This last week i've been enjoying watching A Very Potter Musical on youtube. It's a most hilarious Harry Potter parody with fantastic acting and delightfully catchy songs!

The star of the show has to be Lauren Lopez who plays Draco Malfoy and spends most of the time rolling around seductively on the floor/bench/harry/hermione! Lauren's sense of comic timing is incredible, and the voice and facial expressions are just adorable!

Voldemort and Quirrel are beautifully played with some very touching moments together. Snape is hilarious, like all the characters, much exaggerated!

I think the best songs are near the end. "Not Alone" (Act 2 Scene 5) is a beautifully composed piece of music, and "Voldemort Is Goin' Down" (Act 2 Scene 8) is magnificently performed by the cast.

I've enjoyed it so much that i'm making myself a dvd to take to show friends and family. I love it that the whole thing is freely available. By the fans, for the fans, and yep, the fans are loving it!

I also love how linux gives me free tools to be able to create a dvd. This morning i did not know how to do it, but using todisc and tovid i've been able to combine all the scenes into a sequence, with a menu. I used mplayer to extract the audio of one song, and audacity to split out the song that i wanted to use as an introduction when the menu is shown. I used kino to look at the frames one by one and export a frame to use as the background for the menu. I used the gimp to darken the image and reduce the contrast.

The menu for my dvd is hopefully going to look something like this:

I'll update again if it works! Currently it is encoding each of the scenes into dvd format, which seems to take a very long time … and creates files 5 times bigger than the originals!

Update: it worked!! From youtube to my television!!

Thank you to StarKidPotter, youtube, keepvid.com and to free open source software and the ubuntu community! Now i can take A Very Potter Musical with me to show anyone who has a dvd player! :D

Oh my word i am thrilled to hear news of Google's new operating system, coming next year!

I admit it: i'm a Google addict! I've previously said that Google products are like chocolate bars: i always have to try the new ones! I used to be cautious, not wanting Google to follow me all over the internet, so i always logged out quickly. But recently i've thrown caution to the wind! I have fully immersed myself into Google Mail, Chat, Calendar, Docs, Maps and Reader. We use Google apps at work for all our communication needs. I'm considering getting an Android phone and writing apps for it. I basically love Google!

Chrome OS will be a super-speedy operating system (based on the Linux kernel) that will do one thing and do it really well: the web! With a great lightweight browser, the push towards HTML 5, Google Wave, and Google Gears for offline access, everything is pointing to the gap between desktop applications and web apps narrowing, and web apps taking over.

Haha, i just realised, they're finally going to have to write Chrome (the browser) for Linux! Awesome! It's been 9 months i've been waiting for that!

Update – things have moved on since i last checked – you can now download a development version of Chrome as a deb file for Debian and Ubuntu. The install was quick and easy, and it seems to be working pretty well, apart from keyboard shortcuts.

This is a Google world we're living in, and i fully embrace it! :D

I recently installed Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope and hadn't yet got around to putting Rails on to it.

Installing Ruby and Gems and Rails and getting them all to work nicely together can be a pain, so i'm happy to say i managed to go from nothing to Rails installed and working in 14 minutes this time! Thanks very much to Installing Ruby on Rails on Debian/Ubuntu for most of the tips. Here's how it panned out for me:

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A couple of times recently i've found myself doing <ESC>:wq in the internet instead of pressing the submit button. I don't use Vim very much at the moment – really only to make Git commits – but i've had enough of a taste that i feel it's something i want to learn properly.

For a few months i've been searching for a text editor that i can use both on the Mac at work, and Linux on my netbook and PC at home. TextMate is a wonderful thing, but there is no decent Linux equivalent. A colleague and i started writing OpenMate – an open source cross platform equivalent to TextMate … but it's hard! I enjoy gedit but failed to get gedit installed at work. I've tried NetBeans and jEdit but didn't like them much, and they feel too big and clunky for a netbook.

After a little bit of reading about Vim i have become very excited. More excited that i've ever felt about a text editor before! I've realised that my conception of Vim has been wrong. I used to press i straight away to get into Insert mode, and stay there until i wanted to perform a command, in which case i'd press <ESC> followed by the command. Now i realise that a better way to use it is to be in 'Normal' mode most of the time, press i to enter Insert mode very briefly, and press <ESC> as soon as i've finished inserting.

This afternoon i discovered vimtutor and have been really enjoying it! You can run it on any Unix/Linux based system; just type vimtutor at the command line. It takes you through every command, at your own pace. It gives you samples of text to correct, using the commands you have just learnt. It's actually quite fun and demonstrates the power of Vim very effectively!

