Another web2.0 diagram tool

My last post was roughly related…. basically I was stating that I like web2.0 apps sparked by a lifehacker post about bubbl.us. Well here is another online diagram tool.
Gliffy.com – Create and share diagrams online.

Web 2.0

I really like web2.0 stuff. The more the web takes over the place of our local applications, the less it matters what hardware or operating system we work on. Of course from the privacy view, if your work is hosted somewhere out of your hands, you have to depend on the security of the host. But then again many of these new web2.0 apps allow for local server installation and from a IT view, maintaining a multitude of applications on a single server makes licensing and maintenance much easier. Today on Lifehacker, I saw this nice web2.0 entry “Map your ideas with bubbl.us” It is a nice way to map out your brainstorming ideas. Being a linux user at home and a mac user at work, I haven’t found a nice mapping package that was available on both platforms, thankfully I haven’t had much need either. Anyways… this post is mostly a comment about web2.0 applications… you have any other web2.0 applications you like let me know. I’ve been tagging various web2.0 sites on my del.icio.us postings (look here).

MetaWishlist.com: Possibly my newly favorite Wishlist povider

I’ve played with a handful of Wish list sites. Currently I’ve been using Wishlistr.com. I’ve also tried Gifthat.com and other. I used Gifthat to generate a simple wedding registry for Fair trade good for Lauren and I (link) since it allowed me to include pictures with the posting. This site also allowed me to produce a nice blog entry with the pictures and all, however, the link to the list has never worked properly.

Wishlistr I’ve used for my personal wish list of crap and stuff that I really have no need to have, but would still like anyways… like who really needs a Nabaztag but if you had one you’d love it…. anyways… I like wistlistr since it is simple and has a very easy to use bookmarklet. A simple click and you are off adding a new desired item to your list. Also if you are selecting an item for Amazon, it instantly grabs many of the details for you. Gifthat also has a bookmarklet but I felt I spent to much time filling in the entries (this may have changed since all of these site are constantly improving). Also I like that Wishlistr also includes a simple RSS feed option. I’ve managed to convince my younger brother to setup an account and I can track it with any rss reader.

Well anyways in my never ending wasted time on the internet, I’ve now found MetaWishlist.com again it is just another simple wishlist tracking site. But this one I find is different… it is in my opinion a cross between a del.icio.us site and a wishlist. While you can build your own list, you also can see what other people have added to their lists. Also, it too has the ability to share the list via RSS, including pictures of the items. Also the bookmarklet is as simple as Wishlistr’s but it opens in a nice “sidebar” like fashion where you can easily fill in the various entries. It like Wishlistr also grabs much of the data from Amazon site and I noticed that it also picked up other information for other shopping sites. Anyways… I really like the interface from the point of view of someone who likes del.icio.us. Also I think that the social aspect makes a big difference, I think that it may help with finding gift ideas for people who don’t have wish list. Say you are looking for a birthday present for a fisherman simple search the site for anything tagged “fishing” and you’ll see what people who fish may want since they have it on their wishlist.

Anyways like I title the post… I think this may be my new favorite wishlist site generator web2.0 thingy.
Link: MetaWishlist.com: Welcome!

More Simple weather related fun

Here is another simple do-it-yourself weather contraption:

How to Make a Simple Weather Barometer – WikiHow

Cannibal Fish

Now that “BlogThis” once again works, over the next few days or so, I’ll have to catch up with all the various sites I wanted to post but could not easily do so with out “blogThis”. Anyways so here is the first one…. I completely random site I stumbled upon, how I don’t remember… I was probably verifying a network connection by randomly performing a google search just to make sure that what I loaded was not in cache. I assume that this is the case since a typical search I perform is for “fishsticks“. Anyways the linked to site is a cute fish simulation of survival in fish. It is a great way to waste time staring at the screen.

