Linux Nerds Unite

2010-08-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

So Larry and the boys over at Oracle have decided to attack the Free Software community via a patent suit against Google and Android, huh? Anybody in the Free Software world have any patents they think Oracle might be treading on? I'm lookin' at you Red Hat. Seriously though, why don't we as a community go after these guys, show them that even if they win we can make sure they lose. I'm not just talking about patent suits either, if you're in the market for a data base try Postgre SQL or if you need something a little more robust even if it's proprietary DB 2 is from IBM who have always played nice with FLOSS. I'm calling for a boycott of Oracle products until they drop the suit, free the JAVA and start acting like the good open source citizens they promised to be when they bought SUN.

2010-08-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Lazy web, does anyone know if it's possible to use Go To Meeting in Linux? I've tried User Agent switcher and Wine, I tried installing IE7 with Wine, I tried using the Mac version. So far no go. If anyone has found a way to make this work let me know.

2010-08-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

Weird question, why when I set the keyboard to Canada (where I live) and the language to Canadian(English) in Ubuntu do I get a French keyboard layout? Let me be very clear that the majority language in Canada is English, which is the first language for slightly more then 2/3rds of Canadians. I mean I appreciate that the Ubuntu guys have put in a bunch of work to set up a keyboard layout for my French Canadian country men, but Canada is a bilingual country with a large French speaking minority and an English speaking majority. It would be a lot more sensible to make the default keyboard layout for Canada English and add a Canada(French) layout to support the French speaking minority. At the very least when you're going through the install and pick Canada for your keyboard layout it would be nice if it informed people that the Canada keyboard layout is in fact French and if you choose it you won't be able to find the question mark. Anyone know why they do it the way they do? Well enough ranting for now. 2 interviews tomorrow so off to bed.

2010-07-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else wonder what happened the the frenetic energy that existed in the free software world even 5 years ago? One only needs to look at distrowatch to see the difference, back in 2005 on any given day there would have been news of one or more new flavors of Linux being released, these days though it's all point releases and version updates, I can't remember the last time I heard about a truly innovative new distro or a world shaking new open source app. What happened to that flurry of creativity and how do we get it back? I'd love to hear your thoughts?

2010-07-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Been to long since I posted here, and a lot has happened. On the personal front, I'm getting married to the most wonderful person in the world. However it's on the professional front that the most exciting stuff has been happening, I've started a new career as a salesforce.com developer and consultant. While this transition has force me to compromise some of my open source principles I am also still committed to open source and free software. Lets start with the compromises. first off Salesforce mail merge documents require IE, so IE 7 in wine was a must, this is also good for browser testing, and it works beautifully. That said I hate it and use it as little as possible. Other Proprietary stuff I've had to install includes MS office in wine, this was necessary for both the excel connector for data loading and for running MSAccess data bases given to me by clients for data integration, I found that while some would open in OpenOffice older Access BDs and passworded BDs failed to open, this has been a problem as many of the businesses moving to salesforce are relatively small and in the process of moving their data from pokey tools the put together on the fly when they started up to their first full enterprise class applications. Development wise I am currently working on a new salesforce quotes app, the plan is to sell the app on the salesforce app exchange and publish the code under a free software license, possibly on sourceforge. I won't be publishing code until I get the app to Beta one at least so watch this space for the release announcement. Also I am currently looking for development work, contract or permanent. If you need salesforce dev, config or admin work let me know.

2009-10-11T17:35:00.000-07:00

Yay for Karmic Koala

Just upgraded to Karmic Koala, easiest upgrade ever. Seriously this is the first completely trouble free distro upgrade I've ever done. In the old days everything broke and I'd end up reinstalling, the last few times something minor broke and I fixed it, this time though everything seems to be working. Awesome work Ubuntu team.

2008-03-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

I use linux at work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yay!!!! That's right I now use Linux as part of my daily work. I found there were some issues that were easier to sort out using Linux then trying to do the same thing using windows (sometimes you just can't beat bash). So yesterday I grabbed VMware server and installed an Ubuntu 8.04 Beta VM. Works great. I still in the process of configuring things the way I want them, but so far I very happy with the results. Next step is to get Evolution talking to Exchange.

