Quite possibly having a “paper-clip” there to give inspiration would do a world of good, it may be considered silly by some but that very idea has been inspiration enough for me to get the 2010 reboot of photogabble finished and a couple of months worth of content scratched out. For a short while I felt what it would be like to be someone with no aspirations and I did not like it, for the past three weeks things have begun to turn around and I have finally begun digging myself out of the rut caused by beings or events unknown, it is scary to think that such a rut can be fallen into rather quickly simply by loosing sight of what you want to become; that is something that I shall endeavour not to enable again.

See you all in 2009!

[EDIT]

Right, due to the nature of the backup I used a lot of the database was scrambled, I have just finished running custom scripts to de-scramble it and things should be running smoothly once again.

In the mean time if you need any help with my plugins feel free to fire me an email.

[Update]

The next update for zenphotos 2.2 will be released as soon as I am able to spend some time on it for the time being I am implementing the following new features as required by my new theme (to launch soon) and requested by you guys:

• Plug-in Panel so you can set the default settings within your dashboard rather than edit the plugin file yourself.
• Adding the option to create custom output formatting, which will make it easier to design around.
• Adding the option to select the latest pictures from just one album within your gallery rather that from the whole gallery.
• Adding the option to show a user defined selection of random images from either one album or the whole gallery.

This being my final degree year I have a lot of  work to get finished and not a lot of time to get it all done in, due to this I can’t say for sure when the new plugin will be released as I am having to work on it when I get literally a spare few minutes.

So is there anything I am missing from being with a pc? Well not much really, I got hold of all the applications I regularly used on my pc plus a ton of extra tools and utilities that I otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. The only thing I can really say I miss from the pc is its ability to play games without a lot of messing about. To play games with full compatibility and at full speed I need to reboot into my windows partition, I am not too happy about doing this as I prefer to follow the purist line and only run apple operating system on apple hardware; still as needs must. I bought VMWare recently and installed a copy of windows98 on it, it took a weekend of playing before I got most things working (except sound) and eventually the dos games that I love to play worked, if I could just get sound to work it would be perfect. Still I can’t believe I spent nearly fifty quid on an application just so I could play X-Com UFO enemy unknown on my mac without having to reboot into windows… did I say I was purist?

Lastly before I go off and do what I should have been doing done, I have updated the blogs’ design a little bit. Now if you scroll down on the front page you will see my five most recent twitters. These are predominantly text only as tumblr cant import images from my feed, basically I am trying to tidy up the content on this website so from now on the blog will only contain worthwhile posts and the tumblrs will be the short, spontaneous posts. They will still appear in the main feed however if it turns out that this becomes a problem for people (flooding with multiple posts a day) I shall work a way of excluding them.

I do have a lot to say, but it is still a case of finding time to write it all down. I have entered my third and final year of university, which is also arguably the most gruesome so far as work load is concerned.  In the coming weeks I shall upload the new photogabble theme for 2008 which itself will be modified over the coming months. I still don’t know if I shall release the pinecone theme which currently clothes this blog, that all depends on time and demand. I may release a cut down bog standard version of it around the time I change the blogs clothes. Finally I have a new endevour soon to launch, I am currently in the process of accumulating and sorting through all of its particulars and it is a pretty big step for me to take so I shall dedicate a blog post to it at a later date.

Until then, good night and have a good weekend.

Anyway on to some useful Linux commands I use most often, aside from cd, ls, cp, rm, mkdir and the other usual suspects, I also find the following couple of command based applications useful and you might also.

dselect: This is a very useful application for keeping your server up to date, it is basically a menu driven front end for the apt-get command, which helps speed up the process of deciding what you want and do not want on your machine. I have only recently begun using this frequently because I keep forgetting that it is in fact installed. Where as apt-get can give you issues, I have found that this application is able to fix them and then give you a hell of a lot more, but that’s just the fun of managing your own server and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

top: So you have a rogue process doing something it shouldn’t, are interested in what you currently have running or just want to check up on some system statistics. Top is the application for you; I tend to use it to keep an eye on what the server is actually doing. I sometimes install things and processes which run in the background and then don’t use and subsequently forget about them being there. When you do that enough times then the amount of system resources those forgotten processes use can add up and begin effecting the system as a whole. I used this application to hunt them down and then used dselect to remove them. It’s also handy for keeping an eye on the health of the computer, I tend to leave it running in the background so I can keep a watch on what the server is doing while I test things on it.

mc: The last of the regulars of which I remember, mc is short for midnight commander and is basically a file explorer and editor. The great thing about this application is that it supports the mouse, even over SSH. So when logged in from putty I can just click and use a very DOS like window system to make selections. I don’t use this so much anymore due to managing to break it some how (I’m fixing that now) and I prefer to use the command line anyway, but it does prove to be invaluable when trying to search the entire file system for a file containing a certain phrase.

So there you have it, some very useful applications for use on linux, I don’t use that much other command based applications and to be honest as this is just a html server I don’t have much cause to either unless I am patching things or having to compile a new version of some application.