So, I’m closing in on the end of my first week with Emacs. So far, things are going about as I expected them to be. I have started my own cheatsheet (which I may publish later), and I’ve installed Planner, which is a really great mode for organizing. It depends on a couple of other things, but once installed, it works well. I’m finding that it’s a nice tool as far as work goes when it comes to organization. I haven’t done much real coding in Emacs yet, simply because I’m still looking for a project to do. Coding at work has been slow because I haven’t had time to work on the internal web applications and there hasn’t been an opportunity for a cool bash script lately.

So, what do I have on my list of things to learn?

- Keybindings. This is going to take a while, but once I learn them then I’ll be in good shape

- .emacs. I’m sure there are some settings that some would see as essential. I’ll share mine in an upcoming post.

As far as projects go, I think I might start taking a look around at the open source projects out there and see if there’s something I can do to start getting involved. I think I’ll also work on setting up local source control on this machine to make managing things easier

I am rather not happy with the wireless desktop product.

It would seem that when I am playing sound—any sound at all—on my system, the keyboard and the wireless receiver have to be pretty much right next to each other in order for me to be able to do anything.

Here is a demonstration of what happened in my (what I thought was perfectly reasonable) setup:

$ Mary had a little lamb.
bash: Mary: command not found
$ ogg123 Music/R/Rush/Chronicles/13-freewill_192_ogg_cbr.ogg > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &
$ rale lb.

(Note that I typed “Mary had a little lamb.” just as I had done before, but it only came out “rale lb.”)

I don’t understand how my sound would interfere with the wireless desktop—and only the keyboard, not the mouse. But that is pretty crappy, and definitely not worth the $50 that was paid for it.

It’s even worse when this is used with the PlayStation 3, which was what this was originally bought for. I am turning the PS3 into a computer for the kid to use, as well as the gaming system that it is. Now that I have figured out how to make the wireless desktop to work (put the stupid receiver within 8 inches of the keyboard seems to be the solution), it’s clear that the wired keyboard and my Logitech mouse have to be used with the PS3. Not happy.

At least Ubuntu is far better about driving USB devices than Windows is. I was testing someone’s computer yesterday to see if I could determine if their USB ports were working. Certainly, they appeared to work just fine. But, plugging the exact same device into three different ports, Windows was like, “Wait! I don’t have a driver for this device and this port! Let me Install New Hardware!” which is plain stupid. I would plug the mouse into a port, and it would install a driver. I would move it to another port, and it did more fscking with drivers. Same on the third. Why? Is this not the stupidest thing ever?

This has got to be one of the better skits I have seen in a long time.

Link To Video

IT Guy Vs Dumb Employees - Watch more free videos

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Wonder why I hate airports? It’s because they’re full of total, utter shit.

Airports are some of the most stupid and ignorant places a person can go. Very new technology? Not permitted, because it’s not understood. Why, even when it is, if the TSA breaks it, they can threaten to arrest you when you get miffed about it because they’re idiots. Remember the MacBook Air that the TSA thought was unreal? Idiots.

Very often, in software and other fields, simple engineering is preferred to any alternatives. Well, guess what? The TSA, our government, and the people that are in it like to make things very complex. We need for things to be grossly simplified so that we as a society can function, know the parameters we’re expected to adhere to (because secret rules which we can be arrested for not obeying are obviously reasonable) and be able to jump in at a moment’s notice and actually be able to save a person from some idiot without the fear of that person then being an idiot. After all, idiocy reigns over us and people sue for being saved. The fix?

Simple law. Simple government. Level playing field. Right?

So, carry your guns (legally!) into Hartsfield. Use those permits. Exercise your legal right. Too bad it requires a permit, because I’d just show up. As it is, permits should not be required according to the Law of the Land, but who pays attention to the US Constitution anymore. It’s just a piece of ancient history, right Uncle Sam?

XBMC media center is a free cross-platform media-player jukebox and entertainment hub. XBMC is open source (GPL) software available for Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows operating-system, and the Xbox game-console. XBMC can play a very complete spectrum of of multimedia formats, and featuring playlist, audio visualizations, slideshow, and weather forecast functions, together with a multitude of third-party plugins. Originally developed as XBMP (XBox Media Player) for the first-generation Xbox game console in 2002, XBMC has eventually become a complete graphical user interface replacement for the original Xbox Dashboard, and it is currently also being ported to run natively under Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating-system. This, The XBMC Project is also known as “XBMC Media Center” or simply “XBMC”).