2008-03-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

Yay for Ubuntu Hardy

Upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 Alpha 6. I'd been having trouble video drivers in Gutsy for a while, they'd break, I'd edit xorg.conf to fix them and within a couple of days they'd break again, plus no matter what I did with gutsy I couldn't seem to get desktop effects to work. So this morning I got fed up and upgraded to Hardy. Yay, after a minimum of poking the Intel video drivers are finally working properly and desktop effects are working wonderfully. Next job will be to fiddle with Wifi and Webcam. Wifi looks to be an easier task on Hardy then it was on Gutsy too, Hardy is at least detecting the Atheros wireless chipset, even if no wireless options are appearing in Network Manager. In the meantime I'll continue to get by using my Netgear USB wifi adapter, which detects and runs just fine :) I haven't even poked webcam yet, but, one project at a time I guess.

2008-02-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

Long time no post

Well it's been a long time since I last posted here and a lot has changed in that time. Most of the changes have been personal, my wife and I separated and our divorce is pending. I've fallen in love with a wonderful girl named Julia and we are planning our future together, last night we discussed buying a condo together once my divorce is finalized. I've also changed jobs, I'm no longer working in call center hell and am now very happily working for a small software company as part of a 2 man technical support team. I'm still using and advocating free software every chance I get and I've been thrilled to see the growth of free software over the past couple of years. It seems everywhere you look these day's people are turning to free software, at work CVS and SVN are essential to our development processes. Even my parents are waiting with excitement for the new Ubuntu LTS release so they can play with the new toys I've had on my PC for awhile.
Speaking of my PC I've just acquired a shine new Toshiba laptop, now free of Vista and happily running Ubuntu. There have been a few frustrations with the new lappy, but I'll be covering that in greater detail in an upcoming review. In the meantime gentle readers it's great to be back.

2006-09-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

Delays, delays, delays…

September 28th, 2006

Well, so much for releasing the first episode of our podcast early last week, issues with audio, issues with the website and the fact that none of us has ever done this before caused the first episode we record to be sent to the scrap heap due to white noise and blanks spots in some segment, after some experimentation we seem to have resolved our issues and we will be recording again this weekend. In the meantime Jason, our web guru, has put together a very cool looking website. Jason is a really talented web developer/programmer and is currently looking for work, if you need some cool Ajaxy web stuff done contact him at jason at fenix dot ca. If things work out as planned we should have an episode online Tuesday or Wednesday, check it out.

2006-09-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

Putting together a podcast

Well for those who don’t already know, which is pretty much everyone who reads this, I’ve been putting together a Free Software oriented podcast. It’s been a long process 2 of the 4 guys I originally asked have already opted out due to time constraints, took ages trying to figure out how to record multiple mikes, spent a long night trekking around downtown Toronto looking for an open music store to buy a mixing board that cost far to much. But it all seems to be coming together, this weekend we are recording our first show. There’s still a long way way to go, our website is still being designed and may not be ready by the release of our first show and there’s still a lot to do. There are somethings of that we would like to ask the community t help us with, segment ideas, we need your ideas for the show, in particular if your working on a cool Free Software project and you want to come on the show for an interview about your project, we need mirrors for the show, and most importantly we need listeners. So if you are have ideas for the show, are interested in being interviewed or want to be a show mirror leave a comment on my blog or email us at radiofreesoftware at gmail dot com. As for folks who just want to listen to a show about FLOSS watch this space for our release annoucement early next week. Oh and one more thing at this point we’re working with a three man crew, one short, one bearded and one ginger so if anyone knows a bald Windows monkey in the Toronto area please get in touch, thanks.