At the moment i'm still muttering everything as i go, like "delete … 3 … words" as i very slowly type d3w and i'm exclaiming in delight at almost everything i learn – like – "Wow! That's so clever!" I'm sure soon enough i'll be able to use it effectively without making a lot of noise about it!

It is interesting learning it for Dvorak, but not too difficult. The up and down keys are in my left hand, and the left and right keys are in my right hand. They all actually fit rather neatly under my hands and feel intuitive even though they are not all in a line together. To be honest, i think i probably prefer it to the way it works under Qwerty.

Here is a helpful Vim cheatsheet laid out for Dvorak. Thanks, Mark Schoonover!
Here is an excellent article about the wonders of Vi/Vim.

It's ridiculous how exciting this feels to me! Perhaps it's the sense of moving up another level in the geek hierarchy! :D

Most of my life is spent coding Ruby on Rails, but occasionally i venture into the world of PHP. When i do, i sometimes need to configure Apache because, unlike Rails, it does not happen automagically! To save myself always looking things up on the Internet, here is a little summary of the things i have learnt.

Don't do this!

When i very first started using Linux, i discovered that you could put files into /var/www and access them through http://localhost. This is a very bad idea because you don't have permissions to the /var directory (for good reason!) so i used to end up chmodding everything. Also, keeping anything outside your home directory is bad news because you're liable to forget to back it up before you do an upgrade! WHOOPS!

A perfectly good solution

The next thing i learnt was symlinking, or creating shortcuts. So you can set up a shortcut from the /var/www directory to an appropriate place in your home directory. For example:

sudo ln -s /home/aimee/websites /var/www/html

Now if i have a directory called mac2 under my websites directory i can go to http://localhost/html/mac2/index.php. Nice!

More advanced: VirtualHosts

Later on i started experimenting with Apache's RewriteRule and RewriteBase for nice 'pretty' URLs. You'll soon find out that the symlink method is no longer suitable because you're not using relative URLs anymore. It's time to learn about VirtualHosts, so that i can access my local files with a URL like http://mac2.aimee.

Apache2 keeps a list of available configurations under /etc/apache2/sites-available. I have one called aimee.conf because i am egotistical like that!

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/aimee.conf

It must start with this line:

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1

Then, for each site that i want, i add a VirtualHost like this:

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
  ServerName mac2.aimee
  DocumentRoot /home/aimee/websites/mac2
  CustomLog /var/log/apache2/mac2.log combined
  DirectoryIndex index.php
</VirtualHost>

It really just needs to know where to find the source files. The log and directory index are not especially important. It's probably fairly obvious why i added them. There are plenty of other options you could use if you wanted to, but this is about all i use.

Next we need to enable the configuration. It's as simple as symlinking the file from the sites-available directory. You only need to do this once per .conf file (and i only use one for simplicity).

cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/aimee.conf .

The next step is to configure the hosts file such that when i type http://mac2.aimee into a browser it knows to look on my actual computer rather than on the Internet.

sudo vim /etc/hosts

I enter a line like this:

127.0.0.1       mac2.aimee

Finally, restart Apache and all should be very well!

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

The best of both worlds

If you want it both ways (and hey, why shouldn't you?!) it is quite simple to set up another VirtualHost for localhost. Just add it in like this:

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
  ServerName localhost
  DocumentRoot /home/aimee/websites
</VirtualHost>

Restart Apache again and now the same site is accessible at both http://mac2.aimee and http://localhost/mac2/index.php.

Happy day! :)

Disclaimers

This is how i made it work on Ubuntu Linux in a development environment. Other operating systems may behave differently. I have no idea about setting up production servers!

If Apache is in a different place on your computer, you can find it like this:

whereis apache2

To find your hosts file:

locate hosts

I am not an Apache expert, so if you have any questions, chances are i can't answer them! Scroogle is your friend! :)

Please don't all freak out on me … but … i am thinking of trying out the Windows 7 beta.

I think it's fair to say that Windows Vista did not quite meet all the expectations that Microsoft had for it in 2008. The user account protection was annoying, the visual effects to me smacked of "tried too hard" and i think a lot of Windows XP users felt it wasn't different enough to be worth an upgrade. People took their new Vista computers back to "upgrade" to XP, Dell are selling computers with Ubuntu, and the netbooks available in the high street have pushed Linux further into public awareness than ever before.

