Due to a rather zany situation I had to grab an external drive. I was at Besr Buy and the best bang for my buck was the SimpleDrive. I backed up my data on my wife’s Vista notebook and was done. But when I plugged it into my Ubuntu desktop and got a really weird message about not being able to mount the drive. It is the same as the one in this post. Basically (as was advised in the post) I had to reboot in a windows machine and deactivate the drive for safe removal. Supposedly this would fix the problem.

So I did so and rebooted in Ubuntu – but now the drive wasn’t detected at all. I rebooted in Windows. Same issue. What I did to fix the problem was to unplug the power of the drive and then plug it back in – basically restarting it. I guess after being “unmounted” in windows, the drive had to be restarted to be active again.

But now it works fine, just like it’s supposed to.

oh, and note that I did this on a desktop running Ubuntu 7.10. I assume it’ll work the same for Gutsy and Intrepid.

In switching to Linux, a big problem for many is web development. Most use Dreamweaver in Windows or OS X, and though there are rumors of that now working in the most recent version of Wine, it doesn’t run natively in Linux.

The best suggestion is to dust off one’s HTML and other coding knowledge and get back to coding by hand. I had used BlueFish in the past (sudo apt-get install bluefish), but lately I’ve found myself using Quanta Plus. It is a “fancy” text editor, but it does have a WYSIWYG interface, which is much more Dreamweaver-like. It also has capabilities to maintain a website, but I’ve only scratched the surface of those…

Oh, and note that there are a few dependencies which are not automatically included with the installation that are added manually – you don’t have to install them, but they fill out Quanta’s capabilities:

To install it, run this in terminal:

Okay, I like to periodically post the add-ons I’ve added to Firefox, so that 1) I have an updated list ready (with links) “in the cloud” should anything happen to my computer, and 2) I also like to share those things which I’ve found to be helpful maneuvering online.

Top Five – here are my favorite add-ons:

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – This keeps all my bookmarks synched between computers and OS’es – don’t really know where I’d be without this…

ScribeFire – A blogging plugin which lets you blog from wherever you are on the web. I use this most of the time to post to my main blog. They have some sort of integrated advertising scheme you can use as well – but I prefer to not clutter my blogs up with too much advertising

more…

Okay, I’ve been trying to find a program I can use offline or just outside a browser for blogging. Sometimes I just want to kick a few thoughts off to a blog without firing up a browser. I had played with it before, but hadn’t gotten it to work. Long story short, in synching up a blog with my Flickr account I found out what I needed to make Kblogger work with my WordPress-based blogs (I host them myself using the WordPress.org program). I assume the same thing will make it work with your WordPress.com blog account as well.

The key is to add “xmlrpc.php” to the end of the site address when setting up a blog in the program. After opening the program go to Setting -> ConfigureKblogger. A window titled “Account Profiles” should open up. Choose “Add” (or “Modify” if you’ve already tried to set up a WordPress blog in it) and in the window that opens up, for “Homepage URL” enter: http://your.blog.com/xmlrpc.php

more…

okay, as I noted in a previous post, I had installed Cairo Dock and was loving it. Then one day, as I was playing around with different themes and ways of laying them out (and totally getting it customized for myself) I managed to somehow corrupt the program or something (it happened when I was trying out the Mac OS. Anyways, it stopped working and wouldn’t work at all. I finally had to remove it (sudo apt-get remove cairo-dock), delet the hidden file in my home directory (show your hidden files and it’s labeled “.cairo-dock” – note the period before the filename). Then just re-ran what I did for installation (sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins) and then I was good to go.