2006-07-18T17:49:00.000-07:00

Reprieves, Successes and disappointments

Reprieve, with the death of my laptop I was left without the tool I use for most of my tech projects, including my blog and many other advocacy activities and open source activities. The main reason the loss was so crippling is that much of the spare time I find to work on such things is during my daily commute, 2 hours a day on the subway is a great time to work on such projects. The other reason the loss of the laptop was so annoying was that my laptop has for sometime also been my music player, so I've been faced with sitting in abject silence each day during my commute. Thanks to the astounding generosity of my parents I have been granted a reprieve in the form of the lone of their laptop, a barely use IBM R31.

Not only is this a reprieve it represents one of the advocacy successes I am most proud of, one of the conditions of the lone is that the laptop should be returned running Linux, and specifically a Gnome based distro upon its return. This decision reached after consultation with my dad, a former computer consultant for the board of education and adult education specialist, about how we could make the computer less threatening to my mom, who is in her 60s and the very definition of a computer n00b. After examining a number of desktop options, Windows, KDE, XFCE, Symphony OS, and of course Gnome we came to the conclusion that Ubuntu with Gnome was probably the best option for someone completely new to computing, Good work Gnome and Ubuntu boys!

Another recent success came at work, a co-worker and friend asked if I knew a way a group of guys he's working to set up a game development start up with could share documents over the Internet, I mentioned a couple of options including Novell iFolder (the solution he ended up picking). He then started asking why I was such a advocate for Free software, I explained about the 4 freedoms and how you should be free t run software anyway you want, how you should be able to learn how the software works by looking at the code, how you should be able to modify the software to fulfil your needs and how you should be free to share the software by distributing it, he got very excited by these ideals and I have been receiving regular reports on his explorations of Free software ever since, I think we may have a convert.

As for disappointments I guess the big one is that I won't be able to make it to Lugradio Live once again this year. None the less I want to take this opportunity to pimp this great event to the world, if you are anywhere near the UK get your ass to Wolverhampton this weekend, LRL 2006 sounds like it will be the FLOSS event of the year. Also if you are planning to attend LRL and are experiencing issues due to the impending UK rail strike check out the car pool page on the Lugradio Wiki.

Another disappointment is that the next Lugradio broadcast will be the last one of the season, it will be a long boring summer in their absence, thank god that Reverend Teds fantastic Novell Open Audio will be providing some cool listening materials over the summer.

2006-07-08T11:05:00.000-07:00

Tragic Loss

I regret to report the untimely death of my laptop, my IBM t23 has gone to laptop heaven, the video cable between the base and the monitor has broken inside the hing. After consulting with a team of top nerds it was decide that there was no surgery that could save the patient. You will be missed faithful friend.

Bono is a knob end

Some people may have wondered why I haven’t blogged about the new Defective By Design plan to petition former musician and left wing political thingy, Bono, to join the fight against digital restriction management. This is one campaign I will be sitting out, though I still believe the fight against DRM is an important part of the effort to create a truly free world culture and vital to the Free Software movement specifically and I will support defective by designs efforts in the future. I have two reasons for not supporting this petition, firstly Bono was long ago yesterdays man in the music industry and his left wing political views make him an inappropriate representative in either Washington or Ottawa these days. The other reason I won’t be petitiioning Bono is that the man is a knob end, if the mere fact that this foreigner would come to Canada and try to tell Canadians how to vote wasn’t offensive enough, his smarmy self serving speech at the Liberal leadership Conference a few years ago would have stripped away any lingering respect I might have had for the man. Twat

2006-06-29T17:44:00.000-07:00

Lazy Web, O' Lazy Web...

Help me O’ Lazy web find a free hosted web based email app that runs on Free Software and has a reasonable terms of service agreement? A recent discussion of the proprietary nature of some web apps has me rethinking my beloved google web apps, thus the new wordpress blog I’m trying out. Now I’m looking for a replacement for gmail, I’d like it to be open source and have a reasonable TOS agreement, no scanning my email for ads, no rights to everything I write, accessible from the web and free of cost. While i’m at it I’d like the moon on a stick.

