development

Gnome Tray Services for Ubuntu and Debian

Gnome Tray Services for Ubuntu and Debian is a simple application written in Python using PyGTK for the Gnome Desktop. GTS simply allows you to start and stop init.d services on demand from your desktop system tray.

It was written in-house because our Linux development environment requires that we run daemons like Apache and MySQL, but only if we are developing. Therefore, it makes sense to be able to start and stop the services with the least amount of hassle. GTS does just that, it will prompt you for the root password using gksudo, and then start or stop the service.

Language: Python
Platform: Ubuntu / Debian (Linux)
License: GPL Version 3

Hacking Alexandria to Support E-books

I love books, I have thousands of them! One big problem for me has been in managing my book collection. Until recently there did not seem to be any efficient solutions for managing my e-book collection. I have played with all the usual solutions, but everything seemed overly complicated, difficult, or large. Nothing native to Linux, or to Gnome which is my window manager of choice. All I wanted was a simple browser for my books that would allow me to quickly find the one I was interested in reading so I could read it.

So looking over things I found Alexandria, a book manager for Gnome. It's a neat book manager with interesting features, however it lacks support for e-books. It also seems the author is developing a fork so can't be bothered to add support to the existing application. So I decided to put my ruby skills to the test and hack the application to add support for attaching files to books and it worked -- great!

Looking for beta testers for Social OS

We're now looking for people who are interested in beta testing our open source social network. Just drop a line, tell us a bit about yourself, and why you're interested in what we're doing and we'll get you set up. Initially we're not releasing the code, so we'll get you set up on a sub-domain here and our hosting in the future will be here too. You can contact us through this form.