I find the little chat application that sits in the Facebook status bar pretty handy for sending quick messages to buddies who are online when I am. If you're a user of Pidgin like me you might like the idea of being able to use the Facebook chat service from within Pidgin (keeping all your IM accounts in one place ). Awesomely enough, you can do just that. All you have to do is grab the Facebook Chat for Pidgin plugin:

wget http://pidgin-facebookchat.googlecode.com/files/pidgin-facebookchat-1.38.deb

Once that has finished downloading you can then do:

sudo dpkg -i pidgin-facebookchat-1.38.deb

Now a bit of tidying up:

rm pidgin-facebookchat-1.38.deb

After you restart Pidgin you will have a Facebook option in your Add Account dialog.



Done and done .

After having a look around the Internet at some of the reviews for various iPhone applications available I began wondering how they managed to snap screenshots of the apps. I knew it had to be part of the iPhone Operating System because it would need to be available to any application.

After a quick hunt around I discovered that pressing the Home button and the Standby button at the same time you get a screenshot taken (including a flash of white and the camera shutter noise). Your new image can then be found in the Camera Roll in the Photos application.

Here is an example screenshot that I took of my home screen:

Are you using Git in Ubuntu and want to use an external visual diff viewer? It's easy! I will be using Meld for this example but most visual diff tools should be similar. If you don't already have Meld, then install it:

sudo apt-get install meld

Ok. Now let's begin by breaking it. Enter this into a terminal:

git config --global diff.external meld

Then navigate to a Git tracked directory and enter this (with an actual filename):

git diff filename

Meld will open but it will complain about bad parameters. The problem is that Git sends its external diff viewer seven parameters when Meld only needs two of them; two filenames of files to compare. One way to fix it is to write a script to format the parameters before sending them to Meld. Let's do that.

Create a new python script in your home directory (or wherever, it doesn't matter) and call it diff.py.

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys
import os

os.system('meld "%s" "%s"' % (sys.argv[2], sys.argv[5]))

Now we can set Git to perform it's diff on our new script (replacing the path with yours):

git config --global diff.external /home/nathan/diff.py
git diff filename

This time when we do a diff it will launch Meld with the right parameters and we will see our visual diff.

Want to change the way that Gnome clock applet looks? Its easy. Start by opening up the Gnome Configuration Editor. If it isn't in the menu, you can open it by typing this into a terminal:

gconf-editor

Now navigate to /apps/panel/applets and find your clock preferences key (my clock was at /clock_screen0/prefs/). Change the format key to 'custom'. You can now change the custom_format key to whatever you like (using basic HTML and strftime format strings). I changed mine to:

<span color="#039">%a %d %b</span> <b>%I:%M %p</b>

Which looks something like this:



For more information on date/time formats that you can use, check out the c++ strftime reference.

If you have ever used Quicksilver on a Mac or Launchy on Windows then you have already experienced the concept that makes Gnome Do awesome. If you haven't (and are running Gnome) then give it a try.

To install Gnome Do, first add it's repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ubuntu gutsy main

Then install it:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-do

You can then run it from Accesories->Gnome Do (you might also want to add it to your start up programs in your session).



To launch something, assuming the Gnome Do window isn't already showing, press Super+Space (Windows key + Space bar) and then start typing a program name, etc and press enter. For more information on Gnome Do check out it's project site.

I noticed I was getting a bit of traffic from people searching for 'Eyetoy Ubuntu' but the only article I had regarding the Eyetoy in Ubuntu was about Cheese. So, in an effort to make the Google results pointing here more useful, here is a How To about getting the Eyetoy working in Ubuntu Gutsy (I mostly followed this tutorial on Ubuntu Forums, with a few changes).

First, plug the Eyetoy into an available USB slot.

Then type this into Terminal and press enter.
sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r`

Go to http://www.rastageeks.org/downloads/ov51x-jpeg and download the latest ov51x-jpeg driver to your home directory. At the time of writing the latest driver was ov51x-jpeg-1.5.3.tar.gz.

Extract the the archive by typing this into terminal (change the filename if you have a newer one).
tar -xvf ov51x-jpeg-1.5.3.tar.gz
cd ov51x-jpeg-1.5.3

You should now be in the folder of the drivers so let's install them.
sudo make install
sudo modprobe videodev
sudo modprobe i2c_core

And thats it! If you want to test out the Eyetoy, then check out cheese.

I got a new 6x8" Wacom Graphire4 yesterday. After finishing off an assignment for uni this afternoon I got a chance to hook it up and have a play.

It is incredibly easy to install a Wacom in Ubuntu. It is so easy in fact, most of it has already been done for you. There are only two steps left:

Enter this into Terminal:
sudo apt-get install wacom-tools

Once that finishes, enter this:
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Find these lines and uncomment them (remove the '#' from the start of the line):
# Uncomment if you have a wacom tablet
#InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
#InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
#InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"

Now log out and log back in and your Wacom should be working fine.

To get pressure sensitivity working in GIMP, fire it up and go to File->Preferences and then select Input Devices, then Configure Extended Input Devices.... Set each device (eraser, cursor, stylus) to enabled. Click Save and then Ok. You should now have pressure sensitivity enabled. You can try it out by selecting one of the drawing tools and defining its pressure sensed behaviour.

As for me, I had a bit of a play with my new wacom and got this:



I think I need some more practice

Getting a LAMP installation happening in Ubuntu is easy. Just open up Applications->Accessories->Terminal and type each of these commands in.

To install MySQL, enter the following into Terminal:
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
You will be prompted for a password during the install.

To install Apache, enter this:
sudo apt-get install apache2

To install PHP5, enter this:
sudo apt-get install php5

To get PHP talking to MySQL, enter the following 2 commands:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql
sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

And now, to install PHPMyAdmin, enter the following:
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
When it asks which server you would like to install it on, choose Apache2.
After the install completes, enter this command:
sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ /var/www/phpmyadmin
That will make a symbolic link (kind of like a shortcut) in the right folder for Apache to be able to see PHPMyAdmin. Now you should be able to access it by navigating to http://localhost/phpmyadmin.

If you want to set up Mod Rewrite, then enter this into Terminal:
sudo a2enmod rewrite
(for more information on Mod Rewrite, check out Apache's Mod Rewrite Guide)

Hope that was helpful

When I was building this blog I came across an interesting problem. I wanted to include some of my video projects as Youtube clips but noticed that the default embed code that Youtube offers isn't valid xhtml.

Youtube offers something like this:

<object width="425" height="350">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM"></param>
    <param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
    <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM" 
        type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
        wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed>
</object>

After a bit of playing around, I found that what I really needed was something more like this:

<object data="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM" 
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 
    width="425" height="350">
    <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iJ6JjzfZ2PM"/>
</object>

The next hurdle was RSS; Valid RSS doesn't allow <embed> tags at all. I removed them from the output of my RSS generator but I still wanted to show some sort of preview of the missing Youtube embed. Thankfully, Youtube offers a default preview image for all uploaded videos and so given iJ6JjzfZ2PM as an example video id, the image would be:

http://img.youtube.com/vi/iJ6JjzfZ2PM/default.jpg

That image comes out something like this:


The preview image for a Youtube clip.

So with all that sorted, now I can have my Youtube and my validation