Team-XBMC is always looking for talented developers to help with this effort.

Official XBMC software application names:

• XBMC for Linux
• XBMC for Mac
• XBMC for Windows
• XBMC for Xbox

XBMC en Ubuntu 8.04 from MuyComputer on Vimeo.

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Go to the PODCAST PAGE for the latest Video and AudioPodcast..

yes.. even ogg format

The next season will be much better. Better recorded and produced. We have learned a lot. Thanks for listening.

~josh

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• 1-800-MAGIC: Back to Microsoft - Sergey Solyanik writes about why he left Google to go back to Microsoft. Lots of interesting points, but this is amusing: “First, I love multiple aspects of the software development process. I like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less. I can’t write code for the sake of the technology alone - I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work [my emphasis]. Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!”

Some topics covered:

• Ubuntu 8.04.1 Freeze Proposed
• Intrepid Alpha 1 Released
• New Ubuntu Universe Contributor
• New Ubuntu Members
• Ubuntu Brainstorm News
• Ubuntu Women Project Status
• Maryland LoCo Summer Plans
• Ubuntu Stats
• Launchpad Downtime
• Ubuntu Forums News
• In the Press & Blogosphere
• In Other News
• Team Meeting Summaries
• Upcoming Meeting & Events
• Updates & Security

Read it here.

If you are interested in writing for the UWN, join and introduce yourself to the the news team list.

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

If you moderate a Mailman mailing list that gets lots of spam, I slightly modified an existing Greasemonkey script that might make your life easier.

In the Administrative Database, it will default all messages to discard, and discard all messages from the sender (check “Add foo@bar.com to one of these sender filters” and turn on the discard radio button).

Remember to look over the messages and make sure you aren’t removing or ignoring valid posts/users.

The Greasemonkey script is here.

Check out Steve Langasek’s email for more info and download links: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-June/000440.html

Obviously, don’t install on production machines or any machine expecting a stable system.

For whatever reason, I have stayed away from DVD-RAMs as useful disc types, and pretty much ignored them. However, I am coming to find that they are very useful and extremely flexible—and cheaper per gigabyte than USB flash drive storage, too.

Now, the road to this discovery was actually fairly short, though it took a while before I finally remembered that DVD-RAM was a possible option in my quest. Basically, it started by me revisiting a road that I looked at a while ago—using packet-writing on my drive to be able to treat CD-RW and DVD-RW media as a big floppy disk. Unfortunately, I appear to have drives which do not cope with this very well. It’s slow as hell when it does work, and very often, it errors out or says that there are bad sectors when there are indeed not (e.g., an ISO image burned to the media covering the same spots reads back perfectly fine). So the discs aren’t bad, and the errors are coming from the drive… well, drives.

Now, I decided that this obviously wasn’t going to work and was about ready to give up on the entire thing when I realized that my drives can use DVD-RAM media, and I’d never even thought about it as a potential option until then. So, I headed off to Wikipedia to read up on DVD-RAM. I actually learned quite a bit, and I was intrigued, so I headed out to the store and picked up a couple of 3½” DVD-RAMs to evaluate them. I got home, popped one in, and I was greeted by a read-write filesystem.

“Ahh, the discs come formatted,” I thought. Oh, and these discs are double-sided, too; 1.4 GB per side, and you flip them over to get to the other side. At this point, I am reminded of using floppy discs on my very first computer, as well as using them in the Apple ][ machines that were at school. Even punching holes in discs to get another 180K out of them by tricking the drive into thinking that the disk was writable on the other side, as well… ahh, what fun those days were.

Well, anyway, so I have archived some data onto the discs, and am really happy with that usage of them. They aren’t read-only (though you can set them to be), which means that I can update archives too, instead of just having a static copy of them. Now this doesn’t solve every use case I had thought of: I would like to use some sort of append-only writing to plain CD-R discs such that I could have a system effectively logging to one as a write-one-time device. When it’s nearing out of room, of course, it’d then be changed, but then the bits could never be re-written, which means that the logs can be proved unmodified (at least after storing them). DVD-RAMs are of course not good for that sort of thing, but that’s life. But, DVD-RAM and something like backups that are signed with timestamps and everything, well, that could be plausible but I am not sure if digital signatures as such hold up in a court.

