I just discovered the handy apt-file command in Ubuntu today while trying to resolve the dependencies need to install Hpricot. With this utility, you call search through all the packages in your repositories (installed and not installed) for a given file. For example:

apt-file search stdlib.h

Will return a list of packages with that header file. In order for this command to work though, you’ll need to at least have ran this command once:

sudo apt-file update

I usually get my backgrounds from a couple of photo blogs I subscribe to, but using Flickr for my backgrounds was such a good idea (and a good excuse to play with ruby), that I thought I’d give it a shot.

After some trail and error, and some help online, I was able to come up with this ruby script to do the trick. The script will pull the interesting photos for that day, and will try to find the best fit for your screen resolution. If you don’t like the current background, you can run the script again to change it. With a simple cron entry you can have fresh background at periodic intervals (I have mine set to every 2 hours).

I created the script under Ubuntu GNOME. If you want to give the script a try, you’ll have to edit the script and put in your Flickr api key and shared secret as well as your screen resolution (unless you’re runing on 1440×900). You’ll also need to have rubygems and the rflickr gem installed.

If you ever needed to quickly build a distributed environment for development, consider using the free VMware Player. This last Friday, I was working at Panera and needed to test some distributed aspects of our application, so I took a shot at using the Browser Appliance VM as my server. Since the Browser Appliance is just a stripped down Ubuntu installation, you can use the Synaptic Package Manager to install the necessary libraries for development (the Getting Started Guide provided by VMware has instructions on how to use the Synaptic, as well as information on getting root privileges on the VM).

The trickiest part was installing Java on Ubuntu, which requires some tricks since Sun’s Java for Linux is packaged as an RPM. Overall, this is a nice setup, since this allows you to create a nice and portable client-server environment. It also nicely avoids any issues with developers stepping over each other which occurs when working on the same development server.