Vista was late, but i think they released it too soon. I think Microsoft's reputation took a knock, but they have a chance to repair it. Windows 7 is pretty much Vista done properly, and from everything that i've read so far, it looks as if they've actually done quite well this time. So i'm going to try and get hold of the beta and have a go at dual booting it. It certainly won't be my primary operating system of choice, but it could be useful for running SecondLife and/or OpenLife and i will admit i'm curious to see for myself what it's like.

When using a package manager it is helpful to know how to search for available packages. You can search for part of the package name, so that mysql- returns both mysql-server and mysql-client …

On Debian-based systems:

sudo apt-cache search mysql-

On Fedora-based systems:

sudo yum list "*mysql-*"

On Mac with MacPorts:

port search mysql-

I find it odd that Microsoft seem to be dedicating so much TV air time to their "I'm a PC" response advertisments to the Mac vs PC ads of a few years back. The odd thing is, i never remember seeing any of these ads on television. And i would remember because they were done by Mitchell and Webb in the UK. I've only seen them on Youtube when browsing for amusement's sake. I reckon there could be plenty of people who are completely bemused by all these people saying, "I'm a PC" when they have never seen the original ads for reference. Maybe Microsoft will awaken people up to the realisation that actually, Windows is not the only option.

Here's one of the Mitchell and Webb ads: The Naughty Step.

I actually thought it was illegal to make direct comparisons between your product and a direct competitor's product in an advertising campaign, so i don't know how Apple got away with this whole series of advertisements.

Somebody should do an ad called "I'm a free-thinker!" I haven't sold my soul to Microsoft or to Apple. I don't owe anybody any money. I just owe a debt of gratitude to thousands of volunteers who willing donated their time, knowledge and expertise to create the world's best, most secure, most reliable, most flexible, freely available, freely modifiable and freely redistributable operating system.

Actually, IBM did a Linux ad, ages ago. Linux: The Future is Open. Has anyone done anything like that since?

I had a little trouble installing both Flash and Second Life on Ubuntu, since they seemed to want to use different versions of one particular library. But in the end the solution was astonishingly simple.

Download Second Life from getdeb.net. Choose your OS version and search for 'Second Life'. I got it working nice and fast, graphics looking wonderful, and with streaming music! For ages my experience has been 'choose any two of the three' making Second Life not so enjoyable. I'm looking forward to Esperanto lessons again, and hoping that the voice chat will work now.

In the end, Flash was as easy as:

sudo apt-get install nspluginwrapper flashplugin-nonfree

I tried all sorts of crazy wrapping techniques with 32-bit libraries and symbolic links, none of which worked. But the apt-get just did it all for me, very nicely. It's better than the Debian Lenny out-of-the-box Flash support which required me to press a ginormous PLAY button before Flash would load. This just works exactly as you'd expect it to.

Delighted though i am with Ubuntu, i have just today been informed of Dreamlinux which is another Debian-based distribution, but tweaked up to resemble Mac OSX. I think i might just have to try out the Live USB of that! :)

Update: Oh, and by the way, here's how to install Skype on a 64-bit Ubuntu Hardy Heron:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs lib32asound2 libasound2-plugins; wget -O skype-install.deb http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu; sudo dpkg -i --force-all skype-install.deb

Thanks very much to the Ubuntu forums for that piece of magic! :)

My gosh, all these rumours about Ubuntu being super-easy to use … they are absolutely entirely justified! You can colour me heartily impressed! I am, from today onwards, an Ubuntu user!

To start with, the live CD was fast and responsive. It had plenty of nice examples to show off its features. I was very happy that i could install right from within the live CD, and i could keep browsing the internet whilst it installed, which took a super-speedy 10 minutes.

Installing Nvidia graphics card drivers was as simple as ticking on an option under proprietary drivers. It already found the right driver for me, and alerted me that it was available to use if i wanted it. It worked straight away, and i was immediately blessed with some nice subtle visual effects.

All 'root access' stuff has been completely hidden from the end user. Before i change any system settings it asks me for my password to authorise, not the root password. What a good idea.

Installing a Flash player worked right from within Firefox. It popped up the message box "Install missing plugins" and there were actually three options for me to choose. I've never seen even one appear under Linux before! I chose one called 'Gnash' which was probably the wrong option, because it doesn't yet work for Youtube, but i'm sure i'll figure out a good one.

Ubuntu comes with Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice, Pidgin, the Gimp, F-Spot photo manager, a whole stack of games, Movie player, Rhythm box, Sound Juicer … and a totally awesome Add/Remove Applications.

It has some beautiful themes, and very impressive screen savers.

I think i was worried about losing geek credibility if i switched to Ubuntu. Now i don't care. Right now i need something that Just Works. It's still Linux, but really, really nice Linux! :D