LinuxLefty's personal blog - Website

We're Moving

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:43:45 -0600

As Laura and I will be married on April 17th, 2007, we are shutting down our blogs and combining them in a new website: http://naud.us . Quite a cleaver name if I say so myself

You can mosey over and check out Peter Naudus and Laura Naudus' Personal Website or if you still want to read a blog you can check out the Blog for Peter Naudus and Laura Naudus.

Get Email Updates!!

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:10:49 -0600

My blog already has an RSS feed so that if you have a EXTLINK:@http://www.feedreader.com/|downloaded RSS reader@ or an EXTLINK:@http://www.google.com/reader/view/|online RSS reader@ you can subscribe to my blog's feed.

However, if you prefer to get email updates of my blog, you can use EXTLINK:@http://www.feedmyinbox.com|Feed My Inbox@ which will send you an email every time I post a new entry on my blog. To sign up, simply use the form below:

Blog Upgraded!

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:57:44 -0600

EXTLINK:@http://www.s9y.org| Serendipity@ came out with several new versions since I last upgraded. I have some down time so I went ahead and upgraded to the latest version I went from version 1.3 to 1.4.1. Yay!

It went fairly smoothly. I had to reinstall some plugins and put back in some of my custom hacks. I keep those all in external files so it was fairly simple. Let me know if anything is wonky.

Plinky!

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:12:37 -0600

The other day I found out about EXTLINK:@http://www.plinky.com/|Plinky@, a service that sends you a daily writing prompt. It can also link into various different social networks. However, I just use it for its EXTLINK:@http://www.plinky.com/prompts|writing prompts@. Hopefully this will get me to practice / improve my writing and I can blog more! I created a new "musings" category and I'll be putting all my writing from Plinky in there

EDIT:

I also found the EXTLINK:@http://oneminutewriter.blogspot.com/|One Minute Writer@. I'll be using both of these. I can take one minute every day to improve my writing

Pick Your Favorite Smiley!

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:40:56 -0600

I recently found a bunch of great smileys online. I only had one problem ... I couldn't decide which one I liked the best.

最近我看过了很多高兴脸的胶片. 我想用在我的标志的里面.可是我不可以决定那个是最好.

So I used them all

所以我把它们多用了.

I need your help deciding which logo is the best. There are currently 16 different LinuxLefty logos, each one with a different smiley. Head over to PAGELINK:@vote.php|the voting page@ and cast your vote! Your votes will dictate what logo is loaded. My templating system randomly picks a logo weighting them according to their popularity. So more popular logos are shown more often.

我想你帮助我.清高所我那个标志是最好.情去PAGELINK:@vote.php|这儿@然后点击在最好的上面.

我知道我的翻译是糟糕的.清告诉我我应该写什么.谢谢你!

Photos online!

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:23:30 -0600

W00T! I finally got some of my pictures online. You can see them here: PAGELINK:@/photos/index.php?cat=7|Peter's Chinese Pictures@.

Sorry for the short post, I've written a bunch on the picture's captions I don't have much to write here right now

~Peter

Programming Tutorials

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:40:44 -0700

Several of my friends have been asking me to teach them programming, so I thought that I would start posting some programming tutorials on my blog.

Basically, I would program an application in a programming language, give some background on the language, and then explain what the code is doing line-by-line.

I was thinking this could also act as a comparative programming study. If I did the same program in various different programming languages, it might be easier to see how the languages are similar and where they differ.

Soooooo.... what programming languages do you want to learn and what should I make for the example?

Here are some examples to get you started:

Programming Languages:

ASP ¹
C++
C# ¹
D
Fortran
Haskell
Java
Lisp
Lua
Perl
PHP
Ruby
Python
Smalltalk
TCL
Visual Basic ¹

Programming Examples:

Calendar
Chat program
Checkers game
Drawing program
Journal
Text editor

Please post which programming languages that you want to learn and a simple programming example that you would like to see! Note that I don't know all the programming languages that I listed above, but I tried to hit most of the major ones and I can learn the a new one or two

1: This is only if I can get Mono working on Linux. I'll tend to shy away from these

A Big Thumbs up for Markdown

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:29:32 -0700

I have sort of a love-hate relationship with CMS (content management systems). I love the ease at which I am able to edit content and manage pages. However, I have always felt that they were too restrictive and too much work. I have to work to get my website template in a format that the CMS supports. Then I have to work to install and configure the CMS. Then (and this is the kicker for me), if I want to drop down and code some PHP or Python, at best I have to install some plugin that will allow me to use arbitrary PHP. Usually, I end up having to hack some plugin myself. Then, what if I want my blog and photo album to use the same theme? I have to port my template to these as well and try to hack some kind of plugin so that I can integrate my blog, photo album and CMS all together -- and I have three different copies of my website template to maintain.

