Yesterday, the Ask Ubuntu 2013 Moderator elections wrapped up - our 3 additional moderators are:
And RolandiXor!
They join the existing team of moderators, who are very excited about the new group!
Congratulations to all, and keep up the good work!
]]>Since then, its been a fun ride, and I've learned the various cool tools out there for a IT person.
I do contract work with a nameless startup incubator in the area, and as part of that, I'm partially responsible for printers, user-facing documentation, etc.
As such, I was constantly plugging and unplugging my laptop to show people this, that or the other. however, the tablet has replaced my laptop for a lot of those duties. Let me explain more.
Like it or not, we all have to document things. And we have to do it well, for our intended audience. Now, we have two main pieces of user-facing documentation - the WiFi setup, and the printer setup. Two documents,one of which changes as we fix things (printers).
The Nexus 7 is just the right for me to pull of the document and refer to it as I'm working on someone's machine. The apps I use for that are:
Now, to view them, I need a office type tool. While I could (and have) use Google drive, it doesn't lend itself to the situation well.
I've looked at the softmaker line of products, but I haven't been impressed with their linux offerings, so I'm not sure if I should risk the price for the full amount.
However, I am very happy with Kingston Office Writer.
It's free, and available for Android here.
The ConnectBot family is well-known and very well featured for being able to do SSH.
However, I've discovered that stock ConnectBot doesn't play nice with function keys on bluetooth keyboards, so I am using a fork of ConnectBot called VX ConnectBot that properly supports external keyboards.
ConnectBot supports SSH keys, although I don't make use of them - I don't do enough SSH on my tablet to worry about that.
Evernote. While I used to be a fan of Tomboy/Tomdroid/Ubuntu One, recent events have pushed me into the Evernote fold. And I must say, it's nice. I'm using it to write this blog post right now.
I shell out the cash each month for Evernote Premium, and while I'm enjoying it so far, there are a few "problems" I have with it, but I also had them with Tomboy.
Amazon Kindle or the built-in PDF reader are my go-to PDF readers. They aren't terrific, but they are ok.
Ahg. Email, the bane of every IT persons existence. Email is something I detest. People need to understand that when they email me, I will see it, and then prioritize it. I'm sad that people think that emailing me = instant response and I go and fix their problem. If you email someone, you should expect up to a 72 hour wait period before you get a response. If it's that important, call me. The important people have my number, and the smart ones who might need to call me know where and how to find it.
Anyway, I use the excellent gmail app for my email. I have gmail filters setup server side that filter out mailing lists and similar things into gmail tags, so they never hit my inbox. I then have gmail setup to only send me a push notification if it's in the priority inbox.
So, lets bits and pieces that don't really fall into any category are:
More communication tools: Skype , Google Talk (no link that I could find in the Play Store) and for IRC, I'm a fan of AndChat. Google Voice is another good one, if you're a Google Voice user, I highly recommend installing the application - while I still haven't figured out how to make calls from my Nexus 7, for text messages, it works fine. Lastly, for those times that Skype is just being a pain in the rear, there is Google + Hangouts, which are pretty useful.
For choice of Browser, I have two installed. I have Chrome Beta, and I have Firefox. My main browser is Chrome, and I have Firefox for accessing all the internal sites that require self-signed SSL certificates. I much prefer Chromes tab setup, but Firefox is pretty fast.
I'm cheap, remember? So I am a fan of keepass and Dropbox.
So I store my passwords in a Keepass2 (or KeepassX) database, synced to my Dropbox folder. On my Tablet, I use keepassdroid to access it, and it's all hunky dory.
Other tools I've tried are:
Universal Password Manager. I can't explain why, but something about it not being in the archive for Ubuntu just made me not want to deal with it.
LastPass. Only way to get the mobile apps is the give them money, and I'm not a fan of proprietary applications storing something like my passwords. At least in dropbox, everything is a file.
I use a combination of todo.txt and Wunderlist, but I'm not entirely sure how well it's working. Ask me in a few months.
So, that's my list of tools. What is in your toolbox?
]]>so, you might see something like this when you login to Ask Ubuntu today:
So far, I've managed to earn the Gangnam style glasses, Guide my Sleigh, and Constantipolitan, for posting on meta.