Cannibal Fish

instructables : Anemometer

I thought this was great…. this is what happens when people get board and snowed in.
instructables : Anemometer

BlogThis works with the "new" blogger

WOOHOO! it works again…… let easy posting resume…. now if can can just find the time to post all those old links I wanted to post before I switched.

Ubuntu + Box.net = Happy Nick

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Well one of the things that I could never seem to get working with Centos was the mounting of a webdav filesystem via davfs. Well today with the help of Ubuntu and the web, I’ve gotten it figure

# apt-get install davfs2# mkdir /media/box.net# mount -t davfs http://www.box.net/dav /media/box.net

I was also able to get the mount to work as me by adding a .davfs directory for me with the username and password, plus with an fstab entry. Of course you also have to setuid the mount.davfs for root.

// setuidchmod 4555   executable_file// setgidchmod 2555   executable_file

But now that that is all working, I can actively use my box.net account as part of my filesystem.
I’m happy.

references:
[howto] Mount your Box.Net account using WebDAV via ubuntuforums
How to set the setuid and setgid bit for files in Unix

Ubuntu continued

Well… like I said in my previous post, I moved to Ubuntu. I then promptly screwed my system up, and then I started over and got things working. Well the next step was to load all the standard apps that I use (basically Java stuff). I was easily able to load java, but I was never able to get Eclipse running…. well after many a tries and many a googling, I said screw it…. I remembered having a similar problem with the 64bit version of Eclipse and java on my Centos setup and that I had ended up installing the 32bit version. Of course I first spent many an hours trying to do this same thing, but in the long run, I gave up… now I’m running the 32-bit version of Ubuntu on my AMD 64bit processor… I know it is kind of a waste, but for now I will have to settle. Hopefully now that both the Intel Core 2 Duo and the AMD chips are all now 64bit the OSs will shortly follow… at that point, I’ll give the 64bit version of Ubuntu another try. But for now I’m happy, my system works and the move to Ubuntu seems to be worth it overall.

Moved to Ubuntu

Well after playing with the downloadable live cd from Ubuntu last night, I decided that I would make the move permanent. I’ve been a long time user of Redhat starting back with version 2.0 which I installed on a 386 back in 1996. I gave linux up for many years sticking only with MacOSX via my office computer, but when it came time to buy a home PC I knew that there was no way I was going to load windows. Being that while I love Macs, I refuse to pay the price tag. So I once again looked back to Linux. I first gave BSD a try since it is the back bone of MacOSX, but while I was able to quickly get it running, getting app was a pain especially when it came to java… From there I went to Mandrake but when they merged with Connectiva and ditched the Redhat kernel, I decided to go back to Redhat. Of course this was along the same time that Redhat formed Fedora and I did not wish to go that route or pay for RHEL. Well some at the NWS pointed me at the RHEL clone: ScientificLinux. That worked out well for several months until I got tired of waiting for updates. From there I went to the more popular Centos. Centos was nice and had an extremely similar look and feel to that of the actual RHEL (which I have on several work related machines. This to served me very well, until I finally purchased a LCD monitor (Viewsonic VX2035wm). Being a widescreen monitor, I unfortunately discovered that I was going to be a lot of work to get the resolution right. In steps Ubuntu. I was searching for a solution to my widescreen problem when I ran across several forum entries where people mentioned that they had no problems with widescreens and Ubuntu linux. So I clicked over to Ubuntu.com and started to dig around. Nicely enough, they had a downloadable Live/Install CD. Well naturally I quickly downloaded it for the AMD64 bit processor (then the x386 and then the PPC). I also started to remember a number of article about Google and Ubuntu…. so I went home and boot up the CD. To my great surprise everything worked great. My monitor looked great and all my accessories looked fine. So I started the installer. I must say that installing from a Live Linux CD has its advantages…. instant access to the internet while things load… if you have questions you can google them from the same machine that you are installing Ubuntu on. Anyways… to make this long story short, I’ve got my machine back up and running with Ubuntu and it looks great… of course I promptly killed it by not carefully restoring my files and consequently I over rose something… oh well time to start the process over again.