'software' Archive | RSS

Fedora 9 and KDE 4 

I’ve recently upgraded my home PC from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9. One of the big benefits (apart from getting the very latest Firefox and Thunderbird packages) is that F9 features KDE 4, the latest version of the KDE desktop window manager.
Fedora 9
To upgrade, I followed the excellent instructions at http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f9-tips.php. The key point is [...]

Units 

I was recently reminded of the excellent ‘units’ program, available with all good Unix systems.
Units will convert quantities expressed in one unit in to another unit. Here’s an example:

$ units
2439 units, 71 prefixes, 33 nonlinear units
You have: 12 miles
You want: kilometres
* 19.312128
[...]

What's RSS, and why do I need it? 

RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. It’s an easy way to keep up to date with frequently changing websites.
Let me give you an example. This web page changes every time I write a new post (admittedly not that often). Rather than periodically checking this page for updates (or, more likely, forgetting all about it [...]

Disabling Thunderbird Addons 

Today I was in the unfortunate position of not being able to use Thunderbird to read my email. I recently installed the Lightning calendar addon together with the Provider for Google Calendar addon. What’s supposed to happen is the calendar within Thunderbird (provided by the Lightning addon) is automatically updated from (and updates) my Google [...]

FogBugz World Tour Comes To London 

I attended the FogBugz 6.0 World Tour presentation this morning at the British Library in Euston Road, London. Joel Spolsky was the speaker and he made an excellent job of describing some of the funky new features in FogBugz 6.0.
The Evidence Based Scheduling (EBS) is sufficiently similar to witchcraft to warrant further investigation Joel [...]

Remotely Controlling Your Music Player 

I have recently programmed my Nokia N95 phone to control my music player (the rather marvellous snackAmp) remotely.
SnackAmp sits on my Linux-based server box. It has a remote control feature (details here) which accepts control strings from a TCP socket. I wrote a Python script which runs on the phone to open a Wi-Fi connection [...]