Internship Begins at Miro…

So…

Not in Gsoc.  It’s a bummer, but in a way I am very happy not being in it this year.  I am very busy as it is, and to fail is worse to me then not getting in at all.

I have started my Internship at Miro.  It’s been very productive, at least in my eyes.  My first task has been parsing xml code from rss feeds and figuring out what kind of Creative Commons License they are using.  In the next few days I should have a working parser.  Then I will take it and try to somehow integrate it into miroGuide.

I am also going to try to start doing some video blogs while here too.  That should be fun and I hope to cover many subjects and ideas.  Let’s see if I can do it.

My new apartment is very nice.  With lots of space for what I need.  And with my wife and girl coming this week I hope to have a complete home then.

GSoC 2008, Hardy Heron, Sick Computer, A place to live!

GSoC this year is looking very good.  I have so scheet ideas in mind that I will reveal later.  Most of them I will have to admit come from the new brainstorm feature on the ubuntu site.  It’s sure is a great way to get involved in Ubuntu and Linux.  I have been working closely with PCulture/Miro for there GSoC ideas too.  They are very nice, let just hope they can get accepted for GSoC this year.  They were turned down (why!?) last year.

Speaking of my internship, I found the perfect place to live.  A nice place someone is leaving with everything furnished because it’s a pain to move.  It’s cheap enough that I can pay all the rent at once and just not have to worry about it after that.  I think the renter is very excited about it too.  The location is perfect; right down town Worcester.  Next to the main bus station so we can get anywhere in town very quickly.  What a blessing.  And here we were, worried we would have to pay 6 or 12 month leases.  My family feels like the luckiest one in the world.

Hardy Heron, boy they have made a lot of changes here, I feel like it’s another testing release with all the new stuff.  I have installed it on my laptop to see what new drivers and features it has implemented.  My general impression is very good.  I love the new theme, it looks and feels very nice.  I like the default set of programs that have been selected.  And I am impressed at how well the installation went.  I love the new “strait to the install” option.  Spiffy for sure!

I have made the following to show improvements and regression.

Hardware compatibility:

Open drivers-  Not one item I have on this computer is closed.  That is amazing.

Webcam Support- Even my webcam working now.  (But the colors are wrong.  They compiled the driver with the wrong rgb setting.  Not Ubuntu’s fault.  The driver should detect and change accordingly.

Slow and Chopping Scrolling- In fact alot of the stuff in Compiz is now much slower.  What the heck!  I loved using the Compiz Environment and now I can’t do it. Let’s hope this can be fix.

Screen is dim at boot-  I thought it might be me, but it’s not.  If you boot the computer it goes to the lowest brightness setting.  Now pressing the dim button will bring the brightness to full, then start to dim it, and press the brighten button and it slowly brightens back to normal.  I also noticed that when I ran mplayer, ever time I started a new video/DVD it would go dim again.  Now this isn’t a show stopper for me, but I think it’s annoying.

Screen goes dim when I tell it not to- when the battery is on and I am unplugged, my screen keeps going dim even though I tell it not to in the gnome prefs.  I have to manually brighten it again and again if I wait for more than about a minute without using the computer.  A really bugger, I tell ya.

Bluetooth light on computer is on- This one is funny, I don’t have bluetooth, but for the first time I now see the bluetooth light on my computer on in all it’s glory.  I have checked my system with lspci and lsusb to see if Ihave it showing there but it’s not there.  I notice the light going on sometime before the hard drives are mounted at boot.  Now if this light is changable even without a blue tooth, can I use it for other things?  I would love to know when I have a new email with that light.

SCIM bugging me- It’s kind of annoying, sometime while typing, the keyboard layout will suddenly change.  I have a work around, just disable all the other layouts. ;

Hibernation: yes! Suspend: no - I can now hibernate the system without any problems, but still, the computer will act like it’s going into syspend.  Even has this pretty glowing and diming light on the computer when it’s in suspend. It’s coming out of it that gives the issues.  It turns on everything.  But I have a blank screen and I can’t get at the system at all.  No responses to terminal changes or sound playing.

No sidescrolling- My mighty mouse isn’t very mighty without a bunch of manual code in xorg. Guess I will have to do that.  Let’s hope that one day they will include evdev devices in the xorg file.

Lock screen no longer working- It worked before.  But not in hardy.  I get a response when I press the button and have acpi_listen running, so I know it’s possible.  Now to get it to do something.

Wireless doesn’t turn off and on – My wireless light doesn’t turn on and off anymore.  I used to be able to press the button and it would happen.  Now nothing.  The acpi event does happen so I don’t think it would be hard to fix. In addition, the switch on the side to manually turn it off has never worked.  But why would I need that?

Media Key works – but again, it’s not starting totem like it should.  Nor is it very setable right now… just the acpi event happens.

Sound works – with gutsy I had to reinstall alsa.  Thanks guys, glad it’s working now.

Software issue:

Smart tabing is lost- talk about annoying, I love the terminal, why can’t have I have smart tabbing?  sudo apt-get install ecli<tab> doesn’t work anymore.  Anyone know why?

Ejecting cd – sure it ejects them just fine.  The funny part is that it complains saying it can’t everytime. funny.

Keyboard Layout -When I select the keyboard layout in the bootup, can’t it know what layout I have while installing?  Apperantly I am thrown the US keyboard everytime.  It would be nice if the install was smarter then that.

