Ubuntu Evince with panning hand for scrolling PPA

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I use Wacom Bamboo One tablet in my every day computing and I'm very satisfied with its performance when connected to my Ubuntu PC. But one thing I miss when compared to mouse is panning hand. When using tablet it is easiest to scroll by grabbing you document up or down. But, your application must support such "panning hand" GUI interface. With Firefox i use "Grab and Drag" addon and that's about all I need from my browsing experience when it comes to scrolling with my tablet. Most of the other desktop applications do not support "panning hand" and there isn't much we can do about it except grabbing source and getting our hands dirty. IRIE Shinsuke agrees, so he patched Gnome document viewer Evince with "panning hand" patch grabbed from Evince mailing lists. This patch unfortunately hasn't been accepted for inclusion to Evince (don't know why). Fear not, IRIE is here with Ubuntu PPA for Evince with "panning hand". So read on to find out how to obtain you copy:

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Font smoothing in Debian 6.0 Squeeze like in Ubuntu

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Debian LogoDebian is great operating system, but lets face it: fonts are ugly on any Linux distribution except Ubuntu. That's OK if you ask me. Why? When I hear word "Debian" my first association is reliable server environment, and I guess you don't need fine tuned font smoothing on white on black terminal. What if you really like having Debian on your desktop, and you also like having normal eyesight? Debian user Hadret who describes him self as "Atheist, Debian GNU/Linux user and a philologist to be" has Ubuntu patched versions of libxft2 and libcairo2 - the libraries that control how fonts are looking, in his Debian repository. All you need to do to fix you Debian font situation is to add his Debian repository to your sources list and do regular apt-get update procedure. Here are the necessary commands to do all of that:

su
echo "deb http://hadret.rootnode.net/debian/ unstable main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb-src http://hadret.rootnode.net/debian/ unstable main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
wget -O - http://hadret.rootnode.net/debian/duckbill.key | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

After you restart you PC you fonts should look much better than before and you should also feel much better about using great Debian operating system.

Qt 4 C++ development with Qt 4 Creator or Netbeans on Ubuntu Linux

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Qt logoSo you want to develop GUI applications using Qt4 framework on Ubuntu Linux? No problem. Everything what you need is at the tip of you fingertips (official Ubuntu repository to be exact). Here's what you need to do to have Qt 4 Assistant, Qt 4 Designer, Qt 4 Linguist and last but not least important Qt 4 Creator (following is all one line at the terminal):

sudo apt-get install build-essential qt4-designer qtcreator qtcreator-doc qt4-demos qt4-doc qt4-dev-tools libqt4-dev

Now feel free to go to Applications -> Programming -> Qt 4 Creator and do something creative.

Qt 4 C++ Netbeans development

But what if you want to use Netbeans to develop Qt 4 C++ applications? Piece of cake. Follow me... First step is to install Netbeans (you've probably guessed that one).

sudo apt-get install netbeans

Next step is to start Netbeans by going to the Applications -> Programming -> Netbeans. Netbeans is primarily Java IDE so we must make sure that Netbeans has C++ support plugin. So inside Netbeans interface we go to Tools -> Plugins and then switch to "Installed" tab. Here we must make sure that "C/C++" plugin is amongst installed plugins. If not, we switch to "Available plugins" tab and put checkbox next to "C/C++" plugin and click install at the bottom of the dialog. After "C/C++" plugin is installed along with it we acquired Qt 4 project support for Netbeans.

But there is one thing we must do before we start coding. We must tell Netbeans the path to the "qmake-qt4" program necessary to compile Qt 4 applications. We need to go to Tools -> Options and switch to the "C/C++" tab. Next to the "QMake Command" label we must enter path to the "qmake-gt4" program. If you are using Ubuntu Linux operating system you need to enter this path:

/usr/bin/qmake-qt4

Now click OK and find "Hello World" tutorial like this one. So here you go, now you have full blown Qt 4 development environment inside you Ubuntu box.

Webcam settings control on Ubuntu Linux operating system

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Logitech QuickCam E3500 Web CamIn the last few years the functionality cost of running Linux operating system shrunk. Good hardware support is one of the last things Linux is lacking when compared to other operating systems. That isn't really Linux community's fault. The hardware manufacturers are to blame for not supporting their own hardware on operating systems other than the proprietary ones. The Linux community developers are actually doing miracles with hardware support and I thank them on doing such a great work. Web cam support was once blind spot on Linux supported hardware list. But today we have Video4Linux video capture framework supported by UVC and GSPCA web cam drivers and most web cams are working happily on our Linux PCs.

It can be very confusing for someone who have just installed Ubuntu to discover that his web cam is working, but that he has no control over settings like brightness, contrast, auto exposure etc. Typical proprietary operating system user would use controls provided by web-cam drivers to adjust these settings. But we're not left out in the cold because Linux community provides means to control our web cams. Let me present applications I use on my Ubuntu PC with my Logitech E3500, Logitech E2500 and many other no-name web cams to adjust their video and other settings.

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PHP Savant templating engine pagination class and plugins

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I don't use Smarty templating engine for my PHP web projects. Why? I hate it. Why? I' familiar with PHP and I don't need to learn another markup language that takes away the power from PHP and imposes restrictions all the way. I'm not saying that without spending (non)quality time using Smarty (and loosing valuable time to learn it's unintuitive syntax).

For my web projects I mostly use PHP Savant customized to fulfill needs of the project at hand. What is PHP Savant? It's authors say that PHP Savant is a powerful but lightweight object-oriented template system for PHP. Savant does not compile your templates into PHP like Smarty, instead, it uses PHP itself as its template language. With PHP Savant you can write your page templates in pure PHP and you don't need to learn a new markup system. PHP Savant is great for developers because it is "complex" enough to be extremely useful, but at the same time simple enough to be easily modified without any special knowledge.

SavantPaginate

When it comes to PHP pagination, things can get quite messy. Pagination without templating engine is a nightmare and that's something to avoid at all costs. Even when you're using templating engine like PHP Savant things can get quite complicated without encapsulation of pagination logic in some kind of PHP class. Recently I made PHP Savant pagination class together with PHP Savant plugins for pagination, all for one of my recent projects for college. Today I'm my bringing PHP Savant pagination class and PHP Savant pagination plugins to you, all in a hope that you'll find it useful in your own web projects.

Instructions and download

You'll find instructions and download links by clicking on "SavantPaginate" at the top of TechyTalk.info or by clicking on the following link:

http://www.techytalk.info/other-projects/savantpaginate/