gnash not Flash enough

I’m a comparative newbie to Ubuntu (and Linux in general) but one of the plus points is that it’s Free. You can install Ubuntu on an old PC without putting your hand in your pocket and you get not only a fully functional operating system but all the tools that most users require, i.e. an Office Suite, Web Browser and Email/Calendar client. I recently found that I could not view some pages properly, e.g. Google Analytics, and traced the problem to the playback of Flash components. I had installed gnash as my Flash plugin for Firefox and frankly it just doesn’t cut it. The only option was to remove gnash and install Flash itself. But how? As it turns out is is pretty simple, with just two commands in the Terminal I had Google Analytics as a number of other Flash enabled sites running perfectly.

All Change......

If you are one of the 100 or so previous visitors to the site then you may notice that it has changed quite a lot, in fact the more observant of you will notice that I am now running a WordPress Blog Engine rather than a Joomla! based CMS. I decided to change to WordPress for a number of reasons but I belive in trying to use the right tools for the job and as the site was growing into more of a blog and while Joomla! can handle this it is pretty well accepted that WordPress is the No1 Blog engine on the Net. That’s not to say that Joomla was a load of rubbish but the learning curve was much, much greater with than with WordPress.

Installing the LAMP stack and Joomla!

As I want to be able to develop web based application I need to install the LAMP Stack. The term “LAMP” refers to a collection of applications that are required to run dynamic websites on a Linux system.

• Linux : Operating System (in this case Ubuntu)
• Apache : Web Server
• MySql : Database
• PHP (or PERL, Python etc) : Programming Language.

There are a number of methods for doing this but most use that I found required interaction at the command line which can be a bit daunting for new users (like me) and also turns the process into something of a Black Art. Coming from a Windows background I feel more comfortable with a graphical user interface (GUI). Having said that, when I initially installed the LAMP stack on my spare Hard Drive I had used the command line approach and all went well.

Dual Booting Vista and Ubuntu

In a previous post I stated that have installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) alongside Vista on my Toshiba laptop but this was not as straightforward as I had hoped. I had upgraded the laptop with a 160GB hard drive and Vista was reporting that there was about 90GB free. Great, I only want about 20-30GB for Ubuntu so I should have no problems at all – should I?

The problem is that when i installed Vista I clicked on the ‘Use Entire Drive’ option – which is what I wanted at the time. Now Vista has the ability to shrink a volume so I thought this would come to my rescue – I was wrong! Even though I had 90GB free the shrink tool would only reclaim about 200MB of it!

New Years Resolution 2008/9

Like many other people around the world I have made numerous New Years resolutions over the years and come March they are all but forgotten. Now I don’t smoke and I don’t drink (to excess anyway) but I do carry a few extra pounds around with me – and they have been there for a few years now despite numerous “I will eat less/better this year” resolutions.

The fact of the matter is this; If you don’t want to do something, you won’t. Simple as that. So this year I thought that I would think of something that I would want to do (and not something that other people think I should do!) I currently work as a developer for a company using the Microsoft .NET 2.0 technologies and consider myself to be competant in VB.NET and C# for the development of ASP.NET applications. However, the technologies never stand still and I have still to look at the advances in .NET 3.5 such as LINQ so maybe I should resolve to dig into 3.5 even though the company does not yet implement it. I mean, I may not be working here forever and in the current climate it is wise to keep yourself as up to date as possible.