2006-06-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

Chalk one up for the good guys, a rather smug Mac using orange sunglasses type friend of mine who has in the past made fun of me for my activism in regard to Free Software and fighting DRM called me the other day with a tale I'd heard before, he'd bought a new CD but it refused to play on his Mac. I asked him to read me all the labels on the CD and sure enough it had a "Plays for sure" label. I explained that this meant it would for sure not play on his Mac and advised him to return to HMV where he bought it. He was of course enraged by this, I pointed out that he had in the past told me I was being unreasonable for fighting DRM and that he thought that the Digital Restrictions Management on his iTunes music store music was reasonable even though such music can only be played in iTunes or on his iPod. Since then he has converted all his iTunes music to CD and signed up for Defectivebydesign. This Friday my friend will get is chance to let the bad guys know how e felt about being sold a purposely broken CD, the defectivebydesign guys are organizing a phone in campaign to RIAA execs to protest the selling such defective merchandise. Sign up today to join this heroic effort.
Of course the RIAA are not the only place you can get music, Lugradio's world famous Jono Bacon (see Jono at least someone spells it right) makes all his music freely available under permissive Creative Commons licences through his music site http://www.recreantview.org/, some pretty good stuff, the Banger Beat is particularly funny.
Speaking of Lugradio brings me to my next topic, the Lugradio crews recent discussion of the proprietary nature of most web apps and this article from OSweekly got me thinking about whether I should follow the very reverend Ted of Novell fame over to wordpress, they use open source software and they're terms of servce are quite reasonable, I'm currently running a trial of their service and if all goes well I may migrate in the near future. Now if only I could find a decent floss gmail substitute, oh well, baby steps.

2006-06-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

Bad news first, not going to make it to Lugradio Live 2006, had hoped to pull the cash together last minutes but couldn't make it happen. Maybe next year I guess.
In better news conversions to Linux continue unabated, people are really starting to see open source software as a real alternative. Since my last post I have had continued requests for Linux CDs at an unprecidented rate, as well as many more requests for support. As mentioned in my last post these support requests are somewhat of a double edged sword for me while I enjoy helping get newbies started the demands on my time can be extensive. One thing I have found to give me much needed respite from these support demands is the creation of a desktop HELP!!! icon, this links to the users IRC client, which is preset to #ubuntu on freenode. If the user encounters an issue they can hit the HELP!!! icon and ask for help from the experts on IRC, I'm told this has been a great help and it has certainly cut down on my service calls.
Matt Revell of Lugradio fame has started the Ubuntu Media Relations Team to act as a point of first contact between project members and the Media, this seems like a great way to help out the community. If you have experience dealing with the media and are interested helping out the community in a non coding manner this is a greate way to pitch in.

2006-06-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

Advocacy sometimes reminds me of gardening, you sow the seeds, tend the garden and eventually the crop comes in. The past few weeks have been like harvest time, I've burned more Linux CDs for people in the last three weeks then I have in the past year. Of course success is a double edged sword at times, more friends and co-workers switching to Linux means doing more free tech support. This something I don't mid so much with Linux usually, hold the new users hand through initial install, show them how to add repositories, install software and do updates and walk away, no call next weekend cause they got a virus or spyware infestation, no blue screen of death, life is good. That said this latest rush to Linux is stretching even my vast patience, imagine working tech support in a call center for 9 hours a day and then, when your day in hell is finally over and you want to fall down somewhere and not think about anything going to a friend house for 3 or 4 more hours of tech support. I'm either going to have to find a better way to do this stuff or start charging more for my after work tech support then my usual fee of beer. That said, and all whining aside the recent uptake of linux is awesome, I'm watching the world change around me and in some small way I feel I helped make that happen, it's a good feeling.

Of course the open source community can't take all the credit for our recent successes, some of that credit has to go to our cmpetition for completely screwing the pooch, speculation on yet further delays of Microsofts nearly feature free Windows Vista and reviews like Computerworlds 20 things you won't like about Windows Vista certainly aren't helping them, it's always fun watching your enemies self destruct.

