Enter Dropbox: a service for synchronizing files between computers. It works great in Gnome (Windows and Mac OSX as well).

I use Dropbox for synchronizing my Tomboy notes by telling Tomboy to synchronize to a Local Folder: ~/Dropbox/Tomboy

My one gripe is that you have to go into a note to synchronize. Someone has filed a bug and submitted a patch, so hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Here’s the full list that I’m too lazy to link individually (click above instead):

0-262-53170-4 - $16 - Evolution and Human Behavior
0-534-95216-X - $6.35 - Data Structures
0-321-26853-9 - $14 - Succeeding with Open Source
0-7382-0142-1 - $6  - Emergence
0-596-00792-2 - $8  - Mono A Developer's Notebook
1-861008-07-4 - $9  - Professional PHP Web Services
0-90571261-7  - $8  - Foundation Trilogy Stars Like Dust Naked
0-446-53268-1 - $6  - America (the book)
0-943575-32-X - $16 - Matthew Henry's Commentary (unabridged)
0-8499-1815-4 - $5  - And the Angels Were Silent
0-7637-2339-8 - $20 - Computing with C#

I also have the following books that I’m ready to get rid of, but they’re not worth enough to bother selling on Amazon. Contact me if you’d like one of them:

The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose (1989 Paperback)
0-596-00559-8 - Wireless Hacks
0-451-21166-9 - The Procrastinator's Guide to the Job Hunt
0-88730-866-X - The Dilbert Future
0-43936213-X  - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
0-13-088262-3 - Business Data Communications and Networking (list price on Amazon is a hilarious $115)

I spent half an hour tonight finding a AAA battery to resurrect my ancient 512 MB SanDisk SDMX1 MP3 player, so I could listen to LugRadio while washing dishes.

I’ve never listened before, but after seeing Jono Bacon listed as the #1 Linux blog I decided to give it a chance. There was a great interview with one of my geek heroes Miguel de Icaza. He always seems to be surrounded by controversy even though his decisions are very pragmatic and always end up being exceedingly beneficial to the open source community.

I actually didn’t listen to the whole episode (stopped on the bit about the streaming media server). This American Life remains the only non-musical audio production thats able to keep my attention for a full hour.

LugRadio definitely isn’t geared soley for the hardcore open source geek. Casual open source users should feel right at home as well.

There’s plenty of swearing, so you may not want to listen to it at work without headphones.

Now it seems the project has achieved an important milestone: Hello World. Check out the screenshot and download a virtual machine image.

Update:  I downloaded and ran Revision 86 of disk.img in QEMU.  Below are my screenshots…

Go download it using BitTorrent to be cool.

Tip #1:  You do not have to download all of the CDs, just get one and Debian’s installer will download the rest.)

I’m a happy and loyal Debian user and strongly encourage any Linux power users to try out Etch. Ubuntu is still my recommendation for users who want things to “Just Work.” However, I highly recommend Debian for any kind of server (file, print, application, database, web, e-mail).

Tip #2: Check out Debian Multimedia for all of your proprietary codec needs!

Mini-Review

I’ve been using Etch (and Sid) for a while now, so its tough to do a real review from a “normal” end user’s perspective.

Some highlights:

• Developer’s should be happy as PHP, Python, Mono, MySQL, and PostgreSQL are all fairly up-to-date and extremely easy to install.
• Gnome is stable and speedy.
• The graphical installer brings Debian out of the 1990s and offers tons of features.
• As usual, Debian’s package repository is huge. Forget vendor-supplied RPMs or custom installers, if its not in Debian’s repository (or Debian Multimedia), you probably don’t need it.

Some downsides:

• Relatively ancient version of the standard C library (2.3.6) means poor compatibility with 3rd party binaries (which Debian has always hated anyway).
• Gnome is 2 stable versions behind in Debian (2.14 vs. 2.18). This is very frustrating as Gnome constantly produces nice incremental improvements.
• Debian just isn’t as easy to use by default as Ubuntu. Debian needs to install and integrate some of the more cutting edge desktop apps like Beagle, Tomboy, Deskbar, and Ubuntu’s nicer package management interfaces.
• Secure APT is a great feature, but the error messages it can produce are going to scare the pants off of new users. More effort needs to be made to integrate all of the various places user’s encounter public key crypto. Right now its very schizophrenic and confusing: GPG errors are too common, and command line magic that even confuses me is necessary to add new repositories.
• Not related to the release, Debian’s support system is a confusing jumble of web interfaces, mailing lists, IRC channels, and an excellent wiki (that I rarely remember to use). Hopefully this is something a new Debian DPL will address.

However, every time I create one I find myself writing a lot of the same code with minor variations:

• OnStart: start a worker thread, make it sure it didn’t die, exit
• OnStop: try to stop the worker thread nicely, wait, abort it, exit

Depending on how “nice” you want to be to your worker thread, you can come up with some pretty crazy code to deal with your worker thread (volatile class variables, wait loops, etc.).

I’ve created a basic template for new .Net Services:

ServiceTemplate (2007-02-15)

It was inspired by a service I wrote to read a firewall log file into a database:

Lumberjack (2007-02-15)

The template doesn’t contain any complex worker thread stopping code. Lumberjack uses a mess of methods to try and nicely stop the worker. I’m not sure what Lumberjack does is really any more useful than just using Abort(), but I didn’t want to leave a database connection open.

Both zips contain MonoDevelop solution files, although Main.cs is the only important file in both of them.

The other highlight of both the template and Lumberjack is the SmartLog() method which logs to syslog in Linux and the Event Log in Windows. Although you probably have to comment out the syslog reference to build the source in Windows.

I’m sure I’ll update and keep using this code in the future… I need to find some way to manage my mini-projects and code snippets… any ideas?