http://polibyte.com/ 2010-09-08T19:34:54-04:00 FeedCreator 1.7.2-ppt DokuWiki 2007-10-18T03:46:17-04:00 2007-10-18T03:46:17-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/barcamp_atlanta_2007?rev=1192693577&do=diff

I'd be remiss if I didn't share some of my experiences from Barcamp Atlanta. The general approach in most sessions was “here is something interesting, this is how you use it/do it yourself.” A few of the hot topics were Ruby on Rails, Amazon S3 and EC2, and Facebook apps. The biggest crowd pleaser was the OLPC demo. Aside from being an amazing technical accomplishment and hopefully a world-changing product, it's simply cutest computer since Fujitsu released a Hello Kitty laptop.

2009-02-07T11:29:36-04:00 2009-02-07T11:29:36-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/blogging_thesis_progress?rev=1234024176&do=diff

After discussing it with my advisor, I've decided to start blogging about my work on my master's thesis. I'll start things off with an post about my research questions. The Internet, particularly the world wide web, is an increasingly important part of how people seek out political information. According to results from a 2004 Pew/Michigan survey, 53% of Internet users had gotten news about the Iraq war online, 35% of Internet users had gotten news about gay marriage online, and 26% of Intern…

2007-11-24T23:24:07-04:00 2007-11-24T23:24:07-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/buying_a_dell_without_windows?rev=1195964647&do=diff

A recent discussion on the Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts mailing list has highlighted that it's not easy to find the systems that Dell sells without Windows. Here are all the desktop and notebook options of which I'm aware. * Desktops and Laptops (Inspiron) with Ubuntu

2008-09-07T15:37:38-04:00 2008-09-07T15:37:38-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/calendar_of_floss_events_in_ga?rev=1220816258&do=diff

I've started maintaining a calendar of events and volunteer opportunities around GA involving linux and other free software. I'm currently subscribed to the ALE, CHUGALUG, LUG@GT, GA State's Students for Open Source, GA Ubuntu LoCo, Atlanta “Pragmatic” Linux Meetup Group, and Free IT Athens mailing lists. I'm also subscribed to the LCLUE, MGALUG, SAVLUG, ATLOSUG, and OSSAtlanta rss feeds. Please leave a comment if you know of other places I should monitor for events or have an event you want pub…

2008-03-09T19:31:21-04:00 2008-03-09T19:31:21-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/change_filetypes_cached_by_apt-cacher?rev=1205105481&do=diff

I've been learning how to use debian-installer's preseed functionality in order to automate some of the installations we do at Free IT Athens. Among other things, I wanted to set it to use apt-cacher, our caching proxy server for software, and to install some additional packages, including msttcorefonts. Msttcorefonts downloads each font as an exe file, which isn't in apt-cacher's whitelist of filetypes to accept. If you try, you'll receive a 403 error and the message Sorry, not allowed to fetc…

2009-09-01T01:19:09-04:00 2009-09-01T01:19:09-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/dokuwiki_httpclient_fix?rev=1251782349&do=diff

For a while now, I had an annoying error every time I created a new page in DokuWiki. Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in inc/HTTPClient.php on line 427 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at inc/HTTPClient.php:427) in inc/actions.php on line 296

2007-11-25T12:55:15-04:00 2007-11-25T12:55:15-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/edit_file_as_root_from_nautilus?rev=1196013315&do=diff

This is a script for any users of Linux who'd like a convenient way to begin editing a file as the superuser (i.e root) from Nautilus, the GNOME file manager. * Copy and paste the code below into a text editor such as gedit. * Save the text as the file ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/edit_as_root The tilde stands for your home directory. You may need to right click within the save file dialog and check show hidden files before you see .gnome2 * Open a terminal and run the command 'chmod +x ~/…

2009-10-22T15:28:30-04:00 2009-10-22T15:28:30-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/enabling_history_in_shell_scripts?rev=1256239710&do=diff

If you've ever found yourself trying to log the commands ran by your bash scripts (and cursed your failures to quote and escape them properly), then try using bash's built in history functionality instead. Below is in example of how to turn it on within a script.

2007-12-02T19:34:34-04:00 2007-12-02T19:34:34-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/facebook_is_still_tracking_you?rev=1196642074&do=diff

The news is in that Facebook is tweaking how their Beacon system works. Beacon is a tool a website can use to associate your actions on those sites to Facebook. There is a great post covering the technical details at Radiant Core. When you do something that triggers the Beacon (buying a table on overstock.com, for example), the information about what you did is sent to Facebook. Next, a popup appears and asks if you want to publish this information in your Facebook news feed. In the old system, …

2008-05-18T14:10:42-04:00 2008-05-18T14:10:42-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/libx_for_firefox_3?rev=1211134242&do=diff

The LibX Firefox extension for the University of Georgia is now available for Firefox 3. You can install it from here. UGA, libx, library, firefox

2008-02-08T01:04:23-04:00 2008-02-08T01:04:23-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/libx_for_uga?rev=1202450663&do=diff

I created a version of the LibX Firefox extension for the University of Georgia. It provides nice browser integration with the catalog (Voyager), OpenURL resolver (SFX), and proxy (EZ Proxy). You can install it from here. UGA, libx, library, firefox

2010-04-15T18:18:51-04:00 2010-04-15T18:18:51-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/libx_maintenance?rev=1271369931&do=diff

I published an update to the LibX extension for UGA for the first time in nearly a year today. I did some testing to ensure the basic functionality works. Now that I'm not a regular user of Firefox or UGA's library [0], I can't promise that it wont be another year before I think to publish a new version, or that I'll be motivated to solve any problems that pop up when UGA switches off WebVoyage completely in favor of VuFind. Is anyone else interested in taking this extension over? Thanks to the …

2009-07-10T19:55:30-04:00 2009-07-10T19:55:30-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/macworld_rails_presentation_uploaded?rev=1247270130&do=diff

I've uploaded to pdf and latex source from my Macworld presentation about deploying Ruby on Rails here. macworld,, rubyonrails

2008-02-23T18:12:16-04:00 2008-02-23T18:12:16-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/openid_enabled?rev=1203808336&do=diff

I've installed and enabled the OpenID plugin for dokuwiki. Anyone with an OpenID (more people than you might think) should be able to use it to log in. I'm just doing my part for non-evil federated identity management. UPDATE: Due to spam, you must log in with OpenID or email me and request a local account in order to post comments.

2009-02-04T17:22:01-04:00 2009-02-04T17:22:01-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/opensecrets_api?rev=1233786121&do=diff

While playing with OpenSecrets web service, I've run into some puzzling discrepancies between the data it returns and the data listed on the website. I'm interested in the PAC contributions from a given sector to a given candidate during a given cycle.

2010-01-31T19:00:51-04:00 2010-01-31T19:00:51-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/python_mysql_and_unicode?rev=1264982451&do=diff

The top google result for the search terms mysql, python, and unicode is a blog post that recommends using the init_command option to the construct a MySQLdb connection to run the SQL 'SET NAMES utf8'. A better way is to set the charset option to 'utf8'. This way MySQLdb realizes the connection is using utf8 and encodes things properly. For more explanation see MySQLDB's user guide.

2009-01-20T19:39:05-04:00 2009-01-20T19:39:05-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/reddit_s_json_api?rev=1232498345&do=diff

You can find discussions of Reddit's “secret” API on a few blogs. Just as interesting, but not discussed on those blogs, is that Reddit will return any page in JSON format if you append .json to the URL. For example: * New items in the Comics category as JSON * Comments on an item as JSON

2009-09-01T01:17:42-04:00 2009-09-01T01:17:42-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/rss_mod_for_phpbb2?rev=1251782262&do=diff

If anyone is using the following mod to a phpbb installation, /*************************************************************************** * rss.php * ------------------- * begin : Monday, July 7, 2003 * notes : This code is based on the work of the original * developer below. Portions of this code * 'borrowed' from phpbb_fetch_posts, an * …

2007-10-18T03:42:31-04:00 2007-10-18T03:42:31-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/switched_to_dokuwiki?rev=1192693351&do=diff

I've migrated PoliByte from Wordpress and Wikka Wiki to DokuWiki. I'm using several plugins by Esther Brunner, most notably her blog plugin, and Zenwire's theme mmKanso. I'm doing my best to make sure that no links broke in the process. Tags: DokuWiki

2007-10-26T18:10:59-04:00 2007-10-26T18:10:59-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/two_discussions_of_the_internet_and_campaigns?rev=1193436659&do=diff

I heard about the first through IDPI's blog. It's a a national press club discussion with communication directors from the Giuliani, Romney, Biden and Thompson campaigns; video of the event is available here in Windows Media format. The second discussion was hosted by the E-Voter Institute; the panel includes the internet campaign directors for the RNC and DNC. The discussion was broken into segments and uploaded to Google Video; a list of the clips is available here. If you're interested in th…

2008-04-27T23:18:08-04:00 2008-04-27T23:18:08-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/uga_proxy_bookmarklet?rev=1209352688&do=diff

Along with my recent Ubuntu upgrade came the Firefox 3 beta, but LibX has not released a version of their extension that works with Firefox 3 yet. If you're like me, all links lead to JSTOR, and you're really missing the ease with which LibX allowed you to reload a page through your institution's proxy. Luckily, this is as easy as adding a bookmark to firefox with the following as the location. If you're not at UGA, you should replace the text inside the quotation marks with the URL of the proxy…

2007-12-02T14:11:32-04:00 2007-12-02T14:11:32-04:00 http://polibyte.com/blog/virtual_citizenship_symposium?rev=1196622692&do=diff

I dropped in on the Virtual Citizenship | New Technologies Symposium at Wayne State on Friday via Second Life. This was my first time signing on to Second Life since 2003. The linux client crashed hard at first, but it worked well after I disabled all OpenGL extensions. Since the video link was one way and very few people attended virtually, I didn't see any benefit to Second Life over standard streaming video.