Full list of hats is here - I implore you, go forth and earn hats! And if you dislike hats, there is an opt-out button - just click the "i hate hats" link, and you won't see any hats.
Just remember, hats are only around from now until Janurary 4th, so be quick!
Now hat Away! Hat Away! Hat Away All!
cheesy I know.
]]>Citing a need to completely move their infrastructure, the Ubuntu One team announced that they will no longer be supporting note sync.
As such, I have moved to Evernote, and very gladly fork over $6 a month to them for premium.
So, for those of you who know me, I'm pretty picky about what I use for my syncing. And I have to be - this is one of the more difficult parts of my electronic life, and its even more difficult now.
Let's start with my requirements.
Before I added Android to the mix, I had been using PlainText and Dropbox. Worked wonderfully. Now that I have an android device, I'm moving to Ubuntu One notes, aka tomboy. Seems to work pretty well.
For Windows and Ubuntu clients, I'm using Tomboy. For Android, I'm using Tomdroid, and for iOS, I'm using a new one that doesn't work on iOS6 (yet!), but should get fixed soon, called webNotes (powered by Ubuntu One). All the platforms covered yay!
To get setup, I just installed Tomboy on my Ubuntu and Windows computers. I then installed the beta version of Tomdroid, and connected everything to my Ubuntu One account. Took about 20 minutes to do the switch, and was very painless!
So far, I've been using Ubuntu One in this fashion for about three months, and it's going pretty well so far.
The ability to have my notes anywhere is great - and the fact it integrates with a product made by one of my favorite companies (Canonical) is even better!
]]>And then I entered the Rails Rumble for 2012 with @imnotanerd, and spent a desperate 48 hours with my battling oauth, rails internals, Sinatra, cancan, and a Linux server.
At the end, I've got a few takeaways.
Come up with two ideas - one that only takes 12 hours to build, the other that takes the full 48.
This saved our bacon. We had two ideas - one was fairly complex. At 8PM Saturday I said "look. We've been banging our heads against this for almost 8 man hours. Time to start something else."
So I did a rails new, and thus Volla was born. Or reborn.
Git is your frenemy.
Git is a blessing and a curse. Commit early, often, push, deploy via Capistrano, repeat.
But make sure that your gitignore is properly updated.
Otherwise, you end up committing 20mb worth of binstubs. And your api keys. Not OK.
Anyway. Don't do that.
Stay on target...
Enough said. Don't get distracted by the cool matrix cat or something.
If you don't succeed, try again. Take a month off, then try that idea again. I learned everything I know about rails because I said "I've got two weeks. Let's building something in 2 hours a day". (Side note: that's how I got sucked into Shoes/Hackety Hack, as well as delayed_paperclip. You devote time to something, you will fill it. Fact of life that I've discovered over the past 16 years I've been around on this planet.)
Leverage the knowledge of others.
I did the math, and between the two of us, we spent 8 hours man hours trying to figure out sessions in Sinatra. It was at this point I said "stop and move on, lets get this fixed". Time spent on authentication in rails? 20 minutes. (Authorization though, was closer to an hour, hour and a half)
The lesson to take away from this is that for almost everything you're doing, someone has invented that wheel already - so for the love of pete, USE IT. Thats the wonderful thing about a community.
If you don't know what adding $GEM to your gemfile will do, you probably don't want to do it.
I ran into this - had a gem, added it, broke everything. Removed, worked fine. (Not naming names here, it was some bad code I wrote elsewhere). But adding one gem was enough to break the whole app.
Use a logged chat.
We used skype - this worked, but the logs in skype are... well, less than wonderful. Part of this has to do with Skype for Linux, part of this has to do with Skype in general. If I had to do it again, I'd use Campfire, or even IRC.
Descriptive git commits.
"Fixed bugs" - If you're guilty of this, raise your hand! Oh look, everyones hand went up.
Don't. Do. This. Ever. Makes code review after the fact hard.
If you're confident, do some sort of TDD.
This would have cost us time, but saved us trouble. If we had automated testing in place, I would have known that we broke certain things with certain other changes. But... well, hindsight is 20-20.
Hopefully my tips here will be useful for people in the future. If not, oh well. I tried. :)
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