Google drive/java

Working on using the google drive api, unfortunately Perl is not supported, so I'm going with Java.

Working with Java again, after having been away from it a while makes me realize what I don't like about it.  It isn't so much the language, but the culture of Java projects is that the focus is on the code, rather than on building something useful.  There is little optimization for the common cases, and great concern for the corner cases, that it makes programming in it very tedious.

Anyways,

The oauth, is understandable, but an added complication.

One thing that threw me for a while is the different permissions.  In the provided example it defaults to only programs created by the app, which I missed, and caused me to wonder why I couldn't get a directory listing.

I will have more work to do later, but I got all of the files added for now.  I'll see how useful the spreadsheets are before deciding how much more work to put into it.

virtualbox

so, working on virtualbox

first installing the qt interface
need to add users to vboxusers group, trying to use /etc/security/group.conf
   ... rebooting ...

no luck, for now just set the group password

next up, testing the creation and such

firefox sqlite places search

This is a handy query select strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H %M", (visit_date/1000000), 'unixepoch') AS da, url, title from moz_historyvisits natural join moz_places order by visit_date ASC;

arduino

To get the arduino to work, access to the serial ports has to be given, and some other groups.  They are: usermod -a -G tty USER
dialout
lock
uucp

I also set up a udev rule

#Arduino UNO
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0043", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2341", SYMLINK+="arduino arduino_uno_$attr{serial}"

I need to check to see if there is a better way to handle the group than manually adding them.

parsing xml

a clever website did terrible things to a simple csv file, putting it into xml column major, blech.  So, I'm going to try to fix it.

First step, use tidy to figure out the xml format
   tidy -indent -xml

Next, use XML::Rabbit .... rabbit seems to be giving me some trouble, I'll probably try again later with just XML::LibXML

Got it done with XML::LibXML, there weren't any good examples that I could quickly find on the net, but it wasn't too bad after a little bit of working with it.

freeseer

I used freeseer the other day to create some screencasts and it works well.  Then used HandBrake to transcode them.

backups

Got a 3tb hard drive, ran the smartctl tests and badblocks, and no problems.  Backing up the current 1tb drive, and then will run the smartctl tests just to be sure.

Formatted it as ext4.

Current plan for backups is to create the backups on the internal drives for speed, and then copy to the 1tb and 3tb.  The 1tb will only keep the current semesters' backups.

I need to think some on virtualization backups and automating the database backups.