I moved my blog to WordPress.com with a custom domain, which means WordPress now manages the DNS. However, my mail forwarding service is still coming from Godaddy. To make this work, I had to add custom DNS records to point to Godaddy’s mail servers, like so:
MX 10 mailstore1.secureserver.net.
MX 0 smtp.secureserver.net.
Don’t forget the period at the end of each line.
UPDATE 05/12
We’re now almost two weeks later, and still no love from Audible.com! Latest unconfirmed reports state Audible might keep us hanging for another 1-3 months (see http://forums.wpcentral.com/marketplace-apps/190732-3.htm). Like most other Audible members, I’m extremely patient and loyal toward this company, but um, seriously… I wonder what’s taking them so damn long.
Seriously doubting the Windows Phone platform now, Audible is a key app for me.
In my search for more information on the nascent release of the Audible App for the Windows Phone platform, I stumbled upon the following response from an official Audible rep, posted on WPCentral’s forums, stating that the release might be due in 2 weeks:
Dear Audible Listener,
Thank you for contacting Audible!
I understand you would like to know when the Audible Audible for Windows Phone will be released. I would be happy to assist.
After receiving numerous requests from Windows Phone users, we are excited to say that an application is actively being developed. While we cannot yet comment on its exact release date but it should be available for download within 2 weeks, we are confident you will love being able to use Audible with Windows Phone. When the application is complete, we will be announcing it on our website, newsletter, and social media channels.
Thanks for your interest in using Audible with Windows Phone. If you need any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Have a wonderful day!
Sincerely,
Sade FAudible Customer Support
Thank you for your inquiry. As a valued customer, your experience is important to us. We invite you to answer the question below regarding your Customer Care experience.
Your feedback will help us better serve your future needs.
I’ll be happy to ditch my iPod Nano for the Windows Phone app. This release is long overdue, just get it out already..
BZIP2 compression does seem to offer the best compromise between compression time and compression ratio, as reviewed here: http://odzangba.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/gzip-vs-bzip2-vs-lzma/. I was looking for quick and efficient way to zip up some old files for back up. Bz2 won out for me.
I’m using Ubuntu 12.04′s built-in compression tool.
Massively duplicated files are oftentimes a problem with music and movie collections. Because hunting for dupes by hand is definitely not the way to go, you may want to look to command-line tools like fdupes for help.
fdupes is available via apt-get in Ubuntu, so install it first:
sudo apt-get install fdupes
This is the basic syntax for looking up duplicated files:
fdupes -r [target-directory]
How to delete all duplicates and generate a report at the same time:
fdupes -rdN [target-directory] > textfile.txt
A quick overview of what the options mean:
Needless to say: use this with caution! Files will be deleted forever.
Find more information on fdupes here (UbuntuGeek).
Had trouble installing JungleDisk (‘junglediskdesktop’) on Ubuntu again. This time it’s version 11.10. Mike Jennings from gmjjavadesigns.com has a complete guide on how to get libnotify.so.1 linked correctly and make the tray icon appear. The latter part in particular was of interest to me:
gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist “['all']“
Find his post here.
Thanks Mike!
Ejecting your Kindle reading device is different from ‘unmounting’ because it allows you to keep using the reader while it charges over USB. In most distros, you’ll need the command-line to achieve this. Here’s how.
First, find out where your device is mounted:
fdisk -l
Then, use the ‘eject’ command
sudo eject /dev/sdb1
Gnome3 on Linux Mint/Ubuntu comes with a pretty bare-bones power manager. Luckily, there’s a better alternative and it’s called dconf-editor. Here’s how to get it and use it for power management purposes:
$ sudo apt-get install dconf-tools $ dconf-tools
The relevant settings can be found in org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/power
JungleDisk is broken for Ubuntu again. It won’t start when selected from Gnome 3′s Activities dashboard, nor will it start when calling it manually from the command line.
$ junglediskdesktop junglediskdesktop: error while loading shared libraries: libnotify.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
As suggested by JungleJason (http://askubuntu.com/a/84499), you’ll need to symlink libnotify.so.4 to libnotify.so.1. The latest version of Ubuntu (11.10) apparently only comes with the former variant.
If you’re running a 32-bit Ubuntu:
$ cd /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ ; sudo ln -s ./libnotify.so.4 libnotify.so.1
If you’re running a 64-bit Ubuntu:
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnotify.so.4 /usr/lib/libnotify.so.1
UPDATE: Works with Node.js 0.6.6 and 0.6.7 on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) / Linux Mint 12 (Lisa).
There are no pre-compiled packages for Linux, so if you want to use Node.js, you’ll have to build it yourself. It’s easy enough though, and here’s how.
You can obtain the release version from their website or get an edgier version from their Git source repository. If you acquired it from the former source, you’ll need to decompress it first, for instance to /usr/local/src/.
If you haven’t done this before, your system most likely won’t have the required tools for software compilation. You can easily install them:
sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
If you want to compile with SSL support (default), you’ll also need to install the OpenSSL Development Packages, like so:
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
Open up a terminal witndow and navigate to the directory that contains the Node.js source, e.g. /usr/local/src/node-0.6.6. And execute the following commands in succession:
./configure make sudo make install
If all goes well, you should be able to access the node command from any terminal window.
This year’s buzzword has to be ‘HTML5′. Everywhere I go, people are making a fuss out of building HTML5 ‘applications’ (for the desktop too, now, with Windows 8′s WinRT). However, I see HTML5 more blandly as ‘HTML/JavaScript’, and I make this pairing consciously, because in my opinion, there is no HTML5 without JavaScript and vice versa. Therefore it’s important to know and master the intricacies of JavaScript before boasting your “HTML5″-skills to friends, colleagues and the world at large (using a <header> tag doesn’t count as a skill). Don’t be fooled by JavaScript’s supposed simplicity. It’s just that simplicity (read: lack of OO principles) that makes it difficult to use for building maintainable and enterprise-grade software. Languages like Java, C#, and even ActionScript (JS’ cousin), provide the developer with a degree of standardization and structure that is severely missed in the JavaScript world.
From my point of view, JavaScript has two weaknesses: its loose type system and its prototypal inheritance model. I know many people don’t agree and opine that the points I just made are actually strengths. Point taken. It does have a couple of things going for it: ubiquity and a low barrier to entry.
If you’re used to a more object-oriented development language/platform, with classes, interfaces, inheritance, strict typing, unit and integration testing, this all looks very scary. Many enterprise developers seek the assistance of Maven, Ant or other tools of that ilk to manage framework dependencies, build and test processes, and code quality metrics. And there’s no reason why this can’t also be applied to JavaScript development.
Yes, JavaScript can be tamed, you heard it right. With a limited amount of effort, we can let Maven take care of the following:
Maven is a Java-based tool, so you’ll need to get the latest Java JDK from Oracle. I’m still using JDK 6, but I guess JDK 7 would do as well. Other than that, you’ll need to get the Maven 3 binary and unzip it somewhere. For your convience, you may want to consider adding it to your path (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu Linux). Fire up a text-editor (I like NetBeans for pom.xml and JavaScript editing) and a command-line window. You’re good to go!
Here’s the full pom.xml configuration file. It’s currently still a work in progress, but it implements all of the features I described above. In the subsequent section I’ll provide more information on every section of importance.
Same file, with some extra comments.
I’m continuously looking for things to add, so any suggestions are welcome. Also, I’m maintaining this project on BitBucket, here.