SCIM bugging me- It’s kind of annoying, sometime while typing, the keyboard layout will suddenly change.  I have a work around, just disable all the other layouts.

I will be filing bugs for these soon.

My computer is randomly crashing.  It either just shuts off, or the screen get’s all garbled.  I don’t know what it is, but I am scared they will not cover it with the warranty, because, well, I REALLY use a computer.  I am careful, don’t get me wrong, but I buy laptops to use them as laptops.  I carry it with me everywhere I go.  I have a bag for it.  But I am sure it get’s bumps around.  If they don’t fix it, I am going to get hit with a 110€ cost just to get my broken computer back.  That sucks.BTW, My computer crashed twice while doing this.  So bare with the errors, I just want to get it published. >:(

Internship Recieved, Gsoc Shirt Finally Arrives, School Interview, MeMaker

Boy, oh so much goodness all in one post!

I got my internship with pculture the guys that make Miro. A internet TV application. Pretty cool to be a part of their work for a while. I have big plans while there. But I will leave that all up for a suprise. They are looking for 2 or 3 more people. You wanna come work for them? Even if you don’t want to do an internship, if your a student they can make efforts to give you school credits for your work too. Including official recognition for your work. There are a lot things you can get besides money for your internship. You can come to boston, or jsut chill at home. You pick. I personally will be flying to Worcester MA with my family. It’s expensive, but I want to really get an education out of all this. Including an office setting and to work with other open source developers. Something I don’t get much of here.

My shirt finally arrived from Google summer of code. It’s sad, but so much money is “stolen” from google when they ship these things. There has even been rumor of students lieing and saying that they never got the shirt, just to get another. Jerks. We are adults now you know. >:( Best of all with the shipment was a paper showing I passed the program. When I have a bajillion dollar business I will have that framed in my office. I learned so much from this program. However, some things were not that great, I felt ignored in a way from aspects of the Ubuntu community. Understandable really, there are a lot cooler things to work on then PyStart. Even though, I did learn a lot, was able to make some great friends and even start another successful project. MeMaker. More on that later.

My school has chosen I and a friend to come to the school to be interviewed, so to say. It is to diterming the “best University of Applied Sciences in finland” Funny really, cause they might get alot of rat for my feeling about them using only MS products.

Lastly, MeMaker has made some great progress.  It is now to the point we are not adding any new features until it is at a stable state.  Then we start clean with a new revision set and work towards a 2.0 release.  It is getting a little faster and a little smaller all the time because of all this code refactoring that has been going on.  For example, I am looking for repeated code and seeing if I can make it work by running that code once.  You would beleive how much a little program like memaker can improve.  We are getting memaker in ubuntu!  That means that in the next release anyone can easily install memaker with a simple command… sudo apt-get install memaker.  How exciting! If you would like to package memaker for debian, we are looking for someone.  Please give me a shot and we can make arrangements.  You can learn more about memaker here… http://memaker.org That reminds me, we need someone to help maintain a website.

Linux pays for itself again!

With google summer of code I though, “Now my computer is a tool.  I have begun my journy as a programmer.”  My computer that cost me 1000€ paid for itself in one year.  And here we are again, Linux was all the thing after I started up the Haaga-Helia Linux Club a year ago.  After extensive work, we have some great friends that have been gathered to bring the knowledge of open source to the a school that could care less.

I was ask to recieve a 400€ stipend from the school for my efforts with the Haaga-Helia Linux Club.  It was/is a great thing to be a part of the Linux club here… I hope to, if I have any left after paying for the things I need, give money to the club to help pay for expenses.

I think the best part of the whole experience was the changes that I had to share my feeling about linux and how wonderful it is.  I gave my “Cookies are like Linux” talk and they loved the homemade cookies and Ubuntu CD’s that I handed out.  I was to happy they let me talk to them and I hope it really turns into something greater as the years continue at Haaga Helia.

On another note, I am looking for an internship, paid prefered, but if it is in software I love, and in python I could do it for free.  Interested?  Drop me a line.

Sounds like, if we are lucky enough, our memaker program will be going into ubuntu.  Let’s hope we can make code that is good enough.

Complete code but lots of clean up left to do….

PYSTART

I used to work in construction and learned a very important fact. The house may be complete, but it’s the cleanup that not only makes the house look good, but is a big pain.

PyStart is doing well, and I am working out all the bugs. Some things you see, somethings you don’t. For example, little peices of code I repeat alot that should really be in their own functions. Or having the create screen not move to the correct notebook tab, but in taking a lesson it works. Happily, I and my mentor are satisfied with what I have done and seem to have quite a following of people with requests to make more improvements.

Things I will probably do in 2.o:

• Create a start python console button for quick code checking and experimenting.
• Test taking can have a restricted environment with even a special use that has to be logged in to take a test.
• Gui cleanup, more HIG compliant.
• Create a submit code feature, where code can be automatically submitted to a “teachers server” and then all the files are easily seen by the teacher. Most teachers hate searching through their email.
• Open lessons and/or assignments by double clicking on them.
• More interactive python programs: ability to have inputs and other information. (Basically, a built in console)
• Anything else? PLEASE post it here…

If you want to test it out, contact me:

encompass.gmail@com /jabber/email

encompass@freenode IRC

MeMaker coming slowly:

We are still looking for more willing artwork to go into MeMaker, an avatar maker for Gnome/Ubuntu. Contact me if you would like to help out!