If you haven't yet heard about the FSFs fantastic new anti-DRM campaign defective by design head on over to defectivebydesign.org to sign up to help out with this heroic effort to liberate our culture from the cartels and monopolies. Following the hugely successful protest outside a Microsoft conference in Seattle their next planned action will be a June 10th protest of Applestores worldwide, stay tuned for more info.

2006-05-22T19:30:00.000-07:00

And now for a commercial break... Ok then, just give me a break from the misuse of the word commercial. This is something that is starting to piss me off, people, notably proprietary software companies, using the term 'commercial software' to describe proprietary software when making comparisions to Open Source. As if software from companies like IBM, Novell, Redhat and Sun are somehow noncommercial because they're open source. The implication is that Open Source Software is somehow not as good because it's written by amatures and hobbyists. This is completely untrue, to infer that Linux, Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Hula or any of the dozens of other commercial Open Source packages are coded by developers who are anything less the professional is insulting to the IT pros across dozens of companies, who work on these packages, and shows a deep lack of understanding of the way Open Source software is developed. The Open Source community is the ultimate meritocracy. Where a proprietary software developer can bury crappy code in a proprietary binary, away from prying eyes, Open Source by it's very nature is open to pier review, those who are able to make valid, high quality, contributions are recognized their participation is encouraged by their piers. Those who commit crap code are easily identified and quickly marginallized, the quality is what matters when everyone can see what you did. Eric Raymond said that "many eyes make all bugs shallow", I'll go him one better and say the very prospect of many eyes keeps developers on their toes and conversely the prospect of no one seeing the code leaves developers the temptation to leave in that ugly little fudge they threw in pre alpha to get it working. This is why it really bugs me when people misuse terms like commercial to infer poor quality or reliability in open source software, it simply isn;t true.

2006-05-11T04:03:00.000-07:00

I have been following the melodrama that is Massachusetts adoption of the Open Document Format for a while now. The latest salvo from Microsoft's proxies reveals their increasing panic. In their latest comedy gold Melanie Wyne of the laughably named Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) states "The RFP reveals that the choice presented by the previous ITD bureaucrats – i.e., ODF-compliant desktops for state agencies are the only viable options for citizens to have access to their data in the future – was purposely exclusionary, being primarily designed to distort the competitive landscape."

"In other words, it had little to do with access to documents, and everything to do with excluding proprietary software providers."

This is utter horse shit. First off ODF is a fully documented open standard which may be freely implemented by anyone who wants to do so, including Microsoft. Indeed one of the first office suites to support the ODF format is Star Office, a proprietary product produced by Sun Microsystems.

Secondly what the hell is wrong with excluding proprietary software, it makes perfect sense that an organization as large as a state goverement would want to use software that they have access to the source for and are free to modify to meet their needs.

Finally it seems that Microsoft's proxies have forgotten the cardinal rule of the business world, the customer is always right. In the case of a state government this means the only people who have a right to tell Massachusetts they're not doing the right thing are the citizens of Massachusetts, not mega corporations or their lobby groups.

2006-05-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

A lot has happened since my last post, first the good stuff I have helped 2 friends convert their laptops to linux. This is always fun, especially when stuff happens that is a total happy surprise, on one of the 2 machine the on board wifi which hadn't worked under Windows since my friend acquired it second hand fired up and started working under Dapper, cool. On the same laptop we got XGL going, this is perhaps the greatest tool I have seen for advocating Linux, people just love stuff that looks cool and Windows doesn't even come close.
Speaking of cool looking stuff I've recently been playing Tremulous, a new fully GPLed 3d multiplayer first person shooter, this game is very cool, dark and dangerous a very cool community is growing up around this great game. This is the type of game that will start bringing casual gamers to Linux. I believe it will be sometime before hardcore gamers can move to Linux full time. I also believe this isn't really a huge problem, most people aren't serious fulltime gamers, they're casual gamers who want to know they will be able to find a few cool games to play. Games like Tremulous are starting to make that happen.
I am beginning to feel the need to push my advocacy to a new level,
so I've been thinking about starting a learn desktop Linux class in my off time, I figure I'd need to acquire about a dozen cheap laptops and find a space I can rent a couple of nights a week I can teach about a dozen students a class maybe 2 nights a week. This would let me share Linux with many new people and give me a chance to stretch my training muscles. If anyone has done anything like this in their community I'd love to hear about your experiences.
Finally I am in the process of looking for a new position, if you're looking for someone with experience supporting Linux, Windows, mobile devices and networks and experience with corporate training please get in touch with me at tjoyce1971 at gmail dot com

