Coderplay

The questions and answers driving Oz Quiz, MusicMentor, CountryCaps and WorldFacts have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Please take the opportunity to use and extend these questions and answers; significant work has gone into creating them (by my mother, Rosie Williams) and it would be great to see them used by other people/projects.

You can get the questions/answers at the github repo.

The quiz code itself, as well as the code for the iPhone and Dashboard applications will be released in the near future, so you will be able to use these questions directly and easily with my quiz software.

The code behind Oz Quiz, MusicMentor, CountryCaps and WorldFacts will be released as open source software, and the questions in them will be released under a Creative Commons license.

The quiz script that powers all of these applications will be released, which will enable anyone who wants to create a high-quality quiz in a HTML environment will be able to, remedying the current dearth of quality quiz JavaScript code.

As part of all this, all versions of Oz Quiz, MusicMentor, CountryCaps and WorldFacts have been removed from the iTunes App Store and the Apple Dashboard site. Once the open sourcing is complete, you will be able to download the source code and questions for these apps.

Keep watching this blog for the open source release of these applications.

Recently I switched from OS X to Ubuntu Linux as my main OS; I wanted to share some tips for anyone else making the switch on what apps I am using.

I'm using Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04, using Gnome (+ Compiz) as my display manager.

Applications

When picking applications to use, I generally tried to use the app that came with the OS (if any), and then if I had problems with it, looked for something else.

For web browsing, I use the dev channel of Google Chrome (and fall back to Firefox for a couple of extensions Rest Client and S3Fox); for e-mail, I've tried Evolution, the default client, but it doesn't work terribly well, so I just use GMail (if I want local access I'll probably switch to Thunderbird 3, which is a first-class app in Lucid Lynx).

For the terminal I use xfce4-terminal, because it's almost identical to gnome-terminal except that you can use Ctrl+C for terminating the current command as well as copying selected text; you can't do that with recent versions of gnome-terminal (all aboard the failtrain).

For my text editor (cf. TextMate), I'm using Geany, compiled off of svn and with all shipped plugins compiled; this adds the Tree Browser plugin, which is the closest thing to TextMate's project drawer (and which you don't get if you just download Geany off their site / install it with apt-get).

I'd like to point out how hard it was to find a GTK text editor with what I consider to be the most important parts of TextMate, the project drawer, and global autocomplete.

The GTK part is important, because I want a text editor that feels like all my other applications (I.e. Ctrl+C for copy and Ctrl+V for paste etc.) and I don't believe that any of the GUI vim/emacs packages really behave like proper GUI applications. I will try them out at some point though, so we'll see what happens then.

I tried Bluefish and jEdit, but they both had issues; from memory, I don't think Bluefish had autocomplete, and jEdit's text rendering was ugly, even with all the antialiasing etc. turned on.

I was astounded by the lack of linux text editors comparable to TextMate; I expected them to be a dime-a-dozen, but it seems the FOSS text editors need a bit of work before they will compare.

For music playing I use Rhythmbox, but with the Crossfading plugin activated; without this playback randomly fails. For video playing I use Gnome MPlayer; and sometimes the command-line mplayer application. I tried using the standard Totem player, but AFAIK it renders using XV, which my video card doesn't do very well at all (more on this in a future post).

I'm using wallpapoz to automatically change my desktop background once a minute; it works fairly well but it's a little tricky to use so here's how:

• Right click on Default and click Add Wallpapers (Directory), then select your wallpapers directory; make sure you tick recursive.
• Then once it's finished adding the wallpapers, click Preferences and tick "Pick wallpaper in random order", and choose the "Zoom" style; this will ensure wallpapers fill the full screen area (scaling) with out stretching them.
• Then click "Save" in the main window, then "Restart" for the changes to take effect.

For reading manga I used to use Xee on the Mac (an excellent free application). On linux, I tried these apps:

• feh
• Eye of Gnome
• GQview
• Geeqie
• Quivi

All of them had issues of one sort or another which made me keep looking; finally I found what I wanted with Comix. I've patched it to do side-scrolling which works great with two-finger horizontal scrolling on my touchpad.

Using Acer Hardware

Those are the main application switches I've needed to make; I'll post some more information on my move soon, including hardware-specific information on using linux with an Acer Aspire 5470G.

If you override to_param in your model, make sure it doesn't return any Reserved Characters or your nice resource path methods (e.g. artist_path) will throw weird 'failed to generate from' errors.

It would be really helpful if Rails threw an exception that was useful, like 'bad to_param string'; it would have saved an hour of my time at least ;).

Kennesaw State University (in Georgia, US) is hosting their own copy of RSS2HTML for their use. RSS2HTML is a script I wrote that can be used to publish RSS feeds in web pages in two different ways.

The first is to generate a line of code (JavaScript, PHP or HTML) that developers can paste into web pages to style and publish their RSS feed through my server.

Kennesaw State University has implemented the alternative method which uses their own server.

Since RSS2HTML is available under the MIT license users run their own copy of RSS2HTML via their own servers. It al so means people can make their own changes to RSS2HTML (and hopefully they'll share those changes back to my repo on Github).