Josh Cody

20 Jan 2011

How to Increase the Size of VirtualBox Virtual Machine Disk Image | TechSource

This guide just came in handy.

http://www.junauza.com/2010/07/how-to-increase-size-of-virtualbox.html

14 Jan 2011

Mad programmer's cave: XMind as eclipse plugin

When I bought my new computer, I threw caution to the wind and went with the newest version of all my regular tools. This meant moving to Eclipse 3.6 while going to Ubuntu 10.10. While installing my usual plugins, I was disappointed to learn that XMind had dropped support for their plugin version. As a quick fix, I just downloaded the standalone version and have been working away ever since. Today, I decided I was tired of it and would look for a solution. It didn't take long before I found this post with a handy bash script. A quick run of the script resulted in a few errors. Before hacking through it myself, I checked the post comments for resolutions. That's where I found this:

Rolf said...

dziekuje bardzo :-)

thanks for pointing out the "dropins" directory! I decided to take a slightly different route that seems to work for me:

- I installed the Xmind .deb package on my Ubuntu machine (installed in /usr/local/xmind)
- then I created a symlink to that location in dropins (ln -s /usr/local/xmind $ECLIPSE_PATH/dropins/xmind)

(so relying on Eclipse to only use the latest version of any plugin)

13/5/10 16:23

via blog.xemantic.com

I just created the symlink, restarted Eclipse, and it's working great. While I created this post is a general bookmark for myself, I hope someone else can find it useful as well.

10 Dec 2010

Aptana Studio 3 environment settings

While trying out the Aptana Studio 3 beta plugin for Eclipse, I ran into an issue where the embedded terminal could not find my Rails installation. In doing research on the issue, I found that the terminal initializes itself from an included .aptanarc file. I popped it open to see what it initializes and found this:

export LANG=UTF-8

if [ -f /etc/profile ] ; then . /etc/profile; fi

if [ -f ~/.bash_profile ] ; then . ~/.bash_profile;
elif [ -f ~/.bash_login ] ; then . ~/.bash_login;
elif [ -f ~/.profile ] ; then . ~/.profile;
fi

if [[ "$HOME" != `pwd` ]] ; then
  [[ -f .rvmrc && -n $rvm_version ]] && source .rvmrc
fi

[[ -f ~/.aptanarc ]] && . ~/.aptanarc

Therein lies the problem. I use zshell in lieu of bash and while they are similar, I don't have any bash settings configured on my system. The fix turned out to be setting up the .aptanarc file in my home directory that simply initialized the .zshrc file.

#!/bin/zsh

source ~/.zshrc

After this file was created, I closed the embedded terminal, and recreated the Ruby/Rails project. Problem solved.

10 Nov 2010

Easy introduction to services, runlevels, and rc.d scripts from Linux.com

A Linux service is an application (or set of applications) that runs in the background waiting to be used, or carrying out essential tasks. I've already mentioned a couple of typical ones (Apache and MySQL). You will generally be unaware of services until you need them.
How can you tell what services are running, and more importantly, how can you set up your own?

via linux.com

27 Sep 2010

U.S. Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet - NYTimes.com

“I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” he said. “If they start building in all these back doors, they will be exploited.”
Susan Landau, a Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study fellow and former Sun Microsystems engineer, argued that the proposal would raise costly impediments to innovation by small startups.
“Every engineer who is developing the wiretap system is an engineer who is not building in greater security, more features, or getting the product out faster,” she said.

via nytimes.com

24 Sep 2010

prog21: Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers

Advice to Aimless, Excited Programmers
I occasionally see messages like this from aimless, excited programmers:
Hey everyone! I just learned Erlang/Haskell/Python, and now I'm looking for a big project to write in it. If you've got ideas, let me know!
or
I love Linux and open source and want to contribute to the community by starting a project. What's an important program that only runs under Windows that you'd love to have a Linux version of?
The wrong-way-aroundness of these requests always puzzles me. The key criteria is a programing language or an operating system or a software license. There's nothing about solving a problem or overall usefulness or any relevant connection between the application and the interests of the original poster. Would you trust a music notation program developed by a non-musician? A Photoshop clone written by someone who has never used Photoshop professionally? But I don't want to dwell on the negative side of this.

via prog21.dadgum.com