Category: opensource

Linux Desktop Rebuild Checklist 2 – Web Dev Tools

(This is pretty old now…)

Following Linux Desktop Rebuild Checklist 1

Sublime Text

I’m a Sublime Text convert. Official docs are sparse, but there are great unofficial (community) docs for Sublime Text.

It’s quite easy to install on Ubuntu/Kubuntu via webupd8.

# now for Sublime Text 3
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sublime-text-installer

# old 2 stuff...
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/sublime-text-2
sudo apt-get install sublime-text



LiveReload


Change a file in your project and LiveReload automatically refreshes the browser via an extension (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Mobile Safari, and Opera with a config change).  Check out “LiveReload” in the Chrome Web Store.  Best out-of-the-box support for the filesystem piece is on Mac (and $$), but the Ruby project Guard and its various plugins allow for even more functionality for no charge (except the effort to figure it out).


On Linux, it’s quite simple, even for someone (like me) who knows very little about Ruby.


Install RVM and Ruby.


$ curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby
$ source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
$ rvm use



Install Guard and Guard-livereload


$ gem install guard
$ gem install guard-livereload



Create a sample Guardfile (do this in your project dir).


$ guard init livereload



Then, edit the file for the filenames/patterns to watch. Here’s my simplest Guardfile.


guard 'livereload' do
  watch(%r{.+\.(css|js|html)$})
end



Finally, run guard from your project dir.


$ guard
19:16:14 - INFO - Guard uses NotifySend to send notifications.
19:16:14 - INFO - Guard uses TerminalTitle to send notifications.
19:16:14 - INFO - LiveReload 1.6 is waiting for a browser to connect.
19:16:14 - INFO - Guard is now watching at '/home/mghicks/...'



I haven’t tried Ruby on Windows, but there is a tutorial for using RVM with Cygwin. Git for Windows also has the option to work with Cygwin (selected during installation). I’ve tried Git on Windows with the Git shell, but not with the Cygwin option.


JSHint and JSONLint via NodeJS


Never sweat a missing comma or semi-colon again!  JSHint and JSONLint are the two biggest time-savers I’ve added to my toolset.  Thanks to the NodeJS community, NPM, and NVM, it’s trivial to install and use them.


Install NVM and the latest Node.


curl https://raw.github.com/creationix/nvm/master/install.sh | sh
echo "\n. ~/.nvm/nvm.sh" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
nvm ls-remote
nvm install 0.x.x (use version from ls-remote)



Install JSHint and JSONLint.


npm install -g jshint jsonlint



Configuring Sublime Text next…

Monitors won’t sleep (power management) if synergy is running

Similar question to Monitor won’t enter power save mode, however I only experience the problem under synergy. Screensaver settings work, but the monitors never go to sleep. When synergy is not running, monitors go to sleep at the interval set in Power Mgmt Preferences. I’m running synergy under my user account. Dell Desktop, Ubuntu 11.04, standard install video drivers (installing the proprietary drivers causes many errors.)

Turns out, this behavior is caused by screenSaverSync=true and the fix is screenSaverSync=false. Pic shows the windows GUI placement.

See also,

I love the classic dodge in the bug report:

Closing this bug report since it is more than 2 years old. If this is still a valid bug, please request that it be reopened on the mailing list.

Modeling Theater Sets with POV-Ray (Part 2)

In part one we saw how to setup a basic scene with POV-Ray and render it to an image. We also declared a bunch of standard size scenery flats for use in modeling our set. Oh, and I warned there would be math.

To model our set in POV-Ray, we’ll do basically the same thing we do when building the set on-stage… we’ll take our standard flats, move and spin them around, then fix them in place. Continue reading “Modeling Theater Sets with POV-Ray (Part 2)” →

Modeling Theater Sets with POV-Ray

I got a lot of compliments about the computer model I built for Harvey’s set and a few people asked me how I did it. My way is a bit computer geek intense, so I don’t recommend you do it my way unless you’re a math graphing geek like me. If you’re used to creating maps for games like Unreal, you should check out other CAD and 3d modeling tools, like Blender… But anyway, here’s how I did it.
Continue reading “Modeling Theater Sets with POV-Ray” →