I am currently testing them out under usage patterns similar to the way I used to use floppy discs. I’m interested in seeing how usable they are for certain types of activities. Right now, I have a portable MoinMoin wiki installed on one that I am using for some organization of information, which will give me a good indication how it’ll hold up to fairly steady usage. So far, it’s great—responsive, easy to access, and portable. (Though I do wish I could quickly and easily do the same with MediaWiki, because I like that far better.)

I’ve started messing around with Emacs in the past few days. It’s installed at work and here at home, but I haven’t done a whole lot of anything with it yet. I’ve been working on my .emacs configuration before I go too much further, setting and unsetting some things to get it to my liking. I found an interesting setup called org-planner mode which may end up in me being able to get organized at work *finally*. Time will tell, but I have to get some of the basics down first.

One thing I keep reading is that a lot of people are switching the Control and caps lock keys in their keybindings. It sounds like an interesting idea, and I can’t remember the last time I hit caps lock on purpose. I might go ahead and swap them out. So far, though, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be too big a deal to learn and use.

VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro FX 570 (rev a1)
UniData
Inter-Tel Session Manager

What's your last 10%?

Well, school is almost finished (YAY!) and I swear I cannot wait. Even though I am not using a Microsoft environment (and never will), I still find myself being tied to certain software because of the various requirements of working with the school and their quite nearly insane requirements on what student’s software needs to do.

For example, what’s up with requiring HTML email? This is downright stupid. Why? Because what do people do when you give them HTML email? They can do many things such as insert graphics which are accessed from Web servers (and thus serve as “bugs” so that they can see when you read the email they sent you), they do things like use floresent green text on a hot pink background, or change their font to 12pt Comic Sans MS rendered in Navy Blue through the whole message, completely over-using color and making messages quite hard to read. I thought that the problem of overusage of color and such would have gone away in email in the 1990s, but it didn’t.

Furthermore, the software most people use to compose HTML email totally sucks: It inflates the message size such that the content becomes a mere percentage of the message. Well, news flash: content is what email is all about, and regardless of insane requirements, I do not read messages that I have to put considerable effort into reading. I get far too many email messages in a day to spend more than the absolute necessary time on each message, and even then I still get behind.

With that having been said, I need (at least a temporary) change in scenery. I think I am going to go X-less for a little while and see if I can remember how to setup my computer the way I used to use it, way back when. I used to have a pretty cool setup with 20+ virtual terminals, and I would use each one for a different thing, of course. Surprisingly, there is a lot more terminal-oriented software today than there used to be. Well, I guess it’s not all that surprising, given that people use SSH and friends for using multiple machines at once. But I think I could deal with using a GUI as the exception and not the norm for at least a little while.

Though, I need to figure out just what I would use. This whole Ubuntu thing has me relying on software that I would have blown off years ago as way too bloated and not useful enough. Firefox (yes, I just said that), Evolution (yep, that, too)… nothing particularly wrong with them, except that software today should not treat 266 MHz systems with 64 MB of RAM like they are jokes. The computer that I had the longest (well, after the CS40, anyway) was an AMD 5×86 (which was really a 486-DX compatible chip) running at 100 MHz. I had that for a very long time… and I absolutely loved it. The hard drive was a 250 MB drive, and I had a CD-ROM drive, and I had a nice Sound Blaster, and I ran X only occasionally. I did email in PINE, Web browsing in Lynx, and used programs at the terminal to do everything I needed to do. If I wanted to record music to add to my personal collection, I would flip on the FM radio that I had attached to my sound card, and I’d kick off a program that would capture the sound from the FM radio and compress it into an MP3 (though it wasn’t quite fast enough to encode at real-time speeds, as I seem to recall). If I wanted to listen to something I’d recorded, I’d type the command to do it, and out my speakers it came. If I wanted to rip a CD that I’d just purchased, I’d kick that off via the command line, too, and wait for a long time while the computer thought about it.

