I am in the process of trying to get hardware video acceleration working via VDPAU on my T61 laptop. Rather, I should say I was working on this, as I in fact succeeded (mostly) today. In the process, I had to upgrade my laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). On one [...]

As you may or may not be aware, I use MPD as my desktop audio player (for mobile solutions such as my laptop, I use Rhythmbox or VLC). Futhermore, I use Sonata as a graphical interface for MPD — managing playlists, controlling playback, album art, etc. However, sometimes I find it more expedient to run a [...]

As some of you may know, today (April 24th) marked the release of Ubuntu version 8.04, code named Hardy Heron. This release is a Long Term Support release, meaning that it will be supported with security updates through 2011. My upgrade to Hardy from Ubuntu’s previous version (7.10 Gutsy Gibbon) has not gone as smoothly as [...]

I’ve had a lot of fun recently listening to Jonathan Coulton, a computer programmer turned musical artist and creative freedom activist. All of his music is licensed under the Creative Commons, meaning it is free to download and free to share. Of course, on his website, he prefers to offer people the option of purchasing [...]

I have begun the initial steps of preparing my 4th year undergraduate thesis. I have chosen to write my thesis in LaTeX2e because of the simplicity of writing large amounts of mathematical equations as well as the superior layout capabilities offered by the TeX typesetting system. This leaves two problems. The first is “how should my [...]

Monday night I was working on our latest SSD assignment. The internet is the primary means of communication amongst our team members; we have an FTP share, a wiki, and a mailing list. Well, conveniently enough, my internet cut out. Repeatedly. I fought with it for about an hour before I gave up and walked [...]

I recently installed the latest release of Ubuntu, version 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). So far, I have to say that I am pretty impressed with it. I hadn’t upgraded since Dapper (6.06), which means alot of my apps were out of date (I was using Firefox 1.5, Gaim 1.5, Azureus 2.5, Amarok 1.4.3, etc) and it [...]

I think that’s going to be my slogan for the rest of the term. I missed two very important events today due to Spacesystems Design: the Slashdot party at Einstein’s, and the release of Gutsy Gibbon. Let me put it this way: I’m ready for this course to end. On a totally unrelated note, I still [...]

Holy crap.. I’ve been busy for so long that my own login cookie expired! Suffice to say that between Spacesystems Design, Advanced Mechanics of Structures, and Spacecraft Dynamics its been a brutal few weeks at Skule. I’m now in somewhat of a brief respite, you could say a lull before the storm of Midterms. Once Midterms [...]

Note: I am running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) LTS I recently set up my desktop computer in Toronto to accept SSH connections, and opened the port (22) on my router so that I could remotely manage my computer whenever I go back to Peterborough. I played around with port tunneling too, which basically tunnels any TCP [...]