2006-04-25T19:39:00.000-07:00

Well I'm a KDE user, at least til the weekend when I once again reinstall Ubuntu. Yes one again Gnome went away, not sure why as I hadn't played with any settings, installed any software or done any updates during the previous session.
After trying repeatedly to fix the issue from bash, I remembered,on the point of dispair that I had previously installed the Kubuntu-Desktop, before giving up I thought I'd see if KDE still worked, it did, brlliant!
Beng a KDE user again after two years with Gnome has been an interesting experience there are many things to like about KDE, Kpackage to start with, this awesome package manage can handle installing both DEBs and RPMs in Ubuntu, simply and easily. Super Karamba is another cool KDE app, allowing the installation of various desktop applets I'm currently running the AeroClock applet(a cool tranparent clock) and the Techmon Lite system monitor, Another very impressive thing about KDE are the cool screen animations menus seem to slide out of some secret drawer, cartoon style balloons unfurl themselves before your eyes as you mouse over icon. Also deeply appreciated is the completeness of the Kmenu, every graphical app can be accessed frim there as well as many terminal apps, That said all is not wine and roses it is much slower then Gnome and this can get to be an issue when trying to run already slow apps like OpenOffice.org and I find myself switching to a simple windows manager to do more processor intensive things like gaming. Still all in all a good experience, I wouldn't choose KDE as a full time replacement for Gnome just yet but I can see why others choose to use it full time.

2006-04-22T05:53:00.000-07:00

Aaah the joys of using Alpha software, more trouble with Dapper updates. Tuesday night ran the updates suggested by the update manager, didn't reboot right away as reboot was not required, when I did next reboot the system comes up to the login screen but on login no gnome, just a blank screen, reinstall. did the same upgrade, this time no issues, weird

2006-04-12T20:34:00.000-07:00

Quick update, Realplayer is finally working, strange thing is I used the same search string in Google as before but this time the solution popped right up, Ubuntu forums rock.
Had some fun figuring out how to crop and resize my picture with the gimp, fun image I'm drinking out of a coconut in Jamaica, sent the image off to Jono to be added to planet advocacy.

2006-04-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

Had a frustrating weekend Linux wise, mostly my own fault, due to incorrectly editing my repositories list prior to trying to apt-get dist-uprgade to Dapper I managed to toast my laptop. Fortunately I have my home directory on a separate partition so my info was safe but trying to reinstall fresh was a trial, the first CD I burned was bad and failed to install, after three attempts with this CD I bit the bullet and burned another one, this one installed and everything worked fine until I attempted a smart upgrade with synaptic, this involved a kernel upgrade which forced a reboot, after the reboot my wifi card wouldn't detect, nor would any other PCMCIA devices, weird. After some research I found a reference to this issue, apparently there was no known way to correct this once it had happen but it was possible to prevent it from happening by editing the blacklist to prevent installation of the patch that causes the problem. So reinstall again, edit blacklist, upgrade working, finally. This needs to be fixed before dappers final release. Now to get all the other stuff I need, Java (yes I know it's nonfree but I need it), free flash plugin (not as critical as java, if everything doesn't work exactly like macromedia flash I'll live), codecs (some of the podcasts I listen to are only available in mp3), last challenge is Realplayer (yes I know it's nonfree also but the BBC doesn't offer a free format, hopefully that will change soon) this one has me stumped it appears to require a lib that is not available in dapper at this time. I did some quick research and couldn't find an easy answer, I will try to reseach this further over the weekend hopefully I'll come up with something, there really needs to be something like Automatix, EasyUbuntu or Debcentral Config for Dapper and it needs to