Even then, though, running X wasn’t something that would kill my system. I just didn’t like using it, because I’ve always loved keeping my fingers on the keyboard. I had 24 virtual terminals setup (Alt+F1–Alt+F12 for the first 12, and Shift-Alt+F1–Shift-Alt+F12 for the last 12), and it worked rather well for me. I always had various system status/reporting tools running in the last three or so of them, and the rest I used as general-purpose, do whatever I was working on. IRC was nearly always running somewhere in there, too. And, can’t forget about naim, which I used to use all the time, too. Today, computers (and networks!) are so much faster that I could probably work like that again, and it’d be very snappy and very fun.

Who knows, maybe I won’t go back to doing it for long enough to modify the entire system like I used to, but I think I could at least go for a week without getting into the GUI. Just working with tools, pure and simple. Sounds like a nice, heavenly vacation—to me, anyway.

• Xbox should be home tomorrow. Pretty decent turn-around if you ask me. Question is, though, will it work? #
• *ponders* Perhaps I should become the Dwight of this office… mwhahahaha #
• Question: Will there be cake? #
• If there’s ever a need to keep it simple, resort to caveman grunts. *grunt grunt* clicky clicky #
• I’ve decided to try to learn Emacs again.. yes the OS hides behind the guise of text editor. #

• Gonna call it a night, methinks. Some WoWing makes for a happy me. #
• Yes, I do in fact have a case of the Mondays, now back off! #
• George Carlin, RIP. My favorite performance of his was in the original Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. “Rufus!” #
• “What we need is a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence” #
• 4 hours left. Yeah, this day needs to be over.. Now. KTHXBAI. #
• At least the end is in sight. #
• I hate this ‘lost’ feeling. *sighs* #

Whereever it is your going pal, you can use those 7 words all you like.

Looking back on it, I have to express some disappointment with Hardy. Right now it feels great, the world is all sunshine and roses. But that's not enough for an LTS release, and so we must ask ourselves: how did we do out of the gate, did we start strong, was there a reason for ISVs to have their act together to support the LTS on day-one?

So how did things look day one for me on Hardy? Not so good. Accessing Samba shares was unreliable, credentials kept getting forgotten. During the boot sequence, my screen was black until the login screen, I feel very bad for new users who thought their computer would not boot because they had a black screen while a scheduled file-system-check (which is automatically scheduled and they likely don't even know exists) runs in the background for twenty minutes with the progress indicator completely hid behind a veil of blackness. Working with windows network shares was very, very difficult. Nautilus frequently locked up, often forgot the username and password I had explicitly told it to remember, and could no longer open the locations I had add to my side-bar. Virt-manager couldn't run my existing qemu virtual machines, Compiz still resulted in daily hard-locks and routine visual corruption, and had to be disabled. It was the worst of times.

But now here we are at the best of times, things work by the magic of updates. Lots of updates. And I'm glad, because my life is much better with things working than not. Windows shares work better than they ever have on any Linux distro, and now are on track to be as-good-as or better than MacOS by the next LTS. The screen is no longer black while booting or checking the disk. Virt-manager now launches my virtual machines and they run as they are supposed to. And Compiz? It's enabled, I'll let you know next week how it goes.

So hurray for updates, I've got a working system, if I gave it to my mother she could do what she needed to do. But, alas, it took a while. And good things take time, lots of time, also good things come to those who wait, and other numerous cliches, but perhaps we shouldn't slap the LTS sticker on until we have let it chill out there for a while.

But Rob, it was used by tens-of-thousands (hundreds-of-thousands? anyone got figures), we worked on it during the allotted time, what more can we do? Should we give up our time-based release schedules? Hire an army of engineers with funds from sugar-daddy Mark?

No. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no, no! But, let's have a thought experiment: Imagine if a release was not an LTS release until after the first service-pack. What would life be like? Would overall user-experience for corporate users, grandmothers, and other non-geek audiences users be improved? Would we just end up with a more buggy LTS release to start with and end up with the same quality at a later date, with everyone differing their bugs until the patch? I hope not. "Surprise, this patch is an LTS!" is about the worst release methodology I could think of. What might be better would be to plan for the next LTS to be an LTS release as soon as the first service-pack is out. The aim would be issue a release that had an equal amount of bug-fixing effort put into it as a non-LTS release. This should result in a release that is pre-LTS but still significantly less buggy than a standard release simply because the blueprints for the release would be more conservative, with about the same level of entropy as those introduced for Hardy. This slightly more stable build would then be honed and polished as Hardy was, and as of the first patch Ubuntu X.YZ would be Ubuntu X.YZ.1 LTS.

