journaling

I have been in the process of planning out switching to Linux in 2010 for my main development computer (a laptop), as well as for various web and database servers I am responsible for at work.

I've been making good use of Sun's awesome (and free) VirtualBox program, which allows me to create any number of virtual computers to experiment on. I've had a couple of CLI-only server versions running (Debian and Ubuntu), as well as what amounts to a desktop system for the last three Ubuntu releases: 8.10, 9.04, and the just-issued 9.10.

My User has information that could... that could make this a free system again! No, really! You'd have programs lined up just to use this place, and no MCP looking over your shoulder.

I'll cover the whys and wherefores of switching in the future. For now, suffice to say that the ever-increasing commercialization of Mac OS X, with accompanying restrictions, has been grating on me for some time now. I am also attracted to the notion of software freedom (having been a huge fan of the original Tron movie ;) and of course the cost savings can be dramatic. And since I work primarily in education, I think we would be neglecting our duty by not exploring the open-source world.

All that is visible must grow beyond itself, and extend into the realm of the invisible.

One of the first and ongoing steps is compiling a list of application equivalents to programs I am need of.

• Mail -> Evolution
• iCal -> Evolution
• Exchange -> Evolution \m/
• MacJournal -> Zim or RedNotebook or Lifeograph
• iPhoto -> filesystem + gThumb (still need EXIF editor: JHead?)
• iTunes (music) -> Rhythmbox
• iTunes (podcasts) -> Rhythmbox (audio ok, testing vidcasts)
• OmniFocus -> Getting Things Gnome (GTG) or spreadsheet?
• Adium -> Empathy
• Quicksilver/Spotlight -> Deskbar-Applet
• iFlash -> Mnemosyne
• NetNewsWire -> Liferea or Gregarius
• Tweetie -> Gwibber
• VoodooPad -> Zim
• MarsEdit -> Drivel, BloGTK, or Gnome Blog?
• Dictionary.app -> Gnome Dictionary
• RPG -> see http://www.shell-fu.org/lister.php?id=885
• Black Ink -> Xword
• Desktop Pictures rotation -> Wallpaper Tray (Gnome panel)
• GarageBand/podcasting -> Audacity + LMMS
• OmniGraffle -> Dia
• Minuteur/ApiMac Timer -> Timer Applet

Still looking:

• Time Machine (backup) -> roll-my-own or manual?
• Bluetooth File Exchange -> built into Gnome?

Stuff that exists in both places:

• Firefox
• MacVim -> Gvim
• Audacity
• GIMP
• VirtualBox
• ClamXav -> ClamAV
• VLC
• MySQL Administrator and Query Browser
• NeoOffice -> OpenOffice
• Google Earth
• MacNikto -> Nikto

If you're looking into switching as well, or just are looking for new apps to try out whatever your platform, check out AlternativeTo, which provides alternatives for Linux, Mac, and Windows programs.

Note: Written before the current cold whacked me in the head and upper respiratory tract. Bits are incomplete. Suggestions are welcome.

End of line.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on this date in 1835, and the world is a better place for it having happened.

Casting about for an appropriate passage of his to share, I came across this one from The Innocents Abroad which seems applicable to bloggers everywhere....

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.

This picture, by the way, is of Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla's lab in 1894, which I came across on Wikipedia.

If you're casting about for something to read, take a gander at Mark Twain's works at Project Gutenberg.

A couple of other blogs mentioned the birthday this morning:

• Movie Morlocks has "Always the Twain" covering Mark Twain and Hollywood.
• World Hum posted "Happy Birthday, Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift", (it's Swift's birthday as well) mentioning they were "creators of the World Hum’s No. 7 and No. 6 greatest fictional travelers respectively..."

Speaking of birthdays, yesterday was the 80th birthday of Vin Scully.

Thu Sep 20 12:23:36 PDT 2007

Tracked down an easy method to insert the current date (timestamp) into a Vim document:

:r !date

Producing:

Thu Sep 20 12:24:50 PDT 2007

http://princ3.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/insert-current-date-in-vim/

UPDATE: 2008/11/08

Found another Vim method, slightly easier:

!!date

Should probably set up a single key command for that, maybe an F key.

