Thursday, June 23, 2005

New kernel (2.6.12) & Beagle

Lured by possbility to run desktop search engine on my laptop, I've decided to give Beagle a go. As it turned out, it required installation of new kernel (2.6.12), so I did that (no real problems with it). I have run into some difficulties: wireless card driver refused to compile cleanly because of earlier 'Software suspend' patch applied. Quick patch did the trick:

poppy:/usr/src/ipw2100-1.1.0# diff ipw2100.c ipw2100.c.orig
6404c6404

< #ifndef CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND2_BUILTIN
---
> #ifdef CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND2


(this at least worked for me!).

Beagle needed mono to run (the code is written in C#) and I had some problems with getting proper versions of packages. mono version 1.0.5 comes with standard Ubuntu distribution; version 1.1.7, available from Ubuntu backports is needed. My system couldn't decide which version was 'newer' and tried to get 1.0.5 of mono and 1.1.7 of mono-devel, which was not allowed. My quick and dirt hack for that was to uncomment entries in /etc/apt/sources.list for main Ubuntu repository, doing 'apt update' and downloading the needed packages.

In the end, I was able to get Beagle running. The search works ok, although it needs to be fine-tuned to search through mail contacts, IM conversations etc. I'll do it when I'm back from vacation.

This entry will also be updated by then.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Skinnable Swing Application

Serendipity is a cool thing: while looking for some totally different, I've found this:
L2FProd.com V3, an API that makes it possible to apply Gnome/KDE/other skins to Swing application. More after trying it out!

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Gmail account

Well, I've jumped the Gmail bandwagon and created the account. Right now I'm looking at
Gmail Tools and I'll try to find out some interesting ways how to use it - GMail Hard Drive looks all right but is not working for me yet.

Update:
Mutt can access Gmail via POP3: use 'pops://pop.gmail.com' as a a mailbox name.

TagCloud

How to share stuff you're interested in on your weblog? well, you can start writing about all of them, or you can use TagCloud. What it does: it takes RSS feeds you're subscribed to, filters it through Yahoo's Content Analysis webservice which extracts keywords from the feeds and build a list of keywords, size adjusted for their occurence. Another cool stuff!!

The cloud for CoqSpot blog is called coqcloud and its external link is here

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

SharePoint and blogging

I've spent some time looking for a webpart that would encapsulate weblog (to put it on my corporate SS site) but apparently, it does not exist. I've found numerous examples how to add a RSS feed to a webpart (and it works!). Pretty cool stuff. Now I can read Jabber News there! :-)

Monday, June 06, 2005

Algorithmic Audio

[Via MAKE:blog] Algorithmic radio? well, if there's an algorithm, it's pretty weird. Can you dance to it? that depends on how much did you have to drink... but it's still interesting. Check it out!

MAKE: Blog: Algorithmic Audio

Sunday, June 05, 2005

Mozilla Firefox - Smart Keywords

In search for even better ways to use Firefox, I've found a page with some tips, including this one:
Mozilla Firefox - Smart Keywords. Right now, I can type 'imdb hillary swanson' in Firefox's address bar and it will query IMDb for me. The good thing is that you can do it with any search engine (that makes me wonder if I really need Google toolbar for Firefox right now...)