I heart the ASUS UL30A-A2

First, some background Confession time. I used to be a die hard Apple fan. I remember second grade when the Apple IIe and I first made eye contact. I’m pretty sure I saw the computer smile at me. I was in love. Sure, over the years I occasionally flirted with PCs running Microsoft operating systems …

64-bit Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar add-ons for Linux

For some reason, finding the Mozilla Thunderbird calendar add-ons that are compatible with 64-bit Linux were not as easy to find as I thought they would be. It took me several Google searches to finally turn up this link: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/1.0b2/contrib/linux-x86_64/ When I went to either the Lightning install page or the Provider for Google Calendar …

Kubuntu 9.04 WiFi Problem Solved

I just upgraded to the latest beta version of Kubuntu 9.04 and after a reboot found that my wireless no longer worked. I believe this is because Kubuntu no longer uses the KNetworkManager app to configure wifi connections. If you’re having a similar issue try these steps: Right-click on the Task Manager bar and select …

How to Schedule a Ruby on Rails Rake Task Via Cron

If you ever want to run a Rails Rake task on a schedule via cron, here is the entry you need to make in crontab: */5 * * * * cd /var/www/apps/rails_app/ && /usr/local/bin/rake RAILS_ENV=production rake_task:goes_here The above snippet will run the given Rails Rake task using the production environment every 5 minutes. Note that …

VirtualBox 1.4 is great (plus a fix for Vista guest networking)

I was sceptical that VirtualBox, an open source desktop virtualization software package, could be a viable alternative to VMWare and Parallels. I’m happy to report that my early experiences with it have been fantastic. The biggest issue I had was with my Microsoft Vista Home Premium guest OS (i.e. an OS running inside of VirtualBox) …