ksymeon

About two years since my second post on installing a Linux distro on VMWare Workstation , I think it's time for a new update. Today, I got hold of an ISO image of Zesty Zapus ( Ubuntu 17.04 64-bit ) on the cover disk of Linux Format (June '17) and went immediately to "work"... What follows is my latest "recipe": Ingredients a downloaded ISO image of your favourite distro a newly created virtual machine with 4-8GB of RAM, a 40-60GB disk and a couple of CPU cores Installation Mount the ISO image to your VM's optical drive and boot it up, then follow the instructions to install your distro selecting your preferences (timezone, keyboard layout, etc.). For accessing your VM via ssh from your host, it helps if your Linux account has the same username as the one on your host OS (Windows, OS X). Once the installation finishes and the VM boots up, log in with your newly created user account and password and admire the new clean desktop. It wo...

It's been now several times that I plugged in my iPhone to download my pictures into Lightroom and the device is not showing up on "My Computer". When launching iTunes the iPhone is there, fully operational, sync-able, etc. I've got the latest iTunes, the latest update on the phone, everything! What's going on? The iPhone simply seems to either operate as an MTP USB Device which makes it visible under "My Computer" or as an Apple Mobile Device which makes it visible in iTunes. Switching between the two modes is simple: iPhone working in iTunes, not visible in "My Computer" Device Manager -> Portable Devices -> right-click on Apple iPhone -> Update Driver Software... -> Browse my computer for driver software ->  Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer -> MTP USB Device -> click Next. iPhone visible in "My Computer", not visible in iTunes Device Manager -> Universal Serial Bus control...

I'm not an avid PC gamer, these days I mostly play puzzle games on my mobile phone during my commute. In terms of PC/console games I play probably one game a year and in the last few years I don't even remember staying true to that rule. This year however, a game that I have been anticipating for a while is already out and it's a marvel called "The Witness"  by Thekla Inc. and the iconic designer of Braid , Jonathan Blow . I have managed to finish the game in just over 21 hours (over a period of around 2 weeks - parents don't get that much consecutive time you see) and I must say that the puzzles are a joy to play. The variety of rules and combinations around a simple path-in-a-maze concept are unbelievable. Jonathan & friends are clever blokes, no question about that. Early views What struck me most though is the ability to explore the island pretty much unconstrained and the sheer beauty of the environment. As an amateur photographer, my eye ...

It's been 2.5 years since I posted an installation guide of installing Ubuntu 12.10 on VMWare Workstation but the release of Linux Mint 17.1 has prompted me to write an updated guide. This is the third of my guides, acting mostly as a memo for a quick install of new distros on VMWare, my first one written in 2009 ( Linux on VMWare with later additions of other posts full of little hints and reminders (e.g. fonts, keymaps)). Ingredients Please note that these instructions work for most distros, although this post focuses on Mint 17.1 A downloaded ISO image of your favourite distro ( Mint , Mint LMDE , Ubuntu , Debian ) A newly created virtual machine with 2-8GB of RAM, a 40-60GB disk and a couple of CPU cores. Installation Mount the ISO image to your VM's optical drive and boot it up, then follow the instructions to install your distro selecting your preferences (timezone, keyboard layout, etc.). For accessing your VM via ssh from your host, it helps if your Lin...

Go back twenty years, let's say 1994. You've got a new computer, you get your stashes of CDR disks and floppies, and start installing software. One after the other, OS first for some of us, a bit of config, then utilities, some word processor, some painting package. A compiler, an editor. You'll run them all at least once, reboot multiple times, etc. Now, go back ten years, 2004. You've got a new laptop. You install OS, create user account, setup language, regional settings. You "plug the internet" in, download software, install, configure and so on. Most of your software still comes from CDs or DVDs maybe, installation, serial numbers, you know the drill. Today, 2014. You've got a new tablet. You boot it up, log in to the WiFi. Go to app store, login. Start downloading your already purchased apps, run, log in, Chrome, GMail, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Flipboard. Every app needs a password, every app needs preferences, notification co...