Google has taught us two things and funded the down-payment on our house by two simple principles : 1. there is still a lot of money to be made with a good algorithm and 2. Stick BETA on everything for the first five-years it is out. I think they have taken it a bit far with the BETA thing, actually ludicrously too far, but there is something to the principle. There is no substitute for a few million users doing important work with your software. I'm not convinced our LTS release are any less likely to "eat someone's data" than any other release, but I am convinced that LTS would be more meaningful if it meant that modem-users could farely reasonably keep up with the updates, OEMs and ISVs could be confident that they could get in on the PR bandwagon for the LTS release without having major headaches coming their way, and that mere-mortal developers would feel better about developing against a release that was to a great extent concretized.

• Not feeling all that great today :( #
• feeling a little better at least. Not looking forward to work tomorrow though. #

Some topics covered:

• How to Run a Bug Jam
• French Live CD Derivative
• New Core Developers
• Ubuntu Stats
• LoCo News
• Ubuntu in the Debian Packages Tracking System
• Launchpad News
• Forum News
• In the Press & Blogosphere
• In Other News
• Upcoming Meetings & Events
• Updates & Security

Read it here.

If you are interested in writing for the UWN, join and introduce yourself to the the news team list.

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

• Survived the Friday from Hell(tm). On to a wonderful weekend. #
• Hrm… Dethklok coming to the Tabernacle in Atlanta on 7/2. Wonder if I should go… #

So last weekend I decided that I wanted to play Forza 2 on the good ole 360. I pop the disc in and it starts, and I start going through the menus. Finally, it locks solid and I get the dreaded red ring of death. Now, this wasn’t the first time I had seen it. Bethany got it to red ring while playing Bioshock, but after some messing around it came back up. Unfortunately this time, it didn’t come back.

I called up XBox support, dreading the worst. Luckily for me, the guy on the other end was pretty decent. Within a few minutes, he determined that our 360 was eligible for the RRoD extended warranty and had a shipping box sent to us. 3 days later, the box arrived and I packaged the poor thing up and sent it on its way. I figured it would be at least 3 weeks until I heard anything, but as it turns out, they had the thing tested, fixed and sent out within 3 days of receipt. I’m happy to say that the 360 is on the way home. Whether or not it actually works is a whole other story

• Q and A - Testing Linux With a Live CD - Question - NYTimes.com - NY Times mentions Ubuntu again.
• Gordon Mohr Takes Us Inside the Internet Archives - “…we’ve moved over the years from a Redhat version to a brief use of something that was a pure Debian to now using almost exclusively Ubuntu…”
• Open source is not a vertical | Open Source | ZDNet.com - “One of the first things Microsoft re-sellers learn, if they want to grow, is it’s no good just hanging a Microsoft sign on your front door. You need to specialize. You need to know an industry, a vertical, you need to have an angle…”

Statement 1: The book [Horton Hears a Who] tells the story of Horton the Elephant who, on the fifteenth of May in the Jungle of Nool, hears a small speck of dust talking to him. It turns out the speck of dust is actually a tiny planet, home to a city called “Whoville”, inhabited by microscopic-sized inhabitants known as Whos.

Statement 2: From his perch high atop Mount Crumpit, the Grinch can hear the noisy Christmas festivities that take place in Whoville, thus becoming the central aspect of the Grinch’s Angst.

Paradox: the Grinch is a member of the microcosm known as Whoville in the Horton related literature.

I haven't posted reacently or been on the IRC for a while, but I hope to be back soon! Between this mobile class and work I dont have much time for IRC lurking, because when I'm not coding homework problems, I'm either as far away from the computer as possible, or gaming :D. Anyway

So with the end of my Mobile App class coming this Friday, I thought I might post one of the programs I've been working on.



It's a kinda cheesy falling blocks game :) but I like it.
Just ask me and I can hook you up with the jar so you can play it on your phone! If your phone supports java programs that is!

I'll also post the source if anyone wants (though it's pretty craptastic so I don't know why anyone would.)

Anyway, I hope to see yall again soon!