Cyclopedia Square

My little family blog has been discovered by spammers. They have started leaving comments on my Django powered blog. Not very often, but enough to be annoying. I heard about reCAPTCHA and thought it was a fabulous idea, so I decided that was how I wanted to up the ante for the spammers on my blog. Integrating reCAPTCHA with the Django freecomments wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be though, so I want to write down how I made it work in case it will help somebody else down the road. First of all, I did my due diligence and googled for help. I didn’t find much, but I found an email , a snippet , and a blog that got me going in the right direction. While I’m citing references here, I also made use of the comments page on the Django wiki , and the request and response documentation too. The reCAPTCHA api docs were vital as well. OK, after doing my reading googling I got to work. I registered for a set of reCAPTCHA keys, downloaded the recaptcha-clie...

I'm stuck on the couch with my knee elevated after having had surgery on Tuesday. I tore my meniscus playing Ultimate (a non-contact sport if ever there was one. I think I've just decided that cleats are the root of all evil). So, being stuck on the couch, I've been reading a lot and playing with my computer, of course. I downloaded the CD image for gOS a couple weeks ago, and I finally decided to give it a try. I couldn't just burn it to a CD and boot it up though. Where's the fun in that? I decided to try it under kvm on my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon box instead. Turns out, that doesn't work. It just crashes with the cryptic message, "exception 6 (0)" and some kind of register dump. Since you have to install qemu in order to run kvm, I tried running it under qemu next. It started to boot, but then got to a point where it just dropped me to a busybox shell with a prompt like this: (initramfs) _ Turns out, after some googling, that this is...

When I upgraded my Ubuntu machines from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon the cool beryl/compiz desktop effects stopped being so cool. I have learned how to fix it, however, from a few awesome blog entries . Here's how I did it. First, remove any oddball compiz/berylemerald repositories from your sources.list. Everything you need is in the standard Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon repositories. Next, remove any compiz/beryl packages that you previously had installed: sudo apt-get remove compiz* && sudo apt-get autoremove sudo apt-get remove beryl* emerald* && sudo apt-get autoremove Now, install the needful compiz packages: sudo aptitude install compiz compizconfig-settings-manager Now you can turn it on by running System->Preferences->Appearance and the clicking over to the Visual Effects tab. Choose Custom and then click on Preferences to bring up the settings manager. Then you can follow the How to set up Compiz Fusion instructions to get wobbly windows,...

As I mentioned before, sound stopped working when I upgraded from Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon. I have the Intel 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller. I tried to get it working a few different ways, all following suggestions from various Ubuntu forum and launchpad websites (yes, this seems to be a well known bug), but what finally worked was "Method B" found on this page . Phew! To celebrate I watched some videos on YouTube. They are much better when you can hear 'em.

Pretty fonts for emacs on Gutsy Gibbon was easy to fix (unlike the sound problem I'm having). Just follow the instructions for pretty emacs here .