For a few years now I use Windows, Linux, OS X daily. For years, I've been looking into a language/framework/product that will allow me to build (desktop) applications that can run on all of these OS's. I've looked into QT , PyQT , Java Swing and others. I've looked into the cloud , PaaS , web applications but I couldn't find something that I liked. Of course, HTML5 has gained a lot of momentum and I've been following it from the very first day, so I was "double" happy when I found out about the Chrome Packaged Apps that look and behave like desktop apps, they can however live perfectly in the cloud and are built purely with web technologies. The fact they can run on my Chromebook too, is the cherry on top. Hello World! No time to lose, I jumped into the proverbial Hello World app, which run on my stable Chrome 27.0.1448.0 without a glitch. You have to follow instructions on the previous link to enable the Experimental Extension APIs on chro...

Some of you may be familiar with the bitmap (raster) fonts that I have created a few years back or the Raster Font Editor software that I've written for MS Windows. I've been using Linux quite a lot recently so I decided at some point to convert them to BDF (Binary distribution format) files. Here's a quick guide on how to download them and install them: Download Fonts You can either download from here or type this from a terminal window: wget http://www.cylog.org/files/fonts/cylog_fonts_bdf.zip Unzip and Copy fonts In a terminal window type the following: unzip cylog_fonts_bdf.zip mkdir ~/.fonts mv *.bdf ~/.fonts cd ~/.fonts ls ...and ensure you can see the *.bdf files listed. Convert the BDF files to PCF To do the conversion we use the command line utility bdftocpf , and then we remove the BDF files: bdftopcf -o leros10.pcf leros10.bdf bdftopcf -o leros.pcf leros.bdf bdftopcf -o lini.pcf lini.bdf bdftopcf -o yamahana.pcf yamahana.bdf bdftopcf -o ya...

I always knew of the Mercator Projection and how it makes things (errm land) at high latitudes appear larger than they are, so I decided today to give it a shot and try some comparisons using essential tools like Google Earth , Google Maps , Alt-PrtSc and... Photoshop . Comparisons always need to be made against a known measure (to me) which of course had to be my native Greece, therefore I decided to bring some northern countries to the... Mediterranean Sea . Britain I've been living in ye olde Albion for quite some time now, so first things first; Great Britain to the Med: Mercator Projection: Actual Size: Denmark I've got something with Denmark, maybe because I have a few friends living there, maybe because my wife has a vein of Danish blood. Whatever, Denmark is up North so it's a good test! :-) Mercator Projection: Actual Size: Further North - Iceland Well Iceland is bloody North and its an island too, therefore it should really prove my p...

A while ago I posted a "how-to" doubling as a check list for installing Linux on VMWare and later I've added other posts full of little hints and reminders (e.g. fonts, keymaps). A few years later and that information is still valid, however my workflow has changed a bit, so here's a new post based on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) trying to consolidate everything into one big list. Ingredients A downloaded ISO image of your favourite distro ( Ubuntu , Debian , Mint ) A newly created virtual machine with 1-1.5GB of RAM, a 20-40GB disk and a couple of CPU cores. Installation Mount the ISO image to your VM and boot it up, then follow the instructions to install your distro selecting your preferences (timezone, keyboard layout, etc.). It helps if your Linux account has the same username as the one on your host OS - it helps when accessing your computer via ssh. Once the installation finishes and the VM boots up, log in with your newly created user account ...

I'm on a mission here to write personal reminders for linux installations... My latest collection of monospaced (and not only) fonts can be installed from the command line by typing the following: sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer (Note: do not attempt to run this through the software manager - it has to be executed from the command line as it displays a EULA that needs to be accepted) sudo apt-get install fonts-ubuntu-font-family-console sudo apt-get install fonts-inconsolata sudo apt-get install ttf-ubuntu-font-family sudo apt-get install xfonts-terminus Tahoma Tahoma is not included with the mscorefonts. Here's how to add it. Tahoma: cd ~/Downloads wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/ie6sp1/finrel/6_sp1/W98NT42KMeXP/EN-US/IELPKTH.CAB cabextract -F 'tahoma*ttf' IELPKTH.CAB sudo mv -f tahoma*ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ sudo chmod 644 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/tahoma* sudo fc-cache -v rm -f IELPKTH.CAB ...

