Writing that I love....

I was just reading "Last Chance to See" by Douglas Adams. Like most of his work, his writing once again proves to move almost orthogonally to the normal train of thought.

For instance,

Virtually everything we were told in Indonesia turned out not to be true, sometimes almost immediately. The only exception to this was when we were told that something would happen immediately, in which case it turned out not to be true over an extended period of time.

RIP Douglas, you're still in my heart.

Contract to develop firefox extension

I have wanted to be part of an open source software development business for a long time. Ha. I'm quite giddy right now, because I just happen to own one.

I have a number of little development contracts out right now to develop a variety of tools, website extensions and generally muck about with technology. What's really cool is that I am using exclusively open source tools and environments to do the work in.

Ha, this great.

So long, and later.

Lappy on borrowed time

I have been using my Dell 700m laptop as my primary computer for the best part of a year now. And the machine is on borrowed time. I think.

Last year (2007, ack, that was two years ago.... anyways), I allowed the warranty to expire on the machine because I figured that since it had been so reliable in the past that I would probably be able to get away with it. Well, that streak is now wearing to its end.

And it's the little things that are starting to go. For instance, I am missing some of those little rubber feet on the bottom that prevent it from sliding around the desk. Also, the battery life is serious diminishing, and barely lasts 30 minutes at this point.

However, the most recent issue is that the speakers have cut out. Turns out the the speaker wire that runs up through the hinge area has slowly been rubbing away over the past 5 years and has now been severed due to general wear and tear. So no more speakers.

Dell doesn't sell the speaker individually either, they just come with an entire new lid (including monitor) for $550. So, I have removed the speakers and will attempt to repair them at some point in the future.

This is just indicative of what happens with laptops I suppose. They get exposed to all sorts of little bumps, wiggles and jiggles in their lifetimes, and eventually little things wear away.

As I mentioned before, Lappy is on borrowed time, and sooner or later something vital is going to break, and there is no warranty left to deal with it.

Anywho, the broken speakers thing got me interested in looking for a new machine, and the one I have come across seems to be fancy shmancy. The dell Latitude E4200 is what I would call an "ultra-mobile workstation". Functionally it is more or less the same at the 700m for day to day laptop use. The screen size is the same, graphics are still handled onboard, and the primary component manufacturer is still Intel (wooo, out of the box linux drivers). Unlike the 700m, the E4200 can be used with Dell's E-Series docking stations.

I have never used a laptop with a docking station, because, for the most part, I couldn't be bothered. Why not just use a desktop. But the new docks from dell support dual monitors, which is something that has really been missing for me. Actually to be honest, I have dual monitor set-up sitting in my workshop, but they aren't connected to a computer, they are just sitting there collecting dust.

So I am rather tempted to hand lappy off to a deserving person and move to a shiny new computer.

As I said, lappy is on borrowed time.

Now if I only had a spare $4k.

-Ted

A spin with gnome-blog

I was poking around the software repository for opensuse 11.1, and came across a tool called gnome-blog. This is a panel applet which is supposed to allow me to post to my blog directly from the desktop rather than the supposedly tedious process of opening the blog website and posting from there.

Anyways, the tool is supposed to allow me to drag and drop images inline with the text, so I figure I will give it a whirl.

This version of gnome-blog is from 2006, and appears to be the most recent, so I suppose that development has stalled. Google has failed to deliver anything of interest more recent than that.

Update: I am not impressed. So long gnome-blog.

-Ted

How to synchronize a Nokia 6301 in Linux - Investigation

This afternoon I received my brand new Nokia 6301 cell phone. In many respects, I really do like the thing.

This nokia smartphone has a wifi antenna which allows it to be used as a VOIP handset if you are in range of an appropriate network and also supports all the normal functionality of your typical cell phone. It also supports Bluetooth and has a mini-usb adapter.

When physically connected to a modern linux machine (in my case openSUSE 11.0), it initially identifies itself as a USB Mass Storage device and the desktop responds appropriately by mounting it like any other USB drive. However, the phone specifies a couple of other connectivity options, including "Data Storage" (USB Mass Storage), "Media & Printing" (MTP) and "PC Suite".

When you choose "Media & Printing", the device switches to MTP mode (Woohoo, go libmtp!) which libmtp supports very nicely, although after perusing the datastructure, I am not clear which folders are the "correct" folders for which type of file. I guess this would just require some testing inside of Windows to see where the nokia tools put things. That said, this also means that f-spot should work pretty much out of the box.

Anyways, the third option "PC Suite" puts the device into a state which the nokia PC Suite application can use to synchronize the phone with Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. This third area is the most interesting for me at the moment. I want my Evolution Contact List and Calendar to synchronize with with the phone so that I don't need to pull out my laptop just to check if my flight to New York leaves at 10:45 or 11:45.

There do seem to be a number of tools for solving this problem, however they are not particularly explanatory, nor have I actually been able to sync my calendar, todo list or contact list to the phone in yet in Linux.

So, that pretty much summarizes my experience to date with the Nokia 6301 in Linux.

I definitely would appreciate someone pointing me to documentation on how to get my calendar out of the PC and onto the phone.

The problem with current design software

The more experience that I have with how engineering and electrical design is done, more I am astonished at how much effort goes into problems that are fundamentally trivial.

For instance, when designing a schematic, I need to spend a considerable amount of time figuring out which terminal block contacts are available, and whether or not the final wiring layout is electrically consistent with the schematic.

I don't care about that!

No kidding.

I cannot believe that I need to do that in this day and age. I should be able to plug device one into device two and my design software should just know how to make it happen. Period.

