If you really miss me, remember that most of my updates are on my twitter feed: http://twitter.com/tapH20guru

Binary Starcast has been MIA for a few months now and I’ve been feeling the need for more new music on my long commutes. I ran across Indie Launchpad a week or so ago and so far I’m loving it. It’s like they built and new Fresh ‘n Easy down the street for my ears.

I’m loving the new Weepies tracks, btw.

Our home computer has been Ubuntu linux for a few years now. My wife does just fine on it doing all that she does and my daughter has no issues with barbie.com or mylittlepony.com flash games either. The only thing that my wife needs from Windows is an app called Ding! from Southwest Airlines. It’s a little app that tells you about deals from the airline. I had it running in Wine on Edgy and then upgraded to Gusty without error. I’m starting fresh with Hardy on her laptop and wanted to remember how I set it up. After digging around to remind myself here’s how I did it:

Follow these excellent steps from Drew Withers: http://drewwithers.com/2008/03/southwest-ding-via-wine-and-ies4linux.html (Thanks Drew!)

The registration window acted funny and kept refreshing and losing the text field data. Here’s how to fix that:
Quit Ding and let’s create a special startup script to get things working:

#!/bin/bash
export WINEPREFIX="/home/YOUR USERNAME/.ies4linux/ie6"
wine ~/.ies4linux/ie6/drive_c/Program\ Files/Southwest\ Airlines/Ding/Ding.exe


If you use that startup script to call Ding! everything runs great.

Get yer Linux on… download the latest Ubuntu release fresh out today. Get it here. Get it now!

nail is very cool. Think mailx meets SMTP auth w/ SSL.

We are making the jump to Google Apps for your Domain and I needed a way for Nagios to send alerts out our Google Apps account. Here’s how I got nail speaking to my Google Apps Account, but it will work just fine with your plain ol’ GMail account as well:

sudo aptitude install nail ca-certificates

Then add the following to the ~/.mailrc of the user that needs it (it my case nagios)

set smtp-use-starttls
set pop-use-starttls
set smtp-auth=login
set smtp=smtp.gmail.com:587
set pop=pop.gmail.com:996
set from=USER@DOMAIN
set smtp-auth-user=USER@DOMAIN
set smtp-auth-password=PASSWORD


and now for a test to run as that user:

nail -s 'Testing123' bobsyouruncle@aol.com ...


Yeah by now you’ve heard of GAP - Google’s App Engine. It’s all the buzz these days. One thing I’m excited about is this statement:

I’d also like to mention that Python is the just first language that we’re offering with App Engine. We’re working on more, but for now, we’d like to get feedback from you on the system as a whole, to see what you like.

How much do you wanna bet that ruby is next? (though I can see php slipping in there too.)

Mormons for Open Source. Phe. nom. i. nal.

I’ve always thought Zooey Deschanel had a great voice. Who knew she could write songs too? Throw in M. Ward and you’ve got She and Him. The sound is awesome. Worth a listen. Grab a free track here. It’ll be on my last.fm top 10 this week.

Hey - it’s spring. Time to freshen up the old blog. New theme, WP upgrade and all that.

I love discovering new music. Check out Raining and OK. They are even from good old Phoenix, AZ