jorge's stompbox

Lots to be thankful for in 2k7

I spent the other day in East Lansing with some old MSU/Army buddies. It was good to see everyone home again safe and sound. As I post this my brother is on a plane home from Iraq/Kuwait. As of now he's on terminal leave, thus ends the Castro-family commitment to King and Country. Three generations is enough, we're now all done and can spend our days getting old ...

Professionally, I am really glad I'm a part of the world's greatest open source team. I have nothing to add to that, other than I really look forward to working with as many people in the Ubuntu community as I can get away with.

Linux-related Questions for the New Year:

• Who gets my money, Intel or AMD? One has the drivers (Intel), but not the discrete card that I want to drive my dual panels; the other has the cards (AMD), but not the drivers, yet. Who will win this year? Dun dun dun!
• OLPC, Eee, or the Classmate?
• Will Broadcom listen to their customers?
• Is there an Android phone in my future? I'll just ask Ryan when the time comes.
• Will Stargate: Atlantis EVER. STOP. SUCKING?
• Will Google finally add tasks to gmail/gcal, or do we just use Remember the Milk?
• Who will succumb to using capital letters in their blog first, Aaron Seigo or Ryan Lortie? (Hardest question so far.)
• Will epiphany-webkit be mature in 2008? Or is Firefox 3.0 the future?
• Will imbrandon make it to Penguicon?

and of course, Predictions that WILL COME TRUE:

• The Detroit Red Wings will bring Lord Stanley's Cup home to Detroit.
• Metallica will release a new album and we'll hate it. Jono goes into therapy for 2 months and _MMA_ will rename Ubuntu Studio as "DieInaFireJamesHetfieldbuntu". I will jump off a bridge.
• I'll never be able to pull off the hard part of Master of Puppets on bass (Around 6:17 to 6:37). God, I so can't play that. (NOTE: I know there are harder parts on the rest of the album, but this one is kicking my ass).
• Aaron Bockover and Gabriel Burt release Banshee 1.0. (or they might call it 2.0)
• rharding and wolfger become MOTUs
• The Ohio, Michigan, and Chicago LoCo's will pull off Penguicon, Ubucon, and Ohio Linuxfest without a hitch. The events go so well that Jono declares the lot "a bunch of dudes."
• Corey Burger will remind me that something I blog about is a "closed source piece of crap."
• Jerome Gontangco sells his Mac and comes back to the light.
• LTSP will win another huge deployment. As usual, no one in the media will notice.

It's Raining Comic Books

I recently netflixed Ultimate Avengers: The Movie. Some of my more hardcore comic friends don't like the recent proliferation of comic book movies and all that. "OMG, they're killing our childhood" and all that. I love every bit of it. Well, other than Hellboy, (I hated that movie), but Adam seemed to love it.

I was never into the Avengers (More of a spidey and X-men guy), so I can't really vouch for the "comic authenticity" of this movie, other than I loved it. Ironically, the voice of Nick Fury was done by none other than Andre Ware, the ex-quarterback of the Detroit Lions, go figure. I really liked this movie. I dig that comic book stories are so entrenched into our culture that interpretations of said stories are ok. I just put the 2nd Avengers movie in my queue as well as the Iron Man animated movie. Watching Thor and Hulk fight during this first movie has been totally awesome though.

I think it's cool that I can enjoy Tim Burton's Batman alongside Batman Begins, and look forward to The Dark Knight; at the same time I can appreciate reading Miller's  The Dark Knight Returns all the time. Sure, if you read a bunch of Batman stuff, it all kind of conflicts, but then again, no one really cares. I like that there are so many interpretations of the same story available; I think that's what makes them so great.

As an aside, I didn't like Spider-Man 3 that much, but I can still feel connected to Spidey by the fact that they kept the basic idea of the comics: Spider-Man isn't about Spider-Man at all, it's all about Peter Parker. They kind of tried to do that in the movies, but it's up the watcher to decide if they did that. (Implementation detail). In the video game realm, I absolutely love Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I was never into Iron Man but after playing him in the game and watching the Ultimate Avengers movie I have become a fan. I look forward to the upcoming Iron Man movie.

On the DC side of the house, I've recently blogged about how I've gotten into Smallville. My renewed interest in Superman convinced me to netflix Richard Donner's cuts of Superman I and Superman II. Don't bother with the first cut, it's not that different, but wow, the Donner Cut of Superman II is absolutely brilliant. An entirely different movie. Absolutely fantastic.

Since we're all geeks and love comic books, please leave a comment on your favorite comic book movies below. I know I've left out a bunch.

Hackers needed to stop Judgement Day

Sysadmin-hero Chris Jones has a cool little project that might be of some interest to some of you out there, especially the sysadmins. His project is called Terminator. It takes multiple terminals and puts them on one window. It's better to just look at the screenies:

As you can imagine, this could be quite useful for those of you out there sshing to all sorts of places and doing all sorts of sysadminy type things. You can find code, bugs, and branches on Launchpad. Chris writes:

As we discussed previously, it would be totally awesome if gtk had a grid container of some kind that I could simply drop terminal widgets into, rather than embedding HPaned and VPaned widgets inside each other.

It also currently can't remember a layout - so if any of you out there are looking for a project to brush up your Python on then dive on in. I'm wondering who is going to mash together terminator with hotwire for next-gen terminal goodness. Chris assures me that he has nothing to do for vacation and is keen on being flooded with patches and reports from other sysadmins out there who might find this tool useful. Heh.

Home NAS solutions

I just read that Netgear has introduced a line of Linux-based NAS devices. They're on the expensive side, they start at over $1,000 US.

