Category: Uncategorized

Fixing NAT for Virtual Box on Ubuntu

For some reason, NAT quit working for me in Virtual Box.  Everything works fine, but the machines won’t connect to the Internet unless I change them to bind to a particular adapter.  The problem is that I use different adapters based on my location.  At the office, I have a docking station and the network goes through the USB connector.  At home, I use wireless.  So, when I bind, I have to remember to change the adapter for it to work.  If I use NAT, it doesn’t matter.

So, here’s how I found I could fix NAT to work again.

Read More

Serverless Download

I have a little time-tracking tool that I have been using to track my billable time.  The program stores everything in the local storage within the browser.  The challenge comes when I want to export or backup the information stored in the browser.  I don’t want to force the user to send the data to my website just so it can turn around and download it back to the user’s hard drive.

Here’s the solution that I came up with:

Read More

Building an Eclipse Plug-in Project Wizard

I found this really great article at Hidden Clause called Writing an Eclipse Plug-in (Part 2): Creating a custom project in Eclipse – Adding to the New Project Wizard.  My only problem with it is that I am using a newer version of Eclipse, and I really needed screenshots to understand what it was talking about.  So, here’s my experience at walking through that tutorial…

Read More

What’s in a Unified Name?

I ran across this article …

Engadget: Project Unity stuffs 20 classic consoles into one: if you can’t play it, it’s probably too new (video)

… and it made me wonder how many projects we have named Unity!

Canonical’s Unity

This Unity is the (relatively) new user interface for Ubuntu Linux.  You can read more about it here:

For me, the biggest difference is the new menu.  Instead of a traditional “start”-style menu, Unity introduces this new dash:

One of the things that I need to master as a blogger talking about the Unity interface is the lingo.  Here’s a little article that shows what the different parts are called:

Ask Ubuntu: What’s the right terminology for Unity’s UI elements?

Just FYI, I discovered some nice information about Unity and some of the alternatives:

Unity Gaming Engine

I have a friend and colleague that did some work with the Unity Gaming Engine.  Since it is a 3D engine, I get it confused easily with the “Unity 3D” interface, but it’s completely different.

Just by looking at their website, you can see the quality of the graphics.  I haven’t had a chance to work with it, but it looks very nice.

.Net Unity

While looking around for other things called Unity, I came across this .Net project.  I am not sure I have the bandwidth to try to understand it, but it’s yet another unrelated Unity project.

Codeplex: patterns & practices – Unity

Unity Linux Distribution

I am not sure this distribution is still active.  When I first searched this out, it was there, but now, the site doesn’t respond.  The Wikipedia article describes it a little.  A distribution with that name would be very confusing.

Ubuntu 12.10 and Discrete Video Card

One of the main driver things that I have to install is the video card.  My laptop has a discrete video card.  Without installing the driver, the graphics seem to work pretty well, but with the driver, I get a very noticeable improvement in power consumption.  After installing the driver, the battery lasts significantly longer.  Also, glxspheres does a nice job of showing the graphics performance difference with and without the acceleration.

Read More