At the end of the day I want to be able to say to my machine

"Connect these devices in this order"

I should be able to just figure out basic system layout, and all the wiring, schematics and general fiddling should be just figured out for me.

Open source home renovations

On June 30, 2008 I took possession of my very first property. It's an 800 square foot, two-bedroom condo in South Calgary (Alberta).

Given that I am a massive geek, part of the renovations I am taking on in preparation for moving in, is a robust home network. This includes (at least) seven cat5e, and six rg6 cable drops. For this I have used a fancy product by Leviton. Their Structured Media center items appear to be exactly what I need to marshal my assorted cables, and send them along to their eventual end points.

This allows a lot of flexibility towards future home renovations, and lets you easily re-design the layout of the network at a future point in time. As far as I am concerned, this sort of cable organization is the best way to go.

In any case, all this work is being completed with the intention of designing an ideal open source home. My routing, media distribution, work bench, telephony and data storage system have all marshaled into a single room. The original analog telephony network is untouched in case a future owner doesn't want to use the fancy system that I have built.

Anyways, I have been doing this upgrade as part of a behind the scenes project that I have been playing with to develop a home running entirely on open source software. More on this later, expect interesting developments as the year goes on.

-Ted

On the Radio

On the Radio!

Earlier this week, I was minding my own business, working away and listening to one of the periodical podcasts that pass through my filter of media to consume.

The podcast in question is LugRadio, episode 100.

At about the exact moment of 76:02 into the show, they started reading an email that I had mailed about a month ago. Promptly, the guys made fun of my name, bemoaned my own bemoaning of linux support for the iriver clix (now resolved of course), and then congratulated me on a job well done. I suppose.

Anyways, I am glad to have made a difference, been laughed at, and been mentioned on the radio. Who knew.

As a side note, a passer by just noted that I am running openSUSE on my laptop. Good for him. Wooo community.

Enough for now.

Yahoo and Microsoft? Thoughts

In reviewing some of the old yahoo/microsoft news clips of the past several months, I came across this note about yahoo shareholders suing yahoo for rejecting the initial Microsoft buyout deal.

My thought is these guys are out of there minds if they think a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo is good for them.

I simply cannot see Microsoft being capable of stewarding a transition of this type in a way that would actually work. Nevermind the completely divergent technology base and skill base. If Microsoft feels they are not able to develop their Live platform to rule the day on it own, why should anyone trust them to steward the integration of a completely different platform?

It's not that I am against Microsoft here. AND, I don't get that they know what is missing with their own strategy to begin with.

So I wonder what the Michigan’s Wayne County Employees’ Retirement System thinks they will get out of the Yahoo/Microsoft deal.

Career's a go

So I found myself an absolutely amazing engineering job!

A couple weeks ago I had an interview with a company by the name of Rising Edge Engineering. For those of you without an electrical background of sorts, a rising edge is the part of a digital electronic signal where the voltage rises from low to high, off to on, or 0 to 1.

The interview was absolutely amazing. The way that the conversation went was something like "I don't know how to do anything that you guys do! And, I am absolutely committed to learning what it takes to do this".

Their response was something along the lines of "Ooooo! I want that!"

So here I am, employed as an Engineer in Training in the discipline of Electrical Engineering for Rising Edge Engineering.

Fun Hey!

Job search ahoy!

So I am bringing my post-graduation sabbatical to an end and am now fully into the creation of my engineering career.

I spent the past six months since graduation working in the construction industry with an awesome residential framing company known as LPT Construction. The owner and manager has been really great to work for while I was working through school, and was totally willing to work around whatever crazy school schedule I had.

I really have learned an enormous amount about construction, management, safety and productivity from the years of part and full time work in this industry.

Nevertheless, I am now really interested in starting my software engineering career; after all, I attained my degree for a reason right!

Anyways, so I am available for hire! If you want to take a look at my resume, please have at it!

-Ted

Life the Universe and Everything

So now that I have finally graduated with my shiny new Software Engineering Bachelors degree, I supposedly have some spare time to work on my own projects.

The first thing that I have done is rip out the old comlore web design business aspect of this website and replace it with a trusty blogger.com weblog. The old business had its day in the sun, but I haven't actively worked on professional web design for a number of years now. Moreover, the pages that used to be in this space were hardly well designed (I was 15 with only rudimentary understanding of web stuff at the time).

Anyways, my list of personal projects is forever growing larger. These primarily focus around two things at the moment:

1. Open source development


2. Website upkeep

Under first category, I am working on two important projects; httperf and a kernel space mtp driver for my iriver clix and other similar devices. The work I am doing on httperf originated from my fourth year group engineering design project. The work I am doing on the mtp driver comes from the time I spent working on the user-space mtp driver libmtp during my individual software engineering design project which also occured during my final year of school.

The libmtp project suffers from some pretty substantial deficiencies with its dependency on the libusb library (e.g., device resource sharing is impossible between applications). and really needs to be re-written completely from scratch inside the open source kernel of your choice.

The httperf tool also suffers from a couple deficiencies. Primarily, it's current implementation is a little bit slow and it doesn't scale very well in testing extremely large web systems. Currently, I am re-writing some of the core components of the tool to use the extremely spiffy libevent library. I will never use select() again!

Under my second category of personal projects are the maintenance of a number of webpages that I have written for various purposes over the past several years.

The most important is currently my record of my cross country bicycle trip in which I biked from Vancouver BC to St. Johns NFLD.

The other major project, as well as something of a future career goal of mine is creation of a fairly comprehensive guide on how to build your own home theatre.

On top of all that, I now supposedly need to maintain this here blog!

Anywho, that is just about that for now.

-Ted