 +0000

In the words of Pat Ingolsby, welcome to my head, please remove your shoes.

The Irish Blog Awards are currently open for voting and this blog is nominated in the Technology category [LINK]

It’s nice to be nominated in the Technology category but more so it’s nicer to be nominated in the IRISH technology category. It’s also a great way to uncover other Irish bloggers in this space.

I often struggle with categorizing this blog as it covers a weird mix of stuff.
The list includes various projects I’ve written such as the Audiovox 8600 cell phone utility [LINK], the Movie making Screen Capture tool [LINK], and RoboCast [LINK]

I’ve screwed around with Ajax quite a bit resulting in Zollage [LINK] and Zuggest [LINK] among others.

But it’s not all software, I also blog on Computer building [LINK] and my book [LINK] along with CardSpace and how to Boot Linux from your MP3 Player [LINK].

But this is a full-service blog so along with technology stuff, you also get into things like Wood Working [LINK] and Gingerbread [LINK].

The occasional thing I do gets mentioned in BusinessWeek [LINK] or Ajax Patterns [LINK] or even Sun’s training material (slide 9) [LINK].

So if you like this blog…VOTE FOR ME!!! [LINK].

Voting is easy, go here [http://www.awards.ie/vote/], put your name and email in and scroll down to "Best Technology Blog/Blogger" and pick my name from the list.

Voting will close at 5pm on Friday February 16th.

Here’s the Tech Nominees…

Best Technology Blog/Blogger – Sponsored by Bitbuzz

Creative Zen: So Useful.

Francis — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 10:46:00 +0000

The other day I spent the entire day with my laptop booted into Linux running off my Creative Zen Vision:M. I was able to happily use OpenOffice and Konquer over WiFi whilst charging my MP3 player at the same time. At the end of the day I shutdown my laptop, unplugged and listened to the radio on the way home.

Try that with the i-have-no-mind-of-my-own-so-I’ll-just-by-what-the-cool-company-that-lies-to-my-face-says-Pod.

Here’s some useful resources if you’re already an owner: [LINK]

Boot Linux from a Creative Zen Vision:M

Francis — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 19:23:00 +0000

Tonight I setup Linux (Knoppix) on my Creative Zen Vision:M mp3 player.

Let me clarify that, I set aside a 1GB partition on my Zen to use as a removable hard-disk and installed linux on that. This allows me to boot a standard PC from Zen plugged into the USB drive to the Knoppix operating system.

The best part is probably that I can simply unplug, reboot and be back in windows.

I used the following guide [LINK] and only had to modify things slightly.

Essentially because the guide talks about booting from a USB drive which is essentially a ZIP drive, you need to modify the mkdiskimage command listed in the guide from this:

mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdz 0 64 32
to this:
mkdiskimage -F /dev/sdz 0 64 32

This’ll setup things on a true Fat32 drive which is perfect for the Zen. If you don’t want to read the guide, here’s a summary of the steps:
Put the Zen in Removable Disk mode with the size set to 1GB.
Plug it in and boot knoppix from CD.
Find the name of your USB drive and substitute is for /dev/sdz below.
Be extra careful to use the right drive here as the next step wipes ALL data from the drive.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdz
mkdiskimage -F /dev/sdz 0 64 32
syslinux -s /dev/sdz1
mount /media/sdz1
cd /media/sdz1
Should be one and only one file in the folder.
cp -av /cdrom/boot/isolinux/* .
mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg
rm -f isolinux.bin
cp -av /cdrom/* .
rm -rf ./boot
reboot

This was a bit of a geeky thing to do but I love it and it’s super handy when you’re on the road (as I was this weekend) and need a better OS than the company issue. It’s also great if you’re Whingedoze dies on you. By setting up on a Zen like this it also frees up your CD drive so you can play DVDs without needing the Knoppix CD to be in the drive.

P.S. I’m claiming my blog, view my Technorati Profile.

Virtual Vista

Francis — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:56:00 +0000

An un-released OS running on an machine that doesn’t exist? Count me in!
Virtual PC Server 2005 R2 is an amazing piece of software. I have used Virtual PC 2004 many times to test out Longhorn, checkout various Linux distros etc. all with great success. Never had I tried Virtual PC Server. Until tonight.

Incredibly frustrated with various events of the day, I decided to take matters into my own hands and install the Feb CTP of Vista on my home PC. Unfortunately Vista CTP doesn’t play that nice with VPC 2004 at least on my machine. Some others have had the same problem.

So I installed Virtual PC server 2005. This thing installed in less than 1 minute and I was left with an open browser containing a URI to my own machine. Where’s the client I asked. It took me about 30 seconds to realize the entire thing is browser based!!! Seconds later I was up and running the Vista install on my PC, within a browser. Imagine Virtual PC 2004 combined with Remote Desktop or VNC and tossed into a browser. That’s Virtual PC 2005 R2.

So far so good, Vista is installing (slowly). The other nice thing about this is you can close the browser and the virtual machine keeps running in the background.

About two weeks ago I was in Redmond and met with a number of folks from the Infocard team as well as Office 2007. Looking forward to getting my hands dirty with some of this stuff many days from now when the install finishes…

2600 Hacker Quarterly and Make Magazine

Mon, 20 Jun 2005 14:01:00 +0000

The other day in Borders I came across Make magazine, targetted at the engineer, this magazine describes all sorts of things which the average person would dismiss as silly but which I would view as generally cool. Examples are: How to build a light-seeking robot from an old mouse, install Linux on your iPod and how to recycle rubber.

