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Showing posts from June, 2009

Using Linux

I’ve used linux/unix quite a bit over the years. Probably my first experience with Linux was when I bought a magazine in the 90’s that had Mandrake linux on CD. Since then I’ve used distributions from Slackware to Ubuntu, but never really had a desire to do much with the OS once I had it running, so it just usually sat on my harddrive. I have recently been reminded why I was never interested in using *nix exclusively. Don’t get me wrong here, I think the concept of free open-source software operating systems is great. (Edit 09/2010: I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and have had generally a good experience with it for a few months as my primary desktop. I’m going to keep using it…) Let me go over a scenario to explain my thoughts: Goal: Setup Debian Linux so that I can test my software. I specifically want to use a VMWARE appliance so that I don’t have to mess around with my current OS. (Edit: I’ve since switched over to Sun’s VirtualBox software, which is much better than t...

Site Redesign

I was due for a site software update, so I decided to modify the site as a whole. My main goal was simplification and to improve on usability. As I went through the visual-template code, I also attempted to improve execution speed by minimizing include files and removing unnecessary features. Minimize the website banner to remove wasted space (logo redesign as well). Remove unpopular items from the site such as the forums. Reorder the site tags, recent postings, and other navigation links to improve on ease of use. Lessen the use of colors on the site. Clean up the footer area. I’ve noticed that the site seems to load faster in general. I suspect something like that XML parser for the forum was decreasing overall speed quite a bit.

ChatGPT is a new, and faster, way to do programming!

Currently ChatGPT is in a free “initial research preview” . One of its well known use cases at this point is generating software code. I’ve also just used it to write most of this article… Well, actually a future article about cleaning up SRT subtitle files of their metadata faster than I have been by hand with Notepad++ and its replace functionality. Update: I recorded a screencast of writing the SRT subtitle cleaner application loading and processing portion. I relied heavily on ChatGPT for code. It was a fun process! https://youtu.be/TkEW39OloUA ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a powerful language model that can assist developers in a variety of tasks, including natural language processing and text generation. One such task that ChatGPT can help with is creating an SRT cleaner program. SRT, or SubRip Subtitle, files are commonly used to add subtitles to video files. However, these files can become cluttered with unnecessary information, such as timing lines or blank spaces. To clean...

Blogger Notable theme pop-up header issue fix (thanks to Gemini Pro)

I've made a few half hearted attempts over the years to to fix Blogger's Notable theme's rendering of the pop-up header that shows up when you scroll down the page a decent amount and then pull back to reveal that secondary header. On Chrome mobile I noticed a gray box that forms next to the magnifying glass icon. I never looked in detail on Chrome desktop, but it had an issue as well which I'll detail below. If you are looking for a solution and don't want all of the extra talk about how I was able to find it, here it is: .centered-top-container .sticky .main_header_elements { overflow : hidden !important ; } I decided to try using Gemini Pro 2.5 to see if it was capable of finding the issue and giving me a fix. Turns out that it was able, but it took a bit of collaboration back and forth to find the actual problem. Here is a modified article I asked it to give me based on our debugging chat (it was very colorful in the article which I scaled back a lot, ...

Theme error in 2010s Android App after AppCompat Migration

I plan on releasing a lot of my old work as GPL open source, but most of it has aged to the point that it no longer functions, or if it does work it’s running in compatibility mode. Basically it’s no longer best practices. Not a good way to start off any new public GPL projects, in my opinion. The current project I’m working on is an Android app that calculates star trails meant to help photographers get or avoid that in their night time photos. For now I’m going to skip some of the import process because I didn’t document it exactly. It’s been mostly trial and error as I poke around Android Studio post import. The Android Studio import process… Removing Admob Google Play code before the project would run at all. After removing dependencies, it kind of worked, but when running it in the emulator it shows a pop-up message saying that the app was developed for an old version of Android. Going through the process of updating code to match current best practices… I had the IDE convert the ...