The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

Finally got Ubuntu to look the way I want

by Leave a Comment

I pushed XP aside on my laptop a few months ago and installed Ubuntu Linux. I’ve done this before, but usually there is one reason I go back (like MLB TV or a new version of Visual Studio). Then XP slows way down and it’s not even worth booting up the laptop to look something up. It just takes too long.

I got a netbook a few weeks ago and put Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. I really enjoy it an it’s the perfect size for sitting on the train and writing a blog post (but it also means I have two laptops now– one a full-size Vaio laptop and the netbook– and the iPhone and I still have my desktop with XP which I use for C# development). The netbook is great, but I wanted my Linux laptop to look as cool as people show in You Tube videos. No matter how hard I tried, I could only cusomize it so far.

But yesterday, when I was home again because of snow (the entire week has been snow and flu), I found this tutorial mby Marius Nestor on softpedia:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubuntu-8-10-Desktop-Customization-Guide-100830.shtml

Now, I got my laptop desktop looking pretty slick:

Nike+ C# code

by 1 Comment

A lot of people are emailing me with problems they are having downloading the Nike+ api code from Google Code.  In order to access it, you need a google api login and password.  This sucks, I know.

I will try to find a more open svn repository for this.  I use some for Overpass, but don’t really want to mix my pet project with it.  For the meantime, here is the project as it stands now.  If you are finding this post at a day later than 28 January 2009, you might want to look for a future post where I give more up to date source code. 

The is mostly the API, so don’t expect a nice GUI.  However, I have included a windows app which I use for quick tests.  I also have some unit tests, but these need to be maintained a little better.  My plan was to work on this a bit more before releasing it, but a lot of people seem to be looking for something like this.

http://wroolie.co.uk/files/Nike+.zip

There is no rocket science here.  The only difficult bit is connecting to Nike+.  You can lift the code from this project if you want to.  Ideally, see if you can access the SVN repository.  If you add anything cool to it, please let me know.  I mostly work on this when I have a few spare minutes here and there (and I don’t have much of those), so it would be nice to see it grow or see if it is used anywhere interesting.