Anyone know when the new CDs will appear in the US shop?
Archive for April, 2009
Jaunty CDs
Apr 29
Just read the post on the announcement of the Ubuntu Gaming Team. I believe the fundamental problem of getting games on Linux is the vast disparity of Linux users that are coders versus Artists.
This hits home for me as last week I was looking at programming a game. A game is no fun to program without a quality library of media assets to work with. We obviously have the programming skills in the community. I could probably write a World Of Goo type game in scope solo in 6 months or so. But the pipeline breaks when I want to make it look good.
What did I do? Fired up inkscape and tried to draw some planes for an Air Traffic controller type game. After 3 hours or so of trying to draw a plane, it turns out I just have no artist sense for colors / shading / curves etc. My results using Blender were even worse. Currently the community artists do a great job on icon sets. If there could be an open repository of free game assets that didn’t look like they were from the 80′s this would definitely, atleast in my case, create growth in the games sector.
On a side note, last night I installed Urban Terror 4.1 and Savage 2. Urban Terror was fun to play for a bit, and I didn’t get a chance to really dive into Savage 2 yet.
I was in the camp of thinking they would switch the GDM theme before release. It didn’t change, and it apparently wasn’t a joke.
Dropbox on Ubuntu
Apr 16
Often times you want to keep a file in sync, much like .mac, between computers. Or maybe you just need to make sure your files are backed up to the web. Enter a product called Dropbox.
Dropbox provides many useful features:
- Simply installation
- Automatic file synchronization
- Share files in 2 clicks
- Display photos in a photo gallery
- Works on Ubuntu and Windows
Dropbox free accounts give you 2 gigabytes of space to store files. To install it, you can get the Ubuntu RPM at http://www.getdropbox.com. The Intrepid RPM listed also works under Jaunty. After downloading and installing the rpm, you can logout and log back in and you will notice that the notification area of your taskbar has a Dropbox logo. Clicking that will prompt you to start the process:
After clicking OK you will be guided through a wizard allowing you to use an existing account or create a new one:
After entering all of the information, Dropbox will ask you if you want to check out the features via a feature tour:
Dropbox is now installed and ready to use. You can now drag files to the folder, and they will be uploaded to Dropbox’s server, along with any other computers you have registered. I like to add Dropbox to my places menu for easy access, by opening my home folder and dragging it to the left bar:
Also if you are on the internet and don’t want your connection slowed down by Dropbox uploading / downloading files, if you right click the icon you can set the rate low and not even notice the transfers.
After using Dropbox for several months, I am very happy with their free offering. I am considering upgrading to their $9.99/mo 50 gigabyte plan, but I wish there was a plan between the two. The web interface for Dropbox is great, and the Linux client support has always worked for me. I would highly recommend giving this a try if you are a Ubuntu user.
Recently I upgraded my shared hosting plan to a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Part of the reason is that when your blog gets enough hits, WordPress and MySQL become increasingly demanding. My page load times were around 8 seconds previously. Since switching to a VPS plan, I have decreased that to 1-2s which is much more acceptable. What makes load time interesting is that major internet sites see people turn away if load times are high.
“For Google an increase in page load time from 0.4 second to 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. For Amazon every 100 ms increase in load times decreased sales with 1%.”1
This suggests to me that I had better get page load time under control, or my blog won’t reach many people on the internet. Since I already was paying for shared hosting, the jump up to a VPS was not much more money. The result is fantastic though, as I get a server with root access, and better yet it runs on Ubuntu.
The Cherokee website provides a Benchmarks page2 which covers Cherokee being tested against Apache, Lighttpd and Nginx. Cherokee always does really well in these bench marks, and was designed with a focus on security. My website, which gets over 1000 unique visitors a day, with WordPress / MySQL / Cherokee only uses 119 megabytes of ram on my VPS. Cherokee itself is only using 10 megabytes, which shows just how lean it is. In addition to that, it also services requests very efficiently:
Requests per second with 20 concurrent clients
Another factor which pushed me to Cherokee is the way Cherokee is configured. It provides a great, easy to understand / intuitive web interface for configuration. I never had to open up a .conf file and edit it, and yet the configuration it generated is still in plain text and easy to understand should I need to. That is exactly what the webserver world has needed for a long time.
In the next few weeks I will follow up with a detailed Cherokee installation / configuration tutorial and some other fun things I have done with the VPS. If you want to check out Cherokee, their official project website is at: http://www.cherokee-project.com