For years and years I have been using the US keyboard layout on UK keyboards. Don't ask me why, many reasons. Now, UK keyboards have a key between the left-shift and Z, which has the backslash ("\") and pipe/bar ("|") symbols on it. On Windows selecting the US layout leaves that key as is, so basically this key works as a backslash and pipe key, but on Ubuntu it doesn't - it works as a "<" ">" key :-/ I seem to remember that on one of my Ubuntu installations (or was it a debian) I managed to find a keyboard layout that was US but worked on UK keyboards as I expected it. On my last install I just couldn't find a solution, until of course Googled it and found this page  which has instructions on how to remap a key. Two minutes playing with xev and xmodmap  and voila, all I needed to do was:  xmodmap -e "keycode 94 = backslash bar" Gotta love a quick solution.

What a nice surprise, when my Linux Format arrived today with a copy of Debian 6! My favourite distro's latest incarnation. :-) No time to waste, I've got a VM running with a dual-core CPU and a gig of RAM, and the installation started. A couple of moments later (after following my own instructions to setup ssh etc.) and I have a perfectly functioning Debian install on my desktop. Now, on to my apt-get list of useful things to install: sudo apt-get install make sudo apt-get install gcc Install VMWare tools and then, fire up the Software Centre from System -> Administration -> Software Centre and choose to your heart's content. sudo apt-get install apache2 sudo apt-get install mercurial sudo apt-get install git sudo apt-get install curl sudo apt-get install zip Got Google Chromium browser (synchronised my bookmarks), even installed the Free-Pascal compiler and Lazarus (what a good job they've done). In general Debian 6 did not s...

That's it. I've done it! I have just ordered a bunch of new kit from ebuyer and dabs. I'm building a new workstation. I know, all these macs and sh*t, however, with a mortgage and a kid there's no money for a Mac. So back to basics: Windows and a custom-built PC. In other words get as much umpf as possible for your pennies. My only requirement was memory tbh. I wanted lots. I wanted 32GB of RAM or something like that. Then I had a look at the prices. So I settled for 6! With another 6 at christmas... :-) OS? Well, not much choice, I will start with  64-bit Windows 7, but I might give Ubuntu a partition. Problem is I need to run LightRoom and PhotoShop, so not much room to argue really. My problem now is... the moment I placed the order,  it occured to me that I'm gonna have to literally PULL THE PLUG from my old PC. You see, I'm bloody emotional, I can't let go that easily. All my previous computers (and I've built a few) were built side-by-side wi...

Thanks to my dear friend from NYC and his... accomplice :), I have had an iPad delivered a couple of days ago. I haven't actually managed to do much on it yet, I have spent my minimal free time in the evenings having the iPad lying on my desk connected to my desktop, while I was trying to find any decent specialized iPad apps in the AppStore, which is not as easy as it sounds. Quickly let me get through what everybody else has already said: looks stunning, feels sturdy, screen is amazing and bright, battery life exceptional. That all we all know. Here is my take on the rest - a very quick first impressions review... Ergonomics Sturdy feeling generally and the thick bevel allows you to handle it very easily. On the desktop surface is perfectly usable. It's like a normal notepad instead of a pen you use your fingers. Admittedly you can write faster than you can type on one hand, but for casual use it's perfect. In bed lying on your back it's unusable, too heavy. Lyin...

So Apple releases a new "Terms and Conditions" prohibiting Flash developers from using Adobe's tool for cross-compilation of Flash code to native Objective-C and I wonder: Why such hatred? In my eyes Adobe was one of the very few companies publishing their software for Macs when the Mac had a close-to-zero market-share, it made the Mac user synonymous to the Photoshop or AI user and put simply it supported the Mac during the dark ages of Windomination. Now that the Macs are cool and have a (still comparatively small) market share, why does Apple turn their back to a company that invested millions in making their software work for their platform? When you are a platform maker what you really want is people to write software for you, and people who make tools that create software to make them available to your platform. You are the creator of an ecosystem and you want software to populate it. I understand that running Flash directly on the iPhone, as a Safari plugin let...

It's been a couple of months now, that I have been designing the next version of ToolBox and last night I managed to finally get a beta version out on my web-site. It's been hard work trying to refactor code (clean it up/modernize it along the way), then build new functionality and incorporate a few libraries and technologies I've been playing with these past few years (for example a new image manipulation engine, a new TileGrid component). This beta has the potential of becoming a release soon, I had to draw a line on new features and stop there, otherwise I wouldn't be able to release it soon enough. The new version has many changes underneath, but in terms of user interface it allows you to fully customize a ToolBox. For the first time users can choose to display text below an icon and also create a secondary text comment for each icon and display that on the ToolBox. What is more, the primary icon text that is displayed is now decoupled from the hint, which can be...

I am a bit sentimental I admit it. For years and years and years I've been writing and teaching Pascal, Pascal OOP and Delphi (not since 1999 though). Ever since the early days I had a certain fondness ofn the Pascal enumerated types and the Ord() function. The Ord function returns a cardinal number (integer) for any given ordinal type. Ordinal Types are cardinal numbers like byte, integer, shortint etc., chars (!) and enumerated types. So Ord(0) = 0, and Ord('@') = 64 as 64 is the ASCII code of the '@' char in the order of the ASCII characters. Nice. In the same category as Ord(), are the functions Pred(), Succ() and procedures Inc() and Dec(), which increase and decrease ordinal numbers. Things like Inc ('A', 32) is a valid thing in Pascal, and increases the ordinal value of 'A' by 32, making it an 'a'. Thus making the nicest of capitalisation routines that you can find in any computer language: if (c in ['A'..'Z']) then // ...

I've been always wanting to sit down one day and solve this problem; test the speed of manipulating pixels on a Bitmap using the three options: - the convenient but understandably slow Pixels[], - the "interesting" Scanline property and - the Windows API GetDIBits and SetDIBits. I have been traditionally using Pixels for quick work and the Get/SetDIBits for low-level pixel manipulation such as the filters used in ToolBox . Never really used the Scanline property in anger, I was always thinking, DIBits "had" to be quicker. Little I knew... I have been experimenting with two tools that I've written and never released to the public domain. The first is the BMPCreator which I wrote in order to create 256-level grayscale bitmaps, the other is the IconCreator which uses a grayscale bitmap and applies color maps to it, giving you the ability to create different colored versions of the same icon (like in my database visualization tool VirtualTreeNavigator ). Yesterd...

Wowdi! Didn't expect that. "The Register" reported the news about Opera 10.5 beta and I immediatelly went to download the latest version. Using my own "benchtests", i.e. the little JS/HTML5Canvas expirements I wrote during the last few months ( Mandelbrot and 3D Dissolve JS ), I compiled the following list: Browser Mandelbrot (ms) (*) Dissolve (fps) (**) Chrome 4.0 1248 48.1 Firefox 3.6 1277 51.3 Opera 10.5beta 369 72.3 Safari 4.0 2551 49.2 (*) Lower times (in milliseconds) are better (**) Higher FPS rate is better There you go then, Opera annihilates the competition with a beta! That will make some Google and FF engineers scratch their heads a little bit. Firefox 3.6 came with a lot of improvements closing the gap to Chrome. Opera now comes and from being the slowest browser in JS now becomes the fastest with a difference! More than 3x the speed of Chrome in Mandelbrot? That is absolutely amazing. Very well done guys, you are obviously doing the right thing...

Just been watching the video at http://www.apple.com/ipad/ . I've been grinning, I've been laughing, I've been drooling. This is EXACTLY what I was expecting for 3 years now. Ever since I bought my first-gen iPod touch, I've been thinking about this device with the same interface but just a bigger screen. I have even bothered to get into Photoshop and mock up an ideal iPod touch (screenshot to follow). For 3 years the rumours were everywhere, now this is reality. But two more months of wait? What am I supposed to do now? I think I'll just download the SDK and pretend that I own one using the emulator... Well done Apple, you've got everything right! Even the price!