Thu Sep 20 15:36:40 PDT 2007

Within TextMate, short of creating an internal command, the easiest way is to use the Text > Execute Line and Replace with Result and then using the /bin/date utility by simply typing date and then the ctrl-option-r shortcut</http://princ3.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/insert-current-date-in-vim/>

I keep thinking I've posted about the update of the nifty Mac journaling program, Journler, but keyword searching doesn't pull up what I thought I had done. A shame as version 2 has been out for some months now.

My original Journler post was when it was version 1.0.1; check out its many fine (and new) features. It's worth it for the Full Screen mode alone, but it's also just a fine example of Mac OS X programming, leveraging specific technologies to make it a joy to use within its environment. (This also means it has begun to require Tiger as a minimum, so be advised.)

I've started using Journler again quite often this past month or so. It is one program I would truly miss in a move to Linux.

(Whoops, did I say that out loud? ;)

From Tom Bridge: Weblogs, Pamphlets and Public Citizens: Changing Modern Media

The following was authored as part of my Master's program at Virginia Tech in Science and Technology Studies. Specifically, it was authored for STS-6234: History and Culture of Communications taught by Dr. Janet Abbate at the Northern Virginia Campus....

Over the last few years, weblogs have developed a unique role in the mediasphere as both errata and appendix. Blogs are correcting journalists, they're covering stories that are ignored by modern media and making them part of the media matrix. This process is crucial because it's changing the way that mass media is covering stories and handling their business.

Enjoy. Read. Comment. Share. Link. Debate.

Features, ideas, and thinking on Notanda

Wiki linking functionality, but sans CamelCase. Bracket-linking only. (See CamelVsNonCamel.) It has been pointed out that not using CamelCase breaks AccidentalLinking unless it is compensated for it in some other non-manual way... but perhaps this is not as important as it has been made out to be.

VoodooPad does its thing by checking for patterns on every word -- I wonder if this is feasible due to the naturally limited nature of a personal desktop wiki. Would the server overhead be too much? See also FreeLink and GaGaParser. (Something I saw mentioned was to only check words four characters and longer.)

To forestall this I went with manually bracketing the desired wikiwords. This requires some memory of what articles have been already saved, but a quick CLI search can remind you. Oddly, I've found this promotes the creation of new articles, as I can quickly create a foobar.txt draft file on the fly for later writing.

RSS and Atom feeds are now available. They are hard files created via a cron-called script.

Journaling (aka blogging) could be is achieved by YYYY_MM_DD entries (e.g. 2005_07_27). Organized naturally with 2005_07 and 2005 pages. Still haven't programmed this, and I'm not sure if I will or not. I had been uncertain whether to go through the effort, but it wound up not being a problem. Eventually I will want to compensate for the number of day articles listed in the 0-9 section of the automated Index, probably by splitting them off into their own archives and leaving the year pages.

I've added in tagging capabilities, self-organizing the site a la Flickr and del.icio.us. Tags are added on the last line of the original plaintext file with a simple punctuation indicator. And leveraging the tag concept further, I created a sidebar section that allows you to search by that article's name as a keyword/tag on Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Google.

Bookmarks module Associating articles with tags (i.e. the article titles themselves are potential tags), so that if you're viewing my page on baseball, a sidebar would display any bookmarks list of "Related Articles" with that article's title as a tag is displayed at the end.

Other wikiesque functionality to be potentially added later: RecentChanges, FindPage, BackLinks (in addition to the current tagging), LastEdited, PageInfo.

Blogging functionality: of the standard blog features, the only one I'm really missing and would be interested in doing at this point would be comments, with some anti-spam capability.

I should mention that a lot of this has been inspired by Rui Carmo and the Tao of Mac site.

UPDATE - see article "Journler 2.0.2".

Journler is a handy journaling program that is both free (donate if you'd like) and featureful, a combination that has been missing since MacJournal went commercial.

The UI does a pretty good job of not getting in your way and is grasped with a few moments of clicking around. I also appreciate the ability to record voice notes or embed iTunes tracks. While this might seem superfluous, I can see there might be times when words alone won't do. You can also link to iPhotos, movies, Address Book cards, and arbitrary files in the Finder.

You can hook up to Blogger and LiveJournal, using it for blogging Out There as well as journaling In Here. Or email your entries to your admiring public.

If you'd rather not be famous (or infamous) because of your journal, there is a simple password protection preference -- as the app points out, however, it does not encrypt anything, though this is planned for a future release.

Journler is at version 1.0.1 as of this writing, just made available. It is definitely worth a look, especially if you're like me and miss MacJournal.