A while back while reading a tutorial by Nick La of N.Design Studio, I thought the concept of what his tutorial covered in Adobe Illustrator was cool. Of course using Illustrator is not an option when running in a GNU/Linux environment, this is where Inkscape comes into play. Much like the GIMP, Inkscape does not do everything that its Adobe competitor does. Thus, abiding strictly to Nick’s tutorial is impossible, but getting to the same end result is possible. In the coming weeks I will post a supplement to Nick’s tutorial for the use in Inkscape. However, right now I’m introducing the end result of my Inkscape experimentation, Gentoo Blue Wave. This is a 1080p resolution wallpaper that abides to the Tango pallet. This is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Well yesterday both Gentoo 2007.0 and Aptana milestone 8. Thanks to some bugs in a previous release I was able to test milestone 8 on Gentoo last week; that was before ATI’s drivers went kamikaze.
Overall I am impressed with milestone 8, it features more advanced support of PHP, including variable highlighting. With Gentoo to install Aptana just make a folder in /usr/lib called aptana, then extract the archive to that point. After that make a file in /usr/bin called aptana, open it in your favorite editor (nano) and add the following:
#!/bin/sh
export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox
exec /usr/lib/aptana/Aptana
Save the file and do a chmod 755 on it so that it becomes executable. Now try typing in the command aptana& into your terminal. If all goes right you should see the aptana splash screen. If you get a bug, look at the log file it directs you to. Should you see something like org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: No more handles [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)] then your mozilla path is not correct. If the executable fails in general, you need to make sure you have the JRE 1.5 or newer. To get this just run emerge -p sun-jre-bin (you don’t have to use Sun’s JRE but that is what I use) if you like what you see then rerun the command without the -p. Once portage finishes doing its stuff, try executing Aptana again. It should work then, if not search the Aptana forums.
I am trying to download the 2007.0 LiveDVD (the 2006.1 installer is so old it no longer syncs to portage correctly), which I should be done downloading now, except a bunch of freeloaders are hogging all of the bandwidth. Downloading commenced last night when there were 32 seeders, and 98 of us downloading with about 34 completed downloads. Shareaza ran all night and now over 380 people finished downloading, there are about 340 downloading right now an only about 150 seeders. Checking my bandwidth logs, I continually maxed out my uploading last night at 50KiB/s while my average download was under two thirds of that speed. To say the least, I am disappointed. I can download at 1MiB/s (megabyte per second) tops, to be fare I should be downloading at least as much as I upload (on average). However I have seen nothing of that sort, I’ve uploaded something like 200% of what I’ve downloaded. In all likeliness what is happening is there are a bunch of freeloaders that set their upload to the lowest possible and then leech off of the rest of us. P2P is about sharing, and if you do not want to share, do not participate.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
If you are reading this you’re probably not sure how to subscribe to the CHS podcast but you want to. You’ve come to the right place; I’m going to guide you through finding the podcast and subscribing to it in iTunes. If you don’t already have iTunes installed on your computer then you should head over to Apple.com and download a copy and install iTunes.
Step 1: Opening iTunes
The iTunes folder should be located under Start>All Programs>iTunes if you are running Microsoft Windows XP. Click on the iTunes icon in the menu like so:
You may also have an iTunes icon on your desktop in which you could also click on. If this is the first time that you’ve opened iTunes then the following dialogue may appear.
After reading the Software License Agreement click the ‘Agree’ button to continue. After this iTunes will be running.
Step 2: Finding the CHS podcast
iTunes should be loaded by this step and you should be looking at a screen that looks very similar to the following:
If you don’t see a screen that looks similar to the one above and iTunes is open then you may need to click in the left hand panel on the button which is labeled ‘Music Store’. Now you need the click once on the search field in the upper right hand corner of iTunes.
Now type in ‘CHS podcast’ and then press the Enter/Return key on your keyboard. You should now have a screen that looks similar to the following:
Step 3: Subscribing to the CHS podcast
Now click on the ‘Subscribe’ button to download CHS podcast episodes. A confirmation dialogue will pop-up; click on the ‘Subscribe’ button in the confirmation dialogue like so:
Now iTunes should be downloading the latest CHS podcast onto your computer, this could take a long time for depending on your internet connection, dial-up users can expect this to take up to an hour or so. iTunes will display its current action in the top-center portion of the window. To see more specifically if iTunes has downloaded a episode of the CHS podcast you can click on the triangle next to where iTunes says ‘The CHS podcast’ under its table like so:
This will cause the CHS podcast ‘folder’ to expand revealing all of the currently available podcasts. The podcasts will be sorted by date with the most recent at the top and the oldest at the bottom. One is able to view more information on the podcast by clicking on the little ‘ii’ button next to the short description.
To close out of the extended information dialogue just click on the ‘x’ in the upper right hand corner of it like so:
If by chance iTunes doesn’t download all of the CHS podcasts or one in particular that you want to listen to then click on the ‘get’ button next to the podcast episode date.
iTunes will then download that episode.
Once the episode is done downloading you can play it simply by double clicking on the podcast episode.
If you want iTunes to automatically download new CHS podcast episodes every time you run iTunes then click on the ‘Settings’ button in the lower right hand corner of the iTunes window.
In the settings dialogue that has opened you can set iTunes to download the new when they are released and check for new releases daily. Please note that iTunes can’t check for new podcasts when it isn’t running. Click on the down arrow next to the ‘Do nothing’ dropdown:
Then select ‘Download most recent one’.
When done in the settings dialogue click on the ‘Ok’ button in the lower right hand corner of the settings dialogue.
This is the end of the tutorial, you should now be able to download and subscribe to the CHS podcast via iTunes.
Docrev: 1.1 10-30-05
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
WordCamp NYC
