• Hide your real email address with a temporary forwarding account: http://www.meltmail.com/ #
• Schedule and send recorded messages to phones: http://www.dialmycalls.com/ #

The updated version of Portable GTD is out! Check it out here.

This release is centered around optimizing the UI to work well on lower resolutions (i.e. netbooks). It is a simple update mainly for myself so I can easily use it on my new Dell Mini 9.

Also check out the project page here.

• Good regular expression tester: http://www.regexpal.com/ #
• A fast Google search mashup that crashed my browser: http://www.keyboardr.com/ #
• A website that tries to summarize text and web pages: http://www.greatsummary.com/ #

• Good read on cache: http://dev.emcelettronica.com/memory-cache-overview #

• Fast picture sharing website: http://www.echopic.com/ #
• Google’s 3D modelling software gets a new version: http://sketchup.google.com/ #
• Quick picture sharing website with wider than normal file format support: http://www.piccdrop.com/ #
• Copy and paste Lorem filler text (including bullet point samples): http://www.lorem2.com/ #

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my netbook and overall I am very pleased with upgrades, mainly in the availability of better versions software, specifically QuickSynergy, GNOME Do, AWN and Nautilus. I also really love the new administrative utility that allows you to create a USB install disc as opposed to having to burn a CD (this is huge considering the Dell Mini 9 doesn’t have a CD drive). Also the screen resolution manager is slowly showing more promise.

However I am completely confused by PulseAudio. It still seems like it is not very well integrated into the desktop. It has been my process for the past two Ubuntu releases to have to disable it to get Skype functioning. Here is the guide I used to disable PulseAudio without destroying my install.

http://idyllictux.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/alsa-instead-of-pulseaudio-for-ubuntu-810-intrepid-a-non-destructive-way/

For reference this is the guide I used to get through the installation. Fortunately pretty much everything works out of the box except detecting the audio driver (thankfully it is a simple fix).

http://www.ubuntumini.com/2008/10/installing-ubuntu-on-dell-inspiron-mini.html

The way I got the Ubuntu 8.10 ISO onto a USB stick for installation was to download and burn the ISO to a CD then I booted into the live CD on my desktop then used the utility under System - Administration - Create a USB startup disk.

Also if you want to upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3.0, check this out.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-To-Install-OpenOffice-org-3-0-in-Ubuntu-8-10-96449.shtml

I am working on a project in Python and I want to be able to save files to other servers across a network. I did a little research and it seems like paramiko is the way to go.

This link has a good code sample of paramiko in action.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/68335/how-do-i-copy-a-file-to-a-remote-server-in-python-using-scp-or-ssh

• Nice automobile research site: http://www.carzen.com/ #

I have been playing around Oracle 11g and Microsoft SQL Express inside of virtual machines. I wanted to be able host these databases to other computers in my LAN which meant the virtual machines needed an IP address on my subnet. I am using VirtualBox to host the virtual machines and unfortunately bridged networking (needed to make this work) is not setup when you install VirtualBox. However I found this walkthrough and I worked really well.

The guide is written for VirtualBox 1.6.2 but it worked fine for me in version 2.0.4.

http://samiux.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/bridging-virtualbox-162-on-ubuntu-8041/

For quick reference the basic steps are:

Install bridging utilities:

sudo apt-get install uml-utilities bridge-utils

Change the permissions of this file so others can access it:

sudo chmod 0666 /dev/net/tun

Add the bridge to the networking configuration (you can give the bridge device a static IP if need be):

sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces

auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0
bridge_fd 9
bridge_hello 2
bridge_maxage 12
bridge_stp off

Restart networking:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Add a virtual network device to the bridge:

sudo VBoxAddIF vbox0 `whoami` br0

Then you can in and assign the virtual machines networking configuration to Host Interface: vbox0. Something to note is that only one virtual network interface can be used at a time. So if you want two virtual machines to run at the same time using the bridge, you have to create additional ones (sudo VBoxAddIF vbox1 `whoami` br0, etc) and assign them to machines accordingly.