Snow!

It’s pretty crazy that there is snow happening right now in October. I can’t remember there ever being a snow fall like this before Halloween.

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Statistics: The New Calculus

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I Hate It When I Get A Backlog of Books

I really wish I would have more time to read right now. I have so many great books on my kind waiting for me. Some, Their progress bars, at 85% just wishing I would hit open and turn their pages to the final conclusion. Others still have the new label, never been opened. Saying, “meet my characters”, “see my conflict”.

But, I say no, I must read you later. Leaving both me, the reader, and the book upset. But that’s life. Yet I still can’t wait for the new Stephen King book, and the last novel in the Eragon series. It’s a fatal addiction…

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Making Crunchbang Linux (More) Efficient

Sometimes, I just want to tweak my computer just for the sake of tweaking it. This week I became obssessed with finding faster alternatives to bloated programs in Linux. I ran into some problems that I now know how to fix.

The first thing I replaced was my file manager. Crunchbang comes preloaded with Thunar. I replaced that with PCmanfm. I then replaced my terminal emulator. I chose Sakura, but I wterm is a little faster. Lastly, I downloaded the developer version of chrome. It has a bunch of little tweaks and I don’t feel indebted to the open source chromium in any way. All of these programs can be downloaded through apt-get, except for chrome which you can find on google’s website.

There are some problems though. None of Crunchbang’s keyboard shortcuts work and many files don’t open up with the new programs. Multiple setting files need to be changed to get the new configuration to work.

The first and most important thing that needs to be changed is your Openbox menu.First right click and navigate to “Settings >> Openbox Config >> GUI Menu Editor”. Click that and change all the program commands that need to be changed. For example Terminator needs to be changed to Sakura. You shouldn’t need to change the web browser settings.

After that you need to change the keyboard shortcuts. You can do this by navigating to “Settings >> Openbox Config >> rc.xml”. You have to navigate through the file and find all the places where it says “exec ‘progam’” and replace it with your desired program. For example I changed this part of the file:

    <keybind key="W-e">
      <action name="Execute">
        <startupnotify>
          <enabled>true</enabled>
          <name>Editor</name>
        </startupnotify>
        <command>emacs</command>
      </action>
    </keybind>

So that emacs would be opened with windows_key-e. Once both of these fixes are done, all your new programs should integrate well with Crunchbang. Please comment if you need some help with other problems relating to Crunchbang.

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Aside

The Emacs Way

Why use the official WordPress iPhone app? I can open up my terminal app, SSH into my laptop, launch up Emacs, and use Org2blog instead.

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Hello, Emacs

I am using Emacs for almost all the text editing jobs I do. I write essays. I write note outlines. I just wanted to provide a starting point to get all of these things working.

What I Use:

Org2Blog: This posts blog posts to my wordpress site.

Deft: this is a note taking application that interfaces well with plaintext on my iphone.

Org: This makes outlines for notes (comes with Emacs).

Htmlize: Converts Emacs buffers or selected text to colorful html files.

All of these can be installed by putting their .el files in your .emacs.d directory and by requiring them in your .emacs file.

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Link

The Evolution of a String;

This is a really cool demonstration of how evolution can be modeled through programming, and the timeless example of “hello, world!”.  The ending is very interesting, it takes thousands of mutations just to land on the right one. I think you could definitely expand on this concept. 

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Jetpack For WordPress Review

Jetpack is a plugin developed by Automattic, WordPress’s developers. It is a bundle that includes all the extra features that WordPress.com users get automatically when they create a free website. Now you can install them on your self-hosted site. It includes many extra features that would have taken up a lot more room individually. Here’s a run down. Jetpack (current version 1.13 as of September 13 2011) includes the functionality of eight different plugins.Jetpack.me All of these are useful, but some are more useful than others. For example, the feature I use the most is the site stat plugin. It provides easy to read and up-to-date stats on all my articles and how many times they have been read each day. Also it shows average page views over weeks and months, allowing me to see if my blog is growing. It has some advantages over Google analytics in that it is directly accessed from my WordPress admin dashboard and its user interface is simpler and better looking. I would use this plugin just to access the statistics part. Jetpack also includes a sharing toolbar. It is called ShareDaddy and lets you add links to share your articles to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit (plus a couple of others, but there is no Google+ support yet.) This is great because generally you need a whole other plugin to implement this functionality.