So with LinuxLefty.com, I ended abandoning all CMS's (although the one I did like the best was EXTLINK:@http://modxcms.com/|ModX@. It is a solid system with great hack-ability) and creating my own system. It is very simple and works very well. I am able to easily change my template and instantly (with some minor tweaking) my blog and photo album are using the same template as well. The only problem I was having was that the code was ugly. HTML code is fine, but it became a chore to edit the pages as I had all kinds of divs and html tags floating around. So, I changed two things in my templating system and now it is much easier to edit my site!

Firstly, I cleaned up my CSS a little. I looked for ways to reduce tags by being smart with my CSS. I noticed I was using several tags together so I condensed their CSS so I only needed a single tag. Then I installed the EXTLINK:@http://michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/extra/|PHP-Markdown@ markup library. This enabled me to get rid of a lot of my HTML and have a much cleaner syntax. For example, here is a bit of my website before renovating my templating system:

[geshi lang=html]

Restrictions

The designs presented here are given away for free; you are free to do anything you want with them, as long as it complies with the following restrictions:

You may freely distribute, but not sell the templates.
I remain the copyright holder of all my designs; don't take credit for my work
If you wish to use a design for a commercial purpose, please contact me to obtain my permission. I don't charge for commercial usage, but I don't want my designs to be used on sites which sell adult or offensive products / services.

Although, not required, I would really appreciate a link back to http://www.LinuxLefty.com/ on all pages that the template is used.

[/geshi]

It's fine, but it's not exactly easy to wade through all the HTML. So, I installed markdown and behold:

[geshi lang=plain]

Restrictions

The designs presented here are given away for free; you are free to do anything you want with them, as long as it complies with the following restrictions:

You may freely distribute, but not sell the templates.
I remain the copyright holder of all my designs; don't take credit for my work
If you wish to use a design for a commercial purpose, please (contact) me to obtain my permission. I don't charge for commercial usage, but I don't want my designs to be used on sites which sell adult or offensive products / services.

Although, not required, I would really appreciate a link back to http://www.LinuxLefty.com/ on all pages that the template is used.

[/geshi]

Quite nice, don't you think?

So, I'm very happy with my templating system. It works well for me and now it is easier to use

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 07:48:07 -0700

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which is the best distro of them all?

My hosting provider recently upgraded everyone's month bandwidth limit to 2 Terabytes. I wasn't sure what to do with all this extra bandwidth, so I decided be help mirror some popular but under-mirrored Linux distributions. Currently I am hosting 4 different "flavors" of Linux:

These can all be downloaded at http://www.linuxlefty.com/projects/mirrors

Last month, my bandwidth usage was 82 Meg. However, yesterday alone I used up 100 Gigs of bandwidth. Hopefully this will take a little load off of the projects' main servers

School Starts!

nospam@example.com (LinuxLefty) — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 20:40:53 -0700

Well,

It's that time of year and school is kicking into full gear. This semester will be quite difficult for me, but I'm really excited since I'm almost done with school ! Here are the classes that I'm taking:

Biology 213: Cell Structure & Function
CS 450: Database Concepts
English 302: Advanced Composition
Math 214: Elementary Differential Equations
Music 101: Introduction to Classical Music
PHED 134: Self Defense for Men & Women (I'm taking this with Natalie)
Chinese: I'm trying to learn some Chinese via an online tutor

Lots of fun classes!

Also, I finally got a PAGELINK:@photos|photo album@ up on my website! Now I can show off my cool family

Here are some of my favorite pictures:

The three of us older kids having fun

Abby and Amanda being best friends

Our entire family