So, like n million other gluttons for punishment, I queued up and pulled down the latest Ubuntu release for my netbook yesterday morning to see what all the fuss was about. Specifically, I was hoping to be impressed by the new Unity interface. Admittedly, I had installed Unity from the PPA a few weeks back, so I already knew roughly what to expect. However, it’s what I did not expect that made the biggest impression — unfortunately, a negative one. In a nutshell, all of the glitches and buggy behaviors I had experienced during the beta period were still there. And they annoyed me even more now — this was supposed to be the stable shipping version, right? As a software development professional myself, I must say that [...]

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Lately I have been rethinking / rejiggering / reinventing our SCM and Release Engineering functions at work. One of the things that has shaken out of it is the use of “virtual appliances” in our infrastructure. And of course that means that I have been proofing the concept here at home with VirtualBox OSE (at work we use a different vendor), GNU/Linux OSes, and various GPL software. So, I’ll cheat a little bit for this post and simply provide a few download links and the README file for my favorite LAMP stack DEVELOPMENT image / appliance. (I would suggest that it’s not quite an appliance because I haven’t included the web UI to reconfigure the network or manage the Apache2 install.) In a nutshell, this is a headless [...]

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HOW-TO: Rip audio CDs to FLAC format with Rubyripper

So, you’ve liberated yourself from the prison of proprietary audio formats like MP3 and decided to move to an open format with growing industry support and a far superior sound quality: you’ve selected FLAC. And if you run a GNU/Linux distro on your computer, there may not be a more bulletproof tool than Rubyripper for making high-quality (almost exact) copies of your audio CDs in the FLAC format. How to install Rubyripper on a Debian-based distro To get the latest release, browse to http://code.google.com/p/rubyripper/downloads/list. At the time of this writing, the current version is Rubyripper-0.6.0. Download and extract to a directory of your choosing. You’ll need a few prerequisites and some recommended packages — on Debian 5.0.5 (lenny): $ sudo apt-get install cdparanoia ruby cd-discid eject vorbisgain normalize-audio [...]

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HOW-TO: Install VirtualBox OSE Guest Additions in Debian Squeeze

For the impatient or inattentive: the Debian installer currently detects when it’s executing in a VirtualBox guest VM and installs the guest additions for you during setup. If you think that your installation is bad for some reason, install the virtualbox-ose-guest-x11 package and you’re all set. So, you want to run Debian in VirtualBox at a screen resolution higher than 800×600. Admittedly, this is not a complicated problem to solve, which is precisely why this post is so short. But first, note that Beastie is eating a striped apple in the image to the left and his tail is actually a Debian logo. This is not important and has virtually nothing to do with this post — I just think it’s funny. About the environment Pretty straightforward. Host [...]

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Looking for the default database schemas? Download them for versions 2.6 through 3.3 here. (MySQL format.) NOTE: Much of this content is relevant only to MySQL users. Other database users may find some semblance of an elucidation, but they’ll have to hack their own scripts! Over time and multiple version upgrades of Atlassian Confluence, its database can get a bit “dirty” for various reasons and may cause an upgrade to fail or lead to confusion when contacting Atlassian support (see note). A few examples: Prior to version 2.10, the upgrade process wasn’t very “tidy”, shall we say? For example, if the newer version of Confluence didn’t need a data column that the previous version did, the upgrade would just leave the column in place — with all of [...]

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