A little holiday cheer

One of the guys I work with took it upon himself to create this in good fun.

I couldn’t stop laughing.  But now I have to think of something good for payback.

Chumby here it comes…

I have a tendency to buy Gizmos and let them sit on my desk.  I’ve had some things torn apart like breadboards, multimeters, microprocessors, wires hanging out, half mounted LCD’s, and things entact but still collecting dust like PDA’s, USB sticks, iPAQ’s, scattered around my desk.

So when Ken first showed me the site chumby.com and told me what Chumby’s were all about, I was impressed and shocked at the same time.  But then the sinking feeling of uh oh another gadget fell into my head.  I mean spending $179 would buy me a fun weekend of skydiving (or 8 jumps — skydivers measure how much something costs by how many jumps it would buy).

The other day Ken mentioned his was shipped.  Damn you Ken! I went back to the website and decided yes I too wanted to have this under my Christmas tree this holiday season.

Tonight while I was working, I came up with yet another idea I could use the Chumby for.  And then I received an email stating my Chumby had been shipped! I am going to look forward to playing around with the flash interface and writing up a sample little idea I have.

I guess the one great thing about this gadget is it was made to sit where I want it to, and can do virtually anything.  I eventually see my son wanting one in his bedroom as an alarm clock to wake him, then to tell him the scores of last nights sporting event he couldn’t stay up to watch.  I see one in the kitchen to let my wife browse her recipes, check the weather or keep tabs on that Ebay auction while cooking, perhaps displaying an IM from me when I have locked my desktop at work for the day and am on my way home?

Thanks Ken! 

Dual displays

I was at the last Atlanta Python meeting this month, and noticed some presenters are still having issues getting dual displays to work. It is something I haven’t had to do in Linux. But I decided to try it out.

I found this video which explained how to do everything using nvidia-settings.

A time machine?

I have been once again led down an alternate path while working on something this evening. This time it has to do with how to revert installs on Debian (Ubuntu) based systems when an update breaks something. This can happen on servers, laptops/desktops, etc.I am not the normal (K)Ubuntu user running the Symaptic pkg manager for updates. I tend to always rely on the console aptitude. Some times you preform an upgrade only to find out things just broke and you want to revert.Aptitude records packages it installs in a log file (/var/log/aptitude). So I began to think of writing a quick solution, until I Googled aptitude rollback update. I found Flyback, TimeVault and Dirvish.

Why am I not using my Unison previously mentioned in another post? Unison does a fine job keeping things in-sync. I’m sure Unison could be twisted to act as a daily backup tool as well.  But I use it to keep one or more  filesystems up to date.

Kubuntu

OK, my last posting was written while I was experiencing a tad of frustration.  I Googled, jumped on an IRC channel and tried just about everything, including reconfiguring every package known to man.  I finally found a bug that resembled my exact trouble:

“Administrator Mode” button in “System Settings” does not work properly.

Simply the fix was:

kdesu kcontrol

I had ran kcontrol several times with sudo, but the problem was never fixed.  Running kcontrol with kdesu cleaned up old dead DCOP server files.  Something more than simply deleting he files.

Happy? No not yet, I still don’t know what provoked this.  It may not have been a package upgrade.

Kubuntu – I figured it out!

Don’t install patches, updates or anything upgrade anything already working on Kubuntu or other Linux distros when its finals, exams at college or just before the holiday break. It is the only reason I can think of that makes sense as to why things that worked are broken.Why can a perfectly good laptop running Kubuntu break after installing updates? No….I’m not happy. I’m dealing with this instead of working!!!

The FIRST active maintainer of Kubuntu to come forward and prove to me that he/she held back an update because it was not fully tested, I will send them $25!

Gluon Web Framework

I saw this new web framework and couldn’t pass it up to write about it and link to it. There I’m done.

Cashier Power!

Do you use your debit/credit card for everything? I do, I hate carrying cash. I like the itemized list of things I spent money on each month. Ok…lets face it, I really hate that change that fills up in my pocket, falls down the side of the center console in my car when I’m driving or ends up in some old fish bowl in the house.

I began to pay attention to the different cashiers. Some take your card, swipe it and hand it back to you. Other places like Target, you insert the credit card into a reader, and it spits it back out to you. And then there is the grocery store. You swipe your card, and stuff it back in your wallet.

Well…at work we have a cafeteria.  The food is adequate, not excellent, but hey its edible.  Well there is this one lady who works as a cashier, who takes your card, swipes it, punches in the amount and waits, holding your card! I have even reached my hand out as if I am waiting for my card back so I can stuff it in my wallet and put my wallet back away.  No signature is required, I can even elect to not receive a receipt.

What responsibility does this lady think she has, that she has to keep my card in the case where it tells her to destroy it? One, I am at work — would I really be using a stolen credit card? Two, does she work for the credit card companies? Is it really worth her frustration? Does anyone know if every vendor signs a credit card agreement to become a credit card employee and keep that credit card in the worst cases?

I’m nice to the lady, in fact I smile and nod and act like I know the reason she is holding my card.  But if I wasn’t, would someone really put themselves in harms way JUST to pull the credit card power over me?

I’d like to see a comic strip from XKCD on this topic.  Ok…I’ve ranted long enough…

Kubuntu 7.10 wireless works with Compaq Presario F572US

I purchased the Compaq Presario F572US from Staples two months ago, and have been using Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) ever since. The downside was I never could get the wireless to work properly.

When they released 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, I immediately grabbed the Live CD and began testing it out. I still could not get the restricted drivers to work with the Live CD. I grew frustrated and restored back to factory settings (Vista) to make sure things (hardware) was actually working properly. I was tempted to just make this laptop a Windows laptop. Heck…I may have a use for the Windows side after all.

It must of been eating at me, because I grew tired of Vista after a night or two, and really wanted my programming Kubuntu laptop back. I hate writing Linux code C or Python on Windows. I just get use to having my common command line tools available to me on the development environment similar to the server environment.

I decided to shrink the Windows Vista drive, drop the D drive (HP uses this for recovery, but I still have the two DVD’s I burned when I first bought the laptop if I need recovery). I decided to dual boot and proceeded to install Kubuntu 7.10 again.

After going back to the internet and digging up various “how-to’s”, I followed this one, and it worked! I was not able to simply use the “restricted modules” checkbox included with the distro.  It in turn uses fwcutter, which would not work for this laptop under with all of the default options (using the default suggested driver too).