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What vi would look like if Microsoft had developed it

There’s no where to run and hide from the vi assistant!

kungfuice Computers, Technology

Well I came across this absolutely hilarious video on youtube that really spoke to me. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m seriously going out of my mind from lack of sleep and stress, or maybe it’s because I’m taking an operating system course this semester so some of the things this guy spits really speak to me. Whatever it is this has to be one of the funniest, geek, gansta raps of all time. This guy’s name is Monzy and if you checkout youtube you’ll find a wealth of other just as funny raps. “I do a bounds check before I write to an array”! Foo!

kungfuice Computers, School, Technology

With news of the new Apple IPhone being released at Mac World I started to ponder what kind of effect this is going to have on the cell-phone market in general in North America, and I came mainly to this conclusion, zero. You may ponder how I could possibly deduce this from all of the hype surrounding this device, but my reasons do have basis.

First, although the phone is revolutionary from an interface and design standpoint Apple has clearly stated that they will not provide any toolkit or outside development SDK, which means that this device will solely rely on applications developed for it by Apple. This does not mean however that it will be impossible to extend what runs on the device since it was announced that the IPhone will support Widgets, but the amount that can be accomplished with these widgets is far less then a full blown application.

Second, it seems to me that IPhone is purely marketed at the consumer market, and although most people think this is an Apple advantage, exploiting Rim’s and Palm’s inability to penetrate these markets there are really more reasons then simple execution issues that have plagued smart phones from penetrating the wide spread consumer market. Think about it this way, smart phones require data plans, and data plans are crippling to any consumer. With the average data plan, in Canada, costing $45 a month on top of your voice plan most consumers are unwilling or unable to pay this on a monthly basis. So that leaves our consumers who want these devices to turn to their employers in order to get the smart phones they so desperately desire. The problem here being that most businesses are not interested in fancy interfaces, and nice graphics, they are merely interested in how this phone will help their bottom line, and usually that is accomplished through tight integration with their systems.

RIM has this market dominated for that exact reason their Enterprise integration is phenomenal. Now people may argue that data plans have no where to go but down in price, however this may take years, and it’s not really guaranteed since there is the possibility that the cost may go up in order for Providers to upgrade their networks to support the added load.

For me I see the IPhone being a great product, and I know it will be very well executed, however I just don’t see the main stream consumer market adopting this phone, due to it’s overwhelming cost, not just for the phone but more for the plans that are going to be associated with this phone.

We all know that the Youth market is what drove the IPod to it’s crazed success, and I don’t see mommy and daddy getting ready to go out and drop another $600 on a phone for their little Bobby or Suzy, when it’s going to cost them another $100 a month just to keep the phone on the network.

kungfuice General, Technology

Well I have been missing for a little while, and so has my website. After some server issues and issues with my hosting provider I had to make a switch and all hell broke loose.

The website is back now and hopefully it will be that way for a very long time. While the website was down, I received a USB missile launcher for christmas, just like this one

My only problem with this thing was that of course there was no Linux application to run it. I did manage to find a couple of projects that controlled different USB launchers, but they did not work properly for this one.

I have never written any kind of USB applications before so I decided that now would be a good time to learn and since I didn’t have a website to update it gave me something to do over my holidays. I used libusb and gtk to create an interface for the device in Linux that works perfectly. I even added some extra movement functionality and I am working on adding a webcam to the device to allow you to see who you are going to shoot before you blast them away.

After a lot of working with Snoopy and the Snoopy Perl script to convert the snoopy log files to libusb c programs, I managed to get everything working properly. I’d also like to thank Luke Cole as his driver gave me something to look at, and understand how libusb works.

If you have one of these devices and are interested in having it work under linux go check out my project site on google code

Anyway I look forward to keeping this site up to date, and check back often for new exciting news

kungfuice Technology

OK finally Adobe has decided to release Flash Player 9 in Beta Form for Linux. I’ve decided to throw together a quick how to on how to install it on Ubuntu Edgy. This should hold true however for most flavours of Ubuntu as well.

1. Open Synaptic Package manager
2. Click on the search button and type “Flash”
3. Click the box beside any of the currently installed flash-plugins, this should be flashplugin-nonfree, and select for a complete removal
4. Now click apply and let Synaptic remove the package
5. We are now ready to download and install the flashplayer 9 plugin
6. Point your browser to “http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html”, and select the “Download Installer for Linux” link. Remember where you save this file because we’ll need it next. Close down your browser when you are done since we don’t want it open while we install the plugin
7. Open your favourite terminal and navigate to the directory which you saved the plugin, and execute the following command:

tar -vxzf FP9_plugin_beta_101806.tar.gz

8. You will now have a directory called flash-player-plugin-9.0.1.21.55 or something similar, navigate to this directory
9. You will now need to copy the library “libflashplayerplugin.so” to “/usr/lib/firefox/plugins/”, execute the following command:

sudo cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/

10. Navigate to your favourite flash enabled website and enjoy having the latest and greatest flash player.

I hope this helps, please post if you have any problems or further questions. I hope this helps everyone out.

Update …
Treviño from Ubuntu Forums was kind enough to pack the player into a package. You can now get the files from his repository at http://3v1n0.tuxfamily.org/dists/dapper/3v1n0/

Download the deb and install it

kungfuice Computers, Technology, Ubuntu