I should also mention the other more established magazine which really paved the way for Make and that is 2600 – the hacker quarterly. This is basically a small-jam-in-your-pocket quarterly which details similar stuff like how to hack a vending machine, Hunting Wifi Leeches and Magnetic Stripe Reading . Great stuff.

And finally a problem: How do you start a fire with a can of coke (or any beverage) and a bar of chocolate?
Answer tomorrow.

YAC is not YACC but it’s cool

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 11:35:00 +0000

This is some stuff I never knew existed: YAC, Yet Another Caller ID Program. I’m not sure why it’s not called YACIDP but there you go. Basically, you hook up the phone line to a modem that supports caller ID and this thing runs as a little service to tell you who’s calling, just like your phone does but who can find the phone when you need to. Pretty cool.

Now take that idea and apply it to Windows Media Center Edition or your Linux based Home Theatre PC (HTPC) and you have something REALLY neat.

Kudos to Ethan Zoeller the Product Manager for MCE 2005 who’s built an add-in to MCE that uses YAC to display who’s calling on your TV. No more getting up from the couch to see who’s calling (not that I ever do that anyway).

Tivo & Free-vo: Windows XP Media Center 2005

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 16:19:00 +0000

A follow up on the “Free-vo”, the home-made Tivo idea I posted a few weeks back.

Last weekend I took my Mandrake Linux installation and began the long process of setting up Myth TV. Myth lets you record TV and watch it at the same time. It also has a bunch of other features such as tv listings and weather reports. Unfortunately, it is NOT easy to setup. In fact it’s a friggin nightmare. There’s no native binaries in the download so you have compile all source on your machine. In otherwords you need GCC. The software relies on mySQL (for some weird reason) and also needs LAME audio encoding. All-in-all it’s a major hassle so I gave up.

I wiped the machine and put Windows Media XP edition on there. You may have noticed Microsoft booths popping up in the malls. Basically Media Center is an add-on to windows XP. You run it like an application and it takes up the entire screen.

It gives you similar functionality to Tivo except the you can do things like slideshows of digital photos and listen to MP3s. It also has some other features like downloadable movies (movies on demand) through Movielink.com.

XP Media Edition is not bad but it’s a bit of a hog in terms of system resources. I think the home-made Tivo idea is still viable and I’m going to pursue it but the dream of using my crappy Pentium III is slowly slipping away.

The one small success I had was to pump my computer’s video output into my TV. The desktop can even be shared across the monitor and the TV, even with them each having different resolutions.

More to follow.

Build Your Own Tivo

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 10:43:00 +0000

I have a second desktop that’s aging poorly, a Pentium III 450Mhz processor and some disk storage, not much else. I’ve been using it as a Linux box just to familiarize myself with the OS again.

I’m thinking of turning it into a PVR. What’s a PVR? A Personal Video Recorder, think Tivo. A PVR let’s you do all the things Tivo does and more and without any subscription fee!

Basically all you need is
a) an old computer (doesn’t have to be the latest or greatest)
b) All the disk space you can muster. A 1 hour TV show will take about 3GB of storage, depending on the quality you record at.
c) Something to grab the TV signal and dump it on your hard disk or in technical terms a video in/tv tuner card with hardware MPEG 2 compression. The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 seems to be the way to go here for about $120.
d) Something to take the signal from your computer and dump it out to the TV. Also from Hauppauge the Media MVP seems to be a solid choice.
e) Software, http://www.gbpvr.com/ will let you manage the entire thing through your TV.

At this point you’ll have a PC aquiring a cable TV signal and storing TV to disk. You can put the computer in a totally seperate room and run a single ethernet cable to the Media MVP in your living/TV room.

Moreover, you’ll be able to schedule recordings, play internet radio, listen to MP3′s, CDs, watch DVDs playing on your computer etc. All free. Considering Tivo charges $12.95/month and $99 for the Tivo unit, just to watch/record TV I’d say that’s a pretty good deal.

There’s a great community website (http://byopvr.com) with fairly active discussion forums on the pros and cons of hardware and software.

Linux (SuSE) running inside Virtual PC

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 14:40:00 +0000

The other day I dusted off my old Pentium III 450Mhz and installed Mandrake Linux on it. It’d been about 7 years since my last experience with Linux and I wanted to see how far it had come.

I got all the software I needed from http://www.LinuxISO.org, all free of course. Installation took 3 CDs for Mandrake and took about 2 hours. It installed gNome as the window manager which takes a little getting used to but I soon got the hang of it. I’m really impressed with all the quality of these open source applications such as GIMP, XMMS, Konquerer, Epiphany, OpenOffice and so on. Seems like things have come quite a way since I last used this stuff.

So with this small success under my belt, I realized I could install Linux on Virtual PC on my laptop! This time I chose SuSE over Mandrake, just for the contrast. It took 1 CD, a 1.5Gig Virtual Harddisk and about 3 hours (VPC runs slow) to install. It’s all working now however and I now have the best of both worlds. I’m loving it.

SuSE even comes with WINE which lets you run Windows applications (MSOffice for example) inside Linux. In theory I could run Excel inside WINE running on Linux running inside Virtual PC running on WinXP Pro!!!

Ok, maybe I’m taking this a little too far.