Joe Blog's A Day In The Life Of Your Average Joe

17Apr/0921

Dropbox

From what I recall, quite a few people have heard of, or even use Dropbox.

Dropbox is similar to Apple's iDisk, in the respect that it is an online backup/data storage facility. The only difference is, dropbox will give you 2GB of free storage, just for signing up. There's also an option to pay either $9.99 per month, or $99 per year, which will upgrade your storage capacity to 50GB. For me personally, I don't (yet) need any more than the 2GB, though I may consider looking into the 50GB option in future.

What I like most about Dropbox is that it's cross platform. For me this is fantastic, because I run Ubuntu (9.04 64 bit if you're interested) on my desktop, and my laptop is an aluminum Macbook. Now I had the problem of somehow remembering to put things in the Dropbox directory so that they would get synced to the server and thus between my 2 machines.

Solving that problem was a lot easier than I could've expected. No thanks to my friend Gabby, who told me what he had done on IRC. Using

ln -s

you can create soft links to the directories to/from the Dropbox directory, and any changes you make to that directory outside of the Dropbox directory, get automatically synced. Put simply, if I make any changes to something in ~/Documents, it automatically gets backed up/synced to Dropbox. Awesome!!

If you're unsure of the syntax of

ln

, as it is a little confusing, it's the following:

ln -s target link_name

And finally, if you want to join Dropbox because you haven't already, following this link will (according to Dropbox) get you a little bit more space :)

Edit: I've just been informed (thanks Matteo!) that the referral links don't seem to be giving extra space any more. This is likely because Dropbox limits the amount they give out. Please feel free to use the link at the end of the post if you want, but don't feel obliged to if you do want to sign up. Join Dropbox

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21Mar/0919

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) – My Thoughts So Far

As I'm sure plenty of you are aware, Ubuntu 9.04 is due to be released in little over a month's time. Testing is in full swing (Alpha 6 at time of writing), and the beta should be coming in 2 or 3 weeks (that's a guess on my part, please don't hold me to it!). I figured it was about time to try and install it, partly because I'm interested to see how well it currently runs on my dual-head setup, partly because I need to write an article on installing it for Linux Identity ;)

So - I popped in the Jaunty Live CD, got to the boot menu. All is going well so far, I expected it to not boot though due to my graphics card (Nvidia 9500GT) and a Dual-Screen setup....ok I'm on the desktop (that was quick!). My dual-screen setup was detected just fine (with both monitors at the correct resolution no less!) I was already impressed just from that. I had a play around, and it took me all of 5 minutes to decide that I wanted to give it a proper try out, and to backup my home and install it properly.

1 reboot later, past the (in my opinion) great new GDM theme and nice new splash screen, I'm logged in, installing my nvidia drivers (180.xx) as recommended by a little pop-up. After that install and reboot, I get compiz effects working great, as well as an extended desktop - awesome!

After a bit more playing, I have the dust theme installed (it's come a long way since I last used it), as well as having emesene using the new notification system (which I have to say looks great!). I'm also running on an ext4 based system, and so far - all is well. Hopefully I'll have more to say when the beta is released, but this is running on my main desktop, so it's getting plenty of use :)

UPDATE:

I've got to say, after using jaunty some more this morning, one thing struck me...it's REALLY quick. Boot is way faster than 8.10 and running general. Shutdown is quicker too :)

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13Feb/091

Jaunty Java

Ok so this post has nothing to do with Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) & Java as a whole, it's about the 2 separate subjects, and my lack of knowledge regarding them (currently!).

So I'm thinking that when I've got a bit of free time I'm going to try Jaunty in a VM, just because I've not actually tried it at all so far, I'm a bit disappointed in myself! From what I've heard on IRC and generally from people using it, there's been the usual breakage of some things, but that's to be expected. Other than that I've actually heard a lot of positive things about it, so I'm looking forward to actually installing it on my system :D

As for Java, some of you may know that I'm on a Software Engineering course at University. This means I do a fair amount of programming and general sitting-in-front-of-a-computer-looking-busy ;) . One of the modules on my course this year is OO (Object-Oriented) Software Development, for which we're using Java. Now I'm not a huge fan of Java, but I can appreciate it has many uses, and I don't mind coding in it. The only issue is that, from the lectures, I don't actually have a fantastic understanding of OO Methods and such. So I got a book out of my Uni library - Java in Two Semesters - so far, it's actually really good, and I already have a better understanding of things :) Now I just have to finish an assignment!

One final comment - I'll be changing my Planet Ubuntu feed in the coming week to include all posts from my blog, as I'd say that 99% of my posts relate to Ubuntu in some way :)

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