I recently purchased a My Book World Edition. It's "OK". I don't recommend it because the network performance is really quite crap (even on gigabit ethernet). The second reason I don't like it is that the instructions/documentation with it are pure shit. They could have just said "the thing does smb shares by default, try it.", but they don't. They put in the docs that you have to use this MioNet crap to access your files over the internet. The Docs make it sound like you need this software to make the thing work, which is of course, false. The web interface is decent, it's actually not a bad product, as long as you plug it in and don't follow the instructions.

WD isn't alone, there's been issues with the Seagate's consumer drive things as well. Geeks like us can tell the difference between USB drives and "home NAS things", but as I browse these kind of products at stores, I am convinced that the people who make these things are purposely trying to confuse people.

Part of the problem is, as you would expect, marketing people suck. You can walk into a computer store and it feels like they really blur the line between what a personal NAS is and what a normal USB drive is. They put a drive in a sexy box, and they don't really explain anything. Throw network ports and usb ports on there, and people will be confused. So am I buying an expansion drive or a home network drive thing? Better read the box!

If that wasn't confusing enough, the manufacturers add artificial barriers to make them supposedly easier to use. They can't just have them be normal mass storage devices, they always add a bunch of crapware to their products that are supposed to be value adds, but they're not, they just make the product crappier to use. Who buys extra storage and thinks they need new software with it? No one. People just want more room for their porn. I can't imagine anyone buying one of these things and thinking "Oh man, this MiroNet thing is really useful, I am glad I have to use it for this new drive."

I don't have personal experience with the netgear products yet, but I would actually pay more to have something easier to use. I don't want some extra software or some other "value add" crap, I want to be able to buy a consumer grade drive that is either mass storage, or in the case of the "Home NAS" category, just some simple CIFS/NFS sharing. Every OS can use these devices, which makes the inclusion of the crapware even more ridiculous. And don't think that we're not the only ones suffering, our Windows friends end up with the same problems even though it's a supposed "supported platform". In the end it's a load of crap.

It's more work, but really, these things are so hard to use that buying a drive and an ugly external kit from microcenter/frys really end up being a better solution.

Happy (Holiday Name Here)

Time for some quickies.

• Our friends at Aperture Labs have a great holiday message.
• Enjoy Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 2.
• I gave up and finally signed up for twitter.
• Anyone else finding Facebook becoming a pain in the ass chore to visit? I don't want to be a vampire, pirate, or a ninja. I just want to keep in touch with my friends. FFS.
• People have wondered how Simplifymedia differs from something like Firefly. The key difference here being that Simplifymedia works over the internet. My username is whiprush btw if you want to friend me.
• Bazaar is now 1.0. If you've had performance problems with bzr in the past, now is the time to revist bzr, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the improvements. Congrats to the bzr team!
• I am really liking Mozilla Weave. I have it on my laptop and my desktop and I have synced goodness. A much better implementation than the google sync thing.
• I have become addicted to Smallville on HDNet. I think it's interesting to get all this back story on Supes. It's WAY too corny, but I love it anyway.
• Iain's sense of humor always makes me laugh.
• If you're in the midwest US, make sure you register for penguicon, while it's still cheap!
• Banshee trunk is your Jesus.

Merry Christmas to everyone! (Except for DrPizza, who doesn't believe in Christmas, because he's a heathen.)

More GNOME Do.

Rick Harding has pushed out some new PPA builds of GNOME Do today.

Dave put out a call for documentation and holy smokes did people deliver. A big note of thanks goes to blutack, who totally just rocked the docs this week. Thanks!

Simplify

Aaron Lake and I have been messing with this little tool called Simplifymedia. Basically, you friend a bunch of people, and then Simplify presents their music to your player (Banshee and Rhythmbox are supported) with their music as a DAAP source.

 

Aaron uses it so that he can listen to his music at home while he is at work, that way he doesn't have to carry his ipod with him or other stuff, he can just share with himself over the internet. Aaron discovered it while looking for something for his iPhone, and let me know immediately that they were planning a Linux client, so we mailed in and asked to test it. Now the linux client is available.

It's not perfect, currently the UI depends on Wine and the arial MS font - but one of the developers assures me that this is temporary. Hopefully it will be popular enough to justify the developer time to make a native UI. Of course, if it was open source then someone could do that work for them (like a native Banshee plugin), but that's another conversation.

There's a last.fm group available too if you want to join. Enjoy!

Linux Journal

Apparently Linux Journal has made some staff changes.

Let's hope the "new" blood isn't so venomous. Time to renew the subscription.

Wrapping up 2k7

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier did a quick podcast interview with Jono about all sorts of things for Linux Magazine, like PPAs and where Ubuntu is headed in the future.

Since it's the end of the year Joe wanted to ask what people think will happen in 2008.  For my part, I predict that Ubuntu will release 2 (that's right, TWO) new versions of Ubuntu in 2008. What are your predictions for open source and Ubuntu? Post below or blog about it.

More cool Telepathy bits.

I don't know how I missed this one, but there's a cool applet for empathy called empathy-megaphone-applet that let's you add your empathy buddies to your panel. The cool thing is they reflect status, so as you can see, the last 2 people are grayed out because they're offline. Neat if you want to be able to glance when someone comes on or off.

As you can guess the first thing I tried to do after adding them to my panel was try to drop a file on their head to see if it would send it to them over the internets, but alas, this is not implemented.

Here's the telepathy ppa if you're running 7.10. (I can't confirm the quality of these builds but post a comment if it works for you.