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. 😀

MeMaker Improvements and Progress

Things are working well with this new little program MeMaker.  At over a year old now, I never thought it would be around this long.  Thank goodness it is here, this program has taught me alot!

MeMaker now renders the svg’s properly so that the image is much more appealling to the end user.  This should help alot with how people look at it and consider it.

My favorite jumping programmer has said that if he is blessed with the time he will provide a way for MeMaker to better integrate with Gnomes About Me settings.  That way you can easily integrate your newly made avatar into gnome.

On the art side, I am going to remove the current theme as it isn’t to proffessional looking and move to a whole new more goofy picture set.  But that will take some time.  When I am implemented theme selection support I will put the originals back in.

As for use ability I want to improve the save dialog.  Everyone knows the save dialog, sure it is nice to have, and it will stay.  But I think I could make it so that you select what service you want your image used for, with a combo box. Then from there I willlet the user enter the specific information that they will need.  For example, About me Protocal.  Or a web forums that you have configured. Perhaps your pidgin messenger.  That would be nice.  The best part is becasue it is a user to user program, I can have my program save all these settings automatically so it will show them without having to load any special profile windows.  What do you think?

Jason

An open Bike Trip in Helsinki

My Big break during this hard week of coding on GSoC. WooT! I love H2LC!

We, the Helia Linux Club in Helsinki is having a free bike trip through the town of Helsinki. Early this summer we had a similar trip and it was one of the best social activities I have has with the club and a great way for “geeks to get out”.

I promise the trip will be easy riding and at the end we are all going to be able to roast our own sausage and each a meal. And of course talk about cool stuff.

Details:More to come!
Time:Early Afternoon
Date:Friday 10th
Where:Helsinki Finland Probably starting at Passila Train Station
More Information:lurk at #helialinuxclub @ ircnet, email me at encompass@gmail.com, or call and text at 0400586791

Not everything is finalized but I wanted to give you the heads-up now before it is to late.

See you!

Jason Brower

Linux Course coming along well… Converting a string to a Dictionary…

The linux course I have setup at my local church has been doing very good.  Today we had a course on the basics and potentual of the command line interface.  Talk about an excited bunch.  We learned all the basics, cd, rm, mkdir, less and most importantly man.  We even went into how to use the command line to do very special things like, whatching movies from the text or, for the heck of it, seeing my baby’s first crawling in asci art.  OHHH yeah!  Talk about cool!  They are very excited to learn that their competer that can only run text based linux has some great life in it left.  All in the console.  Next week, we learn some more CLI stuff and move into Kino the video editor.  Hope to post our video we make in class online.

In my GSoC work I had learned a spiffy feature, I needed to convert a string into a dictionary.  Pete was able to work it out, after my many failed attempts

Check it out!

variableDict = {}
string = dictExtraInfo[“variables”]
pairs = string.split(“,”)
for pair in pairs:
variableDict[(pair.split(“:”)[0])] = pair.split(“:”)[1]
print variableDict

dictExtraInfo what the text that needed to be converted.  If you didn’t figure that out yet.   Dang spiffy.  Thanks pete.