Chumby One running Pandora internet radio
Posts Tagged ‘Linux’
I got a Chumby
Friday, January 8th, 2010Social Media Without the Browser
Monday, December 21st, 2009
Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, these are all great websites. People use them to reconnect with friends, let people know what they are up to, offer customer discounts, and more. Some people don’t use their computers for anything but these services and others like them. While Google sees this fact and is moving forward with their idea that the browser should be the OS (Chrome OS), applications are popping up everywhere to help you maintain your statuses, and update your systems easier.
With the power of Adobe Air, every desktop can get some simple applications that tie into your different social media accounts. One great one is feedalizr. It can connect to FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr and more. With this one application, you have access to all your favorite social media without waiting for your browser to load, and eating up your RAM with a ton of different tabs.
If you happen to be using Ubuntu Linux, you may be interested in some of the upcoming changes for the upcoming 10.4 release. This next release is supposed to include a new feature called the Me Menu. If you have twitter and Facebook accounts, this new menu is going to allow you to update your statuses and also tie you into the Ubuntu One online storage. Pretty rad.
The line between offline and online is blurring more and more, and it’s interesting to see how this affects software development.
The Beauty of pyQT
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Here at Zoom Creates we (the Dev Team) mostly deal with online applications. We build custom sites, implement CMS solutions, build animations, create databases, and much, much more. One thing that you might not have know is that we also build standard desktop applications. One of my favorite toolkits to use for Gui applications is the QT4 toolkit. Of course, my favorite language to build these apps in is python. Here’s a quick rundown of the latest app that I built in about 30 mins, to help remove one annoyance from my daily routine.
I connect to our in office server via sshfs. I also use this protocol when connecting to my webserver, and it gets a little old doing the same thing over and over again in the console. So, to solve this I built a little app that runs the sshfs command with some paramaters and is much quicker to get me connected to different servers. Here’s how I did it.
First run QTDesigner (the awesome GUI builder that Trolltech, the makers of QT, give away) and draw out your new program’s interface. Then save it. My file is named server.ui. Now, if you run pyuic4 on this file, you can send the output to a file. I did this by running this:
pyuic4 server.ui > server.py
So now I have an automatically generated file called server.py that has a class in it. This class has all the references to my GUI that I created in QTDesigner. Now, lets make a new python file that will import that file (server.py) and extend it so that we can give it some functionality. I called this new file mountStuff.py.
We want to extend server.py because if we ever need to make changes to our GUI, then all our code will be lost when we run pyuic4 on our updated .ui file. Check out the attached .zip file to see how this neat little program works.
3D, Adding a New Level of Animation
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
We here at Zoom Creates have been getting all kinds of interesting work lately. Some of this new work has led us down the path of animating in the third dimension. Naturally, we wanted to take a good look at some of the tools out there that could help us reach our goal.
First, because the dev team here is a mixed Linux/Windows environment, we took a look at the open source Blender project (www.blender.org). This is quite the powerhouse of software at our fingertips, but the UI is daunting to say the least. Kris tried out the 64 bit version on his Windows 7 machine, and ran into some serious road blocks with some of the different export file types. I downloaded version 2.49 from the Debian repositories and it worked without a single problem (nice going Linux). While Kris was struggling to get his environment up and running, I decided that I would follow some tutorials and make something.
I decided that something should be a tree. Trees are good for first time 3D modeling, as they have a lot of layers to them. You’ve got the bark, the leaves, the multiple layers of branches, etc. I made life easy on myself and downloaded and compiled ngPlant. It’s an open source program that helps you create the basic structure of a tree very easily. After building my tree, I imported it into Blender and added my textures. what you see to the left is my finished product. It’s far from perfect, it could use some smoothing, some better lighting and reflections, and could be filled out a bit better, but hey, it’s pretty cool for a few hours worth of work.
Meanwhile, Kris was still having trouble, so he decided that he should check out 3ds Max. He used this software a few version numbers ago, and is working with the trial version now to see if it’s the right tool for the job. We’ll see.
Let us know in the comments what your favorite 3D modeling program is.
Linux and Dual Screens
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
One thing that I love about working at Zoom is that they give us the freedom to use the tools that we require to get the job done. For me, that is Sidux, Kate (the all powerful and awesome KDE text editor/IDE), SSH and the command line. Sure I use other tools (Virtual Box for Adobe CS3, Filezilla FTP client, GiMP, etc…) but one of the things that I really love about my computer is how easy it is to set up my dual screen set up. I don’t use any of the native built in tools to set this up, as I have found them sometimes amazing and sometimes terribly lacking. I pull up a BASH prompt, fire off a command, and get to work. Today I want to talk about the amazing command xrandr.
If you want to get your dual screens set up without much fuss, fire up your BASH prompt and click to read some more!
Zoom Creates Goes to the Derby
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Pinewood Derby, that is. This weekend, defying the crushing heat, three gentlemen Zoomers competed in the very exciting 2009 Adult Pinewood Derby competition. They handcrafted their wee little cars from a regulation block of wood, then sent them flying down the track to vie for championship status. With sexy results!
Greg’s Subaru, shown here in a diorama that depicts his car’s actual neighborhood habitat, won 2nd Overall and 2nd Coolest.
Kris’s eerily lifelike Jeep (complete with tiny Kris inside) won 13th Coolest.
And Kurtis’s Linux Racer won 7th Coolest, an honor he celebrated by making a commemorative T-shirt to wear to work today.
Congratulations, racers! We applaud your creativity, craftsmanship and speed.