Another functional widget is able to embed a twitter stream in your theme’s sidebar. Again this eliminates another bulky widget from your sidebar. Also for blogs that focus on math and science related topics there is a plugin for embedding latex formatting into your posts. I don’t use latex but for those who do this would be a killer feature.Jetpack also packages After the Deadline, a grammar/writing checker. It scans your posts for stupid mistakes, and cliche’d phrases. This makes your blog become more readable. No blog can succeed with mediocre content. No matter how pretty it is, or how the SEO is tweaked. Overall, I would recommend Jetpack, it is a great plugin to simplify and enhance your blog. It makes your life easier, and your blog more readable. I don’t think anyone can argue with that.

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How to Install CrunchBang Linux Statler and Keep Your Windows Install

CrunchBang Linux (aka #!) is an openbox distro with a simple and efficient setup. Generally the procedure for installing Linux from a flash drive is to open up Unetbootin and let it do its work on the .iso file. However, this process does not work on Crunchbang. Fortunately there is another way to install it from a flash drive.

First, download ImageWrite.exe, it is an Opensuse branded program that basically acts like the UNIX utility dd. Then download the Crunchbang ISO file. Once that is downloaded open up ImageWriter, but you will soon realize that it only accepts .raw files.

But there is an easy workaround. Find the .iso file and rename it so that its file type is “.raw”. Reopen ImageWriter, insert a flashdrive, find the .raw file and press “copy”.

Now that the drive is copied, you can reboot and boot into a live environment (you’ll have to enter into your BIOS and select “boot from flashdrive” or something like that). You can stop there, but you probably want to install it. So go back into Windows and download a program called “EASEUS Partition Master 9.0.0 Home Edition”. It’s free and legal and is a better replacement for PartitionMagic. Once you have that running you need to resize your windows partition and create one for Linux. You probably only need 8 or so gigabytes of space, one for Linux and the rest for files. You have to be very careful during this step as not to kill your windows install. Just make sure you are resizing the correct partition (it should be the largest one where your files reside in my case it is labeled as “C”.

Now that your Linux partition is set up, you can install CrunchBang. Boot your flash drive and select graphical install. Then enter all your region specific details. Finally you will reach the partition screen. Select the manual partition entry. You DO NOT want guided partition. This will erase your whole drive and use it for Linux. Select the eight gig partition and tell the program to use it as the main install disk. Make sure it is not altering your main partition with windows on it and tell it to proceed. Just follow the rest of the installer and it will finally allow you to login to your user account. Now reboot and it should show GRUB2 when you first startup. It should show your Windows bootloader and Crunchbang Linux. If it only shows CrunchBang do not freak out. It can be fixed.

If the Windows entry is missing boot into Crunchbang, right click and open a terminal. Run the command “update-grub” this should fix your grub and make a window entry. Reboot and make sure Windows runs okay.

Note: I do not take any responsibility for any damage incurred from this tutorial. Use this guide responsibly and don’t do anything stupid.

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Using EasyGUI to Enhance Your Python Script

The programming language Python has many different libraries that allow you to create applications with graphical user interfaces. Some are more popular than others (Tkinter being the most well known). Many are very obscure and have very little documentation. One of these is called EasyGUI.

Easy GUI aims to easily create functional GUIs. It easy a wrapper for Tkinter but streamlines many widgets that would take more lines of code to accomplish in Tkinter. EasyGUI has premade message boxes, code boxes, input screens and a couple of other features. All of these can be created with one command and it only needs the EasyGUI library to function. Because it is based on Tkinter it is cross-platform (and kind of ugly). One great feature of this library is that it also makes it very easy to add a UI after the program has been completed.

A Multiple Entry Box

To get started with EasyGUI all you have to do is download the “easygui.py” script from their website. Then you move it to this folder “C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages” on Windows. You can install it from the linux terminal by typing “sudo setup.py install” while in the EasyGUI folder. Once that is done you just have to include the EasyGUI library in your script by typing: “from easygui import *”. Now you can use any of the EasyGUI functions.

One great feature of EasyGUI is the easy creation of Choice boxes (shown in the first picture). This can be done through this code:

You only have to input a couple of fields to have a usable GUI popup. I highly recommend this library to anyone who has been intimidated by Tkinter widgets or any other Python GUI library. It allows you to focus more on the functions of your script and less on the syntax of coding an interface.

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