Digital Adventures of Cyril Pauya

I just finished voting in the Halalan 2010 - the First Automated National Elections in the Philippines.  It was an exciting experience for me as a Filipino, although as a programmer and a techie guy, I do have some apprehensions.
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There are a lot of options for a Mercurial GUI client on Ubuntu but I preferred to use TortoiseHg so that I could use it with Nautilus - Ubuntu’s file manager.

TortoiseHg however is not in the Ubuntu Karmic Koala repositories.  Another challenge is that TortoiseHg 1.0.1 requires Mercurial 1.5 but Ubuntu Karmic only has Mercurial 1.3 on the repositories.  Of course I want the newer versions.

Here are the steps I did to install TortoiseHg, my preferred Mercurial GUI client on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10:
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Here are the steps I did to successfully install Agilo for Scrum (open-source version) in my Trac site at Webfaction.com:
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I have been busy modifying Django’s models for a project to include a field for uploading an image and was testing the model using Django’s Admin interface when I suddenly got this error:

Upload a valid image. The file you uploaded was either not an image or a corrupted image.

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Here are some quick tips when moving your Django site into production.
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I was surfing for news about typhoon Ondoy (Ketsana) and the new typhoon Pepeng (Parma) when I saw this very interesting item at CNN’s Tech News section.  It’s about Google Wave - an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration.  And I must say it is a very interesting and useful product from Google.  Click on the video links at the bottom of this post to see what I mean.

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To use multiple Django versions for development, you will need virtualenv. Virtualenv is a sandbox that allows you to use different versions of Python in your development machine.  It is a tool to create isolated Python environments.

I have been using Django 1.1 beta on my projects.  Just recently, I needed to use Django 1.0 for a new project.  Of course there were major differences from Django 1.0 versus Django 1.1 which could cause headaches.

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If you have been using Ubuntu (or any Unix variant), you should now know that there is a history command which keeps track of the commands you have executed in the shell.  I have been using Ubuntu for a few months and my history command list is now at 500+ commands.

Here are some of the basic uses of the history command:

> history

• this lists all commands you have executed in the shell

> history | more

• same as above but only shows a page of list
• press spacebar to move to the next page
• press the letter q to quit displaying history commands
• the | is a pipeline which means redirect the output of the history command as input to the more command

> history | grep <text>
example:
> history | grep ls
> history | grep rsync

• lists only the shell commands that contains the text after the grep command
• grep basically is a command line text search utility

> man history

• help manual of the history command
• very helpful documentation I must say!

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Ubuntu is a free and open-source operating system based on Debian.  The reason I choose this over the other GNU/Linux variants like Fedora, Mint, openSUSE,Mandriva, Debian, and others, is because of the Ubuntu promise to make it free forever, including the enterprise editions and security updates.

I have been waiting for more than two years for Ubuntu to mature as a replacement to Windows XP.  To qualify, it must satisfy the following features:

1. easily support dual monitors
2. out-of-the-box support for my laptop’s Broadcom B43 wireless adapter
3. support for my laptop’s infrared device

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We got disconnected from our ISP today, NDMC now has no Internet connection.

We have been with DCTech (old ISP) for more than 4 years and since they cannot fulfill our need for an upgrade from a 1.5Mbps to 4Mbps connection we decided it’s time to look for another ISP.  We signed-up with Globe INNOVE last June 2009 but are still waiting to be connected this month.  DCTech was generous enough to allow us a one month extension last August 2009 but did not approve our second request for an extension.

We had 8 public static IP addresses with DCTech and we used all of them to host servers for the following:

• school website
• email server
• applications server
• proxy server
• perimeter firewall
• internet gateway for offices

All major offices of the school are using e-mail and the Internet for research.  With my estimate, it would take around 2 weeks or more before Globe connects us.  Since we will be disconnected this month, I decided to move the three important servers on my Webfaction account so that we will have a minimal downtime.

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