Swarm the dot com

Swarm the dot com: A new way to browse the web.

Swarm is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connection to each other. While you're browse the web, Swarm will update itself every second with the sites that other people visiting in. When a site becomes more popular (Google.com, for example), It will move towards the center of the swarm.
Test it out...

eth0: No Such Device

Todays been a shitty day... 2 days ago I unplugged my 2nd monitor from my ubuntu machine to hook up to the windows machine so pallavi could use it since her laptop's dead.. And what do I get after doing a good deed?? my internal pci port on the mobo shot while trying to re-hook up the monitor back!! Freakin Hell!!! its a brand new mobo!!

So, no more dual screens... and to top that, when I shut down the machine to troubleshoot I didnt realise that I had accepted a kernel update and so when I rebooted.. no internet!! Now that's a kick in the nuts (if i had nut's, im sure thats what it would feel like!)

After and hour of frusterated googling on the windows machine, i finally figured it out... phew! i thought i'd have to reinstall.. hate that!

Problem:
Ubuntu detected the card (sudo lspci | grep -i ethernet) but sudo ifconfig was just showing 'lo' and no 'eth0'.

When I tried a sudo ifconfig eth0 up i would get an error.
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

Solution: Simple..
sudo network-admin OR Click on System-->Administration-->Networking
You will get a window with networking setup options on it..
Click 'Ethernet Connection'
Click 'Properties'
Enable the connection. Save.
Activate the connection!

Phew..... Moral of the Story: Beware the kenel updates! (and Beware the good deeds)

Need to track down Mach Speed Motherboards for warranty.. grrrr...

Hamachi: VPN Application

I came across a Digg about 10 Unknown Windows Freeware Applications You Should Know About. This was not one of the crappy freebies but some really useful and unknown ones..

Hamachi was one that sounded really interesting to try out..

Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking application.

In other words Hamachi is a program that allows you to arrange multiple computers into their own secure network just as if they were connected by a physical network cable.

Hamachi is fast, secure and simple. Its core version is also free.

Interested?? I sure am!!

Here's detailed installation instructions. For Ubuntu Dapper dont forget to add sudo in front of commands that need to be run as root...

Note: Make sure make is installed. If it isnt then:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

After installing hamachi, download gHamachi a GUI interface to hamachi. (needs hamachi to be installed to work)

Thats It!! Now off to test it with some windows users...

Swiftfox

Ditch Firefox... Switch to Swiftfox

Trying to install Flash was such a pain in Firefox. I couldn't find 'flashplugin-nonfree' in the repository and there were posts about some problems with 64bit. Then I came across this reccomendation to try Swiftfox. Its built on firefox and tons faster and meant for Linux..

Easy install... and boy, did it ever work! Went to a flash page and it asked to install the plugin.. and zap! flash was installed! google video here i come!!