I have a couple of friends to blame for introducing me to FarmVille. I never was much of a Social Web kind of guy, but this little game adds a different perspective to the ‘normal’ social networks… in order to progress in the game, the player is obliged to interact with others.
With no more than half an hour a day I keep in touch with my neighbors. I like it!
Regular expressions are an important development tool for me. Every day there are patterns to be found on text output (e.g a especific tag on an xml file, or a given value in a csv file) or configuration files.
Until recently, the best tool to find such patterns was egrep, which prints the lines of a text file that match a given pattern. grep can be used to match ’simple text’, but used with option -E (egrep is an alias for grep -E) it searched for regular expressions.
egrep is a very useful tool, but very recently I found out that there is an X-Emacs builtin “regex” builder.
Just activate-it by M-x re-builder. The “regex” builder allows to create the regular expression, while finding the matches in the active buffer. I don’t know any other tool that does that in linux. I love it.
NOTE: This feature did not always work in X-Emacs (it wasn’t fully compatible since it was primarily developed for Emacs). I’m using the current Ubuntu 9.10 packages.
Firefox is an excellent web browser (my first choice!), but there is so much fuss around Google Chrome. A friend suggested the change, but it wasn’t until now that I had a go at the ‘new’ web browse.
If you don’t know, Google Chrome is based on an open source project called Chromium. Apart from the icons - which have a slightly different colors - the browsers are essentially the same. So, I went for the it and installed the ‘original’ Chromium web browser in my Ubuntu desktop, with the following steps:
1) Add the new repository to source.list file.
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
2) Add the GPG key for the repository
sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5
3) Update the source list
sudo apt-get update
4) Finally, install the web browser
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
First, the usability is was amazing - the interface is very compact, but the more noticeable effect was navigation speed. It may have been the sense of “Ha!!” but the pages were loaded really, really fast.
I really recommend it! Firefox is still my first choice, but I was impressed by Chromium’s performances. At least for my EEE Pc, I’m
thinking of converting to Chromium.
Next, I’ll be trying the Chromium OS. There, I really don’t think there is a change over Ubuntu.
On the last December 23rd, the wind was strong, the tree was too close to the cable and my telephone service went dead. This meant that after that date, and until today I have been Internetless! Poor me!
I survived… 22 days without Internet. But I’m back, and eager as ever…
There must be at least 20 episodes of TV series to download. I much make for the loss time.
