Sean McNamara

Cheat sheets are handy, you ever get stuck you just look up at the wall where you have your cheat sheet right there providing you the answers you need! Moving to Ubuntu is a big step for alot of people, and cheat sheets can make that so much easier! So in regards to that, here are three ubuntu cheat sheets to make your life handier!

Download em, Print em and put em somewhere creative!

Back to a post I did last year I went and found who was hosting Irish blogs for 2009. As you can see there is your piechart and heres the stats:
BLACKNIGHT – 46 Irish Blogs Hosted
GOOGLE – 30 Irish Blogs Hosted
HOSTING365 – 11 Irish Blogs Hosted
WORDPRESS - 10 Irish Blogs Hosted
GODADDY – 5 Irish Blogs Hosted
DIGIWEB – 4 Irish Blogs Hosted
TYPEPAD – 3 Irish Blogs Hosted
THEPLANET – 3 Irish Blogs Hosted
SLICEHOST – 3 Irish Blogs Hosted
COGNOTENT – 2 Irish Blogs Hosted
WEBHOST IRELAND – 2 Irish Blogs Hosted
BLUEHOST – 2 Irish Blogs Hosted
SERVAGE – 2 Irish Blogs Hosted

So it hasn’t really hit me yet, only got the letter this afternoon and I still can’t believe it but I’ve been accepted to Waterford Institute for Technology’s course “Applied Computing“. This a very good day!

So heres the subjects for Semester 1:

Cannot wait for Induction on Monday!

So as any of you users of Eircom already know, if you now try to go to thePirateBay.org you will see this page:

So what are your options now? Well you can get around this little block Eircom have in place by using a proxy; such as HideMyAss.com as some commenters are familar with and there are many others on Proxy.org . You could also just use one of the many other [not yet] blocked torrent sites, Torrentfreak have a great list of them here.

Seatbelts on everyone. Internet Censorship has begun!

Recently I’ve been working on a friend of mine Roger’s game. Tonight I was coding the profile pages, one of the more easier and mundane tasks. I still find it fun to do though! So said with my acomplisments so far I’d give a little sneak peak into the next generation of text-based games! To any of you Mafiamatrix or Injustice players, Red Republic is going to blow you away when it comes out! A whole new type of gangster role playing!

The game is going to be ready for an Alpha release soon enough, I’ll be sure to keep you updated on its status here on the blog and in the meantime if your interested register over at red-republic.com . As you can see the registration website is still using the old design!

Moving on to Class II after a long break! We will today cover PHP’s If Else Statements.

Here is one in action:

Simple enough? To start with as you can see you first write the statement name, in this case “if”. Then you enclose your condition in brackets, [A condition is essentially a question you ask PHP.] then you add an opening “curly bracket”. The opening curly bracket basically defines the start of the code to execute of the condition of the statement evaluates to true. In this case we are wanting PHP to output the text “condition is true” if the condition is true. Then finally we have a closing curly bracket.
In the above example the entire condition has simply been set to the variable $condition. Therefore what we are asking PHP is does the variable $condition exist, and if it does, does it have a value that is not NULL. [Null = Nothing, zero, zilch] In this case we didn’t actually define the variable $condition therefore the statement will evaluate to false and the code within the statement wont be executed. Therefore the above will output nothing at all. However the following code:

Would output “Condition is True”.

Now if statements are pretty useless on their own! What you really want is if / else statements, which we will look at here!

Basically here the variable condition is 10. PHP Checks if it is 5. As we all know 10 is not 5, so PHP does nothing. However in this statement:

We have an if statement, an if else statement and an else statement.
Basically the code explains it, but the condition is 10. If the condition is 5, PHP will output that it is 5. Otherwise if the condition is less than 5. PHP will output that it is less than five. Lastly, if nothing matches in the if or else if statements PHP will output its else. Saying Condition is 10.

A last sample before we head off.

Here you can see that the condition is actually a word. PHP checks it just like it would a number and outputs all the same. Here PHP would output “Condition is True”.

And that’s it for today! Next week we have “arrays” so until then practise!

Some people need to use a recruitment agency when they find themselves out of work and with us being in the middle of a recession there must be a lot of people down in these agencies now looking for jobs. However, this has gone to certain agencies head. Specifically, in my experience Global Professional Consultants.

I was speaking today to Caroline Herlihy (Global Professional Consultants) on behalf of my Father. She had already rang the previous day and had left a message with my Mother regarding my Fathers CV which he had sent in. Less than 24 hours later we received another call from Caroline on his mobile. He had left the mobile behind him when he was out, I informed Caroline of this and was met with impatience and anger. She rudely refused to leave another message, told me harshly “It was a Recession and this was disgraceful behavior” and then hung up. Less then a few minutes later she rang me back and angrily informed me not to bother letting my father know she had called as she wasn’t going to be helping him. She then hung up again before I could even get a word in.

So Caroline, how do you think this reflects on your company? I think you’ve allowed this Recession to get to your head. You cannot treat potential clients like this over the phone and I found your behavior disgraceful.

So here Caroline, this ones for you

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With all the recent activity in Ireland with the MPAA you can’t be too safe anymore, you no longer know if someone from the MPAA is lurking in your computer watching everything you download and just waiting for the perfect time to send you that court summons. Program’s can be installed to prevent people like this getting access to your computer, on Windows you have PeerGuardian, for Linux you have MoBlock. We can’t really tell how effective these peer blocking tools are but in this day and age it’s better to have some security rather than no security!

I’m going to just focus a little more on the power of MoBlock though, which is rumoured to soon be the offical PeerGuardian for windows. Installation is a breeze if your using Ubuntu Jaunty, for other .deb users read here.
First open up a terminal and edit your sources.list you can do this by typing the following:

This opens “kate” for you using admin privilages. Add the following to the bottom of the file.

You will also have to enable the universe module, this should already be enabled just look for:

Next you’ll want to add the gpkg key of the program. To make it trusted, do this by typing the following into a terminal

Then it’s a walk in the park:

And finally:

After it’s installed you will be guided through configuring moblock! Good luck!

Amarok is an open source music player with a great intuitive user-interface that breathes new life into your music collection. Play lists are easily created through drag and drop – and the sound can be adjusted to suit you listening environment using the built-in 10 band equalizer. Amarok also lets you listen to internet radio (mp3 streaming) including music from last.fm.
Other features include automatic cover and lyrics download, dynamic playlists, visualizations and podcasting. An least but not last – Amarok will also synchronize your music to your iPod. For the more technical users a scripting interface allows you to extend the functionality of Amarok.

Amarok, definately the best media player I’ve used on Linux! Check it out!

People say using linux is complicated. That just isn’t true anymore. Back when I first started using Ubuntu there was not much support for using the Eyetoy as a webcam. Now however using the eyetoy as a webcam is a walk in the park! Just open up a terminal window and copy the following into it:

And Presto your webcam is working!