I went to the Flogging Molly Concert about two weeks ago, and it was pure awesomeness. It was probably the best concert I’ve ever been too. It also helped that I was hanging out with friends I hadn’t seen/hung out with in a very long time. Since then I’ve started the process of buying a house (We have a contract in place! woo!). Which is exciting and worrisome at the same time. Other than that I’ve been enjoying some of the nice spring time weather we’ve been getting lately. I have a few plans on some projects to do, but finding time to code outside of work is difficult these days. On the other hand I no longer have cable and am saving every penny I can so maybe that time will come sooner than later 
Float
March 9th 2009 | Random
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A brand new theme!
February 15th 2009 | Random
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Well I’ve been playing with my own worpress theme for quite a while, and decided tonight to finally quit goofing around and put it up. There are still a couple tweaks I want to make such as tweaking the background image and adding a latest tweet thing(http://identi.ca/keare – if you’re interested, is an identica update called a tweet still?). And I’m sure I’ll come up with one or two other changes. It is entirely likely I’ll switch the color scheme as well (not 100% about how I feel on dark themes). Life’s been good lately, though slightly stressful, we’ve adopted one more dog (total of two now). She’s a mix between an English and American bulldog. Consequently, she is stubborn, full of energy and quite a handful. Though we started obedience training today and surprisingly she acted scared of the other dogs. Still need to find some time to finish/start coding some other projects. Either way I’m sure to post again in a week or two. Music for everyone to checkout: Flogging Molly – Float(seeing them live on the 24th! YES!) and Less than Jake – GNV FLA(full album stream!).
A short update
December 28th 2008 | Random
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Here’s a big surprise :I’ve neglected this blog again! Anyhow here is a quick update of new things since the previous post. I’ve been to and come back from Maui. I was there for a week with my girlfriend Jamie. It was great and I’m wanting to go back for some more snorkeling and paradise. We bought a dog the first week of November, his name is Atlas and he’s a minature Daschund. He’s pretty much the man (and perfect for keeping me warm at night). I’m trying to convince Jamie we need to get him a bulldog friend. We’ll see about that though. Aside from that, Christmas was good for me I got the following games: Fallout 3, Bioshock, LittleBigPlanet, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Wipeout: Pulse, Patapon and Sonic Rivals. I guess I’ll have to start making time for all those games. I wouldn’t normally call myself a big gamer, but some of these games could change all that for me. Other than that nothing new to report. My goals post from last year is still on the front page, it’s a little dissapointing since I didn’t meet most of them (though I did significantly cut back on fast food intake). Ah well motivation to be better this coming year! We’ll see if I can post here again next week – no promises though.
Music you should listen to at least once
July 27th 2008 | Music
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First up, one of my all time favorite bands: Thrice. These guys are simply amazing. All four volumes of the Alchemey Indexes have been in heavy rotation on my music player at work. This isn’t the Thrice I originally started listening too with album The Illusion of Saftety, they’ve gone completely beyond metal or any category you would want to put them into. All I can really say about them is that they love making music, they love exploring music and it is awesome to be able to enjoy the ride with them. You can expect to be giving a full spectrum of their abilities with the Alchemey Indexes, metal, electronic rock, and folk. This music inspires me and gets my mind twisting down all these different stories the songs conjure up.
Next: The Album Leaf – In a Safe Place. This cd is pure relaxation, perfect for doing just about anything. It is hard for me to describe these guys. I want to say that the music doesn’t get in your way and is perfect for working. But if you do actually listen to the music, it’s very good and as I mentioned soothing. The music itself covers acoustic guitar, piano, and some soft electronic effects. The cd is mostly instrumental, but there are a few songs on it that amazingly do not interrupt the flow of the entire album.
Iron & Wine – Dusty told me about this guy a few years ago and I’ve really only gotten into him recently. This is a very mellow completely acoustic guitar solo act. Definitely a nice twist(from my normal music). The lyrics to some of the songs are amazing.
Muse – All I can say is if you have not listened to the Blackholes & Revalations album you are truly missing out. This is a great album and I hope there is more of this music on the way. This is another band not content with sticking to one style of music, and even on this album they don’t just stick with driving techno rock music.
Finally, I want to talk about Revolution Void, I haven’t listened to this music that much but what I’ve heard I have enjoyed. It can be described as electronic-jazz but I think it is better than the music I think of when I here those two words together. Anyhow he releases his music under the CC so you can download it for free, and if you enjoy it you can give something back to him. Something worth looking into if you’re looking for something different. So far it sits in the work music category, not annoying enough for me to skip it but not quite good enough for me to want to listen to in my car or at home, but that could change as I listen to it more.
It amazes me as I listen to all this new music I can always go back to stuff I’ve listened to for years and get right back into it. It’s not the same as when I first heard it, but it is still great, like having old friends that were with you through the tough times. Ghoti Hook, Five Iron Frenzy, Alkaline Trio, and many others will still be in my playlist for years to come.
Compiling packages in Ubuntu
May 11th 2008 | Ubuntu
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Brad was asking me the other night to try and compile wormux (yes we both loved Worms Armageddon) because he was having some issues with it. Now I guess I’ve been using Ubuntu for a while but I have yet to actually do any development on it, and it has mostly been just to keep my server up and running. In Gentoo, if you installed a package you’re pretty much promised to have all the development files needed to compile the package again later. Ubuntu doesn’t even come with a compiler intially! No problem though, all the things you could need for compiling c/c++ programs can be easily installed with:
sudo apt-get install build-essentials
That little command will get you set up with autoconf, make, gcc a couple of libraries and a few other things you’ll be needing. However it’s not enough to actually compile wormux. We need more libraries, specifically wormux lists, libsdl (and several other libs that extend sdl), libxml and libcurl. Hrm, cool enough, Ubuntu has libsdl-dev, libxml-dev, and libcurl4-openssl-dev (somehow I figured out that was the package I needed as wormux lists libcurl3-dev). You can go about installing each dev package as you need ie:
sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
But there is a much easier way. If the package you want to compile has a source package you can do this:
sudo apt-get build-dep wormux
And boom, there you go. Use ./configure followed by make and you should have a fresh binary to run through your cpu. Though once I was finished with this I ran into some issues and a couple questions. For example look at the output from initally running the above build-dep command:
The following NEW packages will be installed: cdbs comerr-dev debhelper fdupes html2text intltool intltool-debian libcurl4-gnutls-dev libfreetype6-dev libgcrypt11-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglib2.0-dev libglibmm-2.4-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libglu1-xorg-dev libgnutls-dev libgnutlsxx13 libgpg-error-dev libidn11-dev libjpeg62-dev libkadm55 libkrb5-dev libldap2-dev liblzo2-dev libogg-dev libopencdk10-dev libpng12-dev libpthread-stubs0 libpthread-stubs0-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsdl1.2-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libsmpeg-dev libsmpeg0 libtasn1-3-dev libtiff4-dev libtiffxx0c2 libvorbis-dev libx11-dev libxau-dev libxcb-xlib0-dev libxcb1-dev libxdmcp-dev libxml++2.6-dev libxml2-dev mesa-common-dev patchutils po-debconf x11proto-core-dev x11proto-input-dev x11proto-kb-dev xtrans-dev zlib1g-dev 0 upgraded, 57 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 4231kB/15.3MB of archives. After this operation, 56.5MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
A lot of these development libraries are completely unneeded for compiling wormux and while initially conveinent using build-deps does not give you an easy method for removal. There is no “apt-get remove build-dep package-name.” Which most of the time that’s not a problem, when people decide to compile software they usually have plans to work on it for a while. However, in my case (just installing the deps to help a buddy out with some compile issues) it would be nice to have a way to remove these packages.
So to end this tale, the best way to install development packages if you’re feeling lazy is to use apt-get to install (and later remove) the dev packages individually (as done in the first example). You would then use apt-get build-dep for when you’re actually doing more serious work (presumably managing packages/releases for Ubuntu/Debian). The ideal solution is to install each package manually, cluttering your system the least amount and giving you full control. But as I’ve been told while looking into this, there’s no reason to sweat the small stuff, so I’ll probably stick with installing dev packages individually and removing them when I get in the mood for cleaning my system later.