facti.net

Some install notes, likely to be updated as time permits

Through no major fault of my own I have ended up with an iPhone.  Overall it seems quite a nice unit, although I think the android based phones have a better future.  The core functionality the iPhone comes with is relatively limited, but it can be significantly enhanced with the right applications.  Unfortunately it is difficult to weed through the chaff in the App Store to find the best applications.  Here is my initial list of the best free iPhone apps I have found.  If you know of any others that are worth please leave a comment or send me an email.

Inkscape is a great little scalable vector graphics drawing tool.  This website has some very nice practical screencasts on how to take advantage of the many inkscape features to produce some good drawings and learn the more advanced features at the same time.  You might want to work through the examples in reverse order, as the more advanced examples are the later ones and it is inverse-sorted by date:

http://www.bestechvideos.com/tag/inkscape/

The eclipse metadata for a workspace is still a mess in eclipse 3.5.  Not only is the file naming and structure inconsistent (what's with all the hidden files within hidden files, while some are not hidden in a rather random way) but it mixes things that should be persisted (such as preferences, and launch options) with things that should not be persisted (such as history and cache files).  All of this makes it rather painful to try and version control a workspace efficiently so that one can use the important bits of a workspace in different machines with minimal fuss.  For example, if the .metadata is in your version control files, doing a status results in reams of files that one does not want to version control, but if it is outside the tree then settings and launch configurations don't get added and can be a real pain to reconfigure every time.

My current strategy for each workspace involves:

Looks like there is a small change in how name resolution is done in Ubuntu 9.10.   It looks like IPv6 DNS resolution is applied first now, when it is available, and a silent failover to the IPv4 entry occurs when it isn't. 

I noticed this effect when apache was running on the local machine.  Trying to access a Web server on a server that had an IPv6 record of ::1 (don't ask) but a proper IPv4 record.   In the current version of Ubuntu that results in the local Web server being accessed when it is available rather than the IPv4 one.  When it is not available it silently falls over to the IPv4 address.

For example, trying to access a website (http://facti.net for argument's sake;) on the internal network when apache was running on the laptop resulted in firefox connecting to the laptop rather than the Web server on facti.net.  However, if apache was shut down on the laptop then firefox would connect to the facti.net Web server.