Posts by David Oliver
Setting up compass stylesheet authoring framework in Ubuntu 10.10
In case it’s useful to other Ubuntu users, here’s a quick and painless way of getting the compass stylesheet authoring framework version 0.10.6 set up and ready to rock in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1 sudo gem1.9.1 install compass sudo echo “PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.9.1/bin:$HOME/.gem/ruby/1.9.1/bin” > /etc/profile.d/rubygems1.9.1.sh compass version I’m not a Ruby on Rails [...]
Fixing Clementine and other music players crashing in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (gstreamer)
After my new installation of Ubuntu on my new rig, I was annoyingly unable to play music with Clementine. When Clementine was run from the command line, it would exit with “Segmentation fault”. A gdb backtrace showed that it was gstreamer that was crashing, so I found and updated from the PPA for GStreamer developers [...]
SSD in Linux and trim (“discard”)
My new workstation is “finished”; I’ve been using it for client work and all seems well. I meant to post interim updates on its progress along with some photos, but got carried away with the build. No doubt I’ll get some photos on here soon. One minor issue which I resolved (at least for now) [...]
Workstation PC build: 1 – components
A short while ago my workstation computer’s power supply unit went bang, and after taking it to the PC repair shop down the road it transpired that it took down the motherboard with it. I’d been planning to get a new PC for a while anyway, and this event brought the upgrade forward rather abruptly. [...]
Returned from Austria and back at work
If you are a client who I’m currently working with, you’ll know that I was away for a week in Obertauern, Austria. I’m now back at work, and will shortly be catching up with a few people.
January 2011: a busy month
Christmas and New Year were good, and I’m glad I got to spend them with my special someone, her family, and my brother who came to visit us in Germany. I’ve got lots of work on the go which is great, so you’d think I’d now be in the “studio” slaving away over a hot [...]
I’m closing my Amazon account
I hold freedom of speech and the press to be important, and find Amazon’s actions against Wikileaks to be cowardly. Whilst Amazon is entitled to do or not do business with customers as it chooses, I feel that if a business wishes to make profits via its customers it should respect their right to information, [...]
Converting multiple PDFs to plain text in GNU/Linux
Yesterday, I wanted to convert over a hundered PDFs to plain text to allow for easier and quicker copying and pasting during product updates for a client. After a short while searching I found a nice and effective way to go about it, and I’m very pleased with how it handles line breaks and paragraphs.
Google, please don’t let the Wave die out
Update: there is a campaign to save Google wave at http://www.savegooglewave.com/ Google Wave really struck me with its potential when I first saw what it was about. Adding the persistence of email to the real-time nature of instant messaging in an environment open to multiple participants was one of those things that now seems so [...]
Get up and running with @font-face
Here’s a very quick introduction to using the CSS fonts module intended for web designers who have a good knowledge of CSS but haven’t as yet experimented with @font-face rules. Internet Explorer 6 onwards and recent versions of all mainstream browsers support the CSS fonts module.