Hero Inc.

I’m still doing the Linux thing at home and will be doing it in a mobile way soon (more to come later), but I figured I’d park my latest information concerning Linux for those interested as well as my own personal journal of my linux journey (A Penguin And Me Lives!). At least this way if I screw it all up in the future, I’ll remember what to go back and do.

• Databases – Due to work at my job and other online related work, I’ve come to join the simplest most powerful tool I know, the database. In my eyes a database should be created for anything and everything. It can be as disposable as a piece of paper but as powerful as the information contained within it. It holds my music habits as well as posts for this site. At work if I get frustrated by the more powerful Excel commands, I’ll offer to throw everything into a quick database to run queries against. I’m lazy and don’t feel like giving more of my mind to Microsoft at the moment.

  Overall, I’ve found that the best GUI tool available, for me at least, is DBVisualizer. It works on Windows for those interested and is free. Yay, free. Most repositories should have it available for quick install. I did encounter an issue when trying to start the program initially after the install. It would fail every time. Thanks to the internet, yet again, I found that I needed to modify the “my.cnf” file and comment out the “skip-networking” line. With that simple change, I was up and running with ease.

• Application List – From the beginning of my work installing Linux at home, I’ve kept a application list document that helps me keep track of what I use daily and what I need to install to keep everything running smoothly. This application list is not distro specific.

  I’ll continue to update it as I go for those, other than me, who are interested.

• Amarok Scripts – In a previous post, I mentioned writing a simple script to turn Amarok into my own personal alarm clock. Maybe I should have saved time and performed more research because someone built it before me and a billion times better. I feel so small now. WeekAlarm has a better interface than my script (mine had none) and the configuration parameters make it much easier to setup and control.

  I even found a good Amarok script that works with my IM client, Pidgin (see below).

• Pidgin Plugins – There are many different IM clients available (Google Talk, Skype, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) and I’m certain many people have accounts on all of them. Having 4 applications open that perform the same task is just annoying in my eyes. That’s why I use Pidgin. Not only does it work across multiple clients, but it is extensible in the same way that FireFox and Amarok are, via scripts or plugins. As mentioned above, I have a Pidgin plugin, called MusicTracker, that will update my IM status with whatever is currently playing from Amarok. Since music is huge to me, this is kind of nice and easy for me to share. However, the best plugin for Pidgin is one that comes by default. This plugin, Text Replacement, is my biggest tool in my ultimate goal of scripting my life away. Out of the box, it helps with the general everyday corrections that one commonly needs while sending messages online. By adding on top of that, you can basically turn four letter word into a complete sentence that you type 20 times a day. As an example, I use Pidgin at work and have the following text replacement scenarios setup (Text:What To Replace Text With).

  ATL:Atlanta, SFO:San Francisco, LAX:Los Angeles, FWD:Forward, FWDD:Forwarded, PLS:Please,HA3:Ha ha ha.

  I usually add a few more each day because I can’t stand typing all of these out every time. It may be my OCD taking over but I’d say it helps to speed up my typing.

Oh yeah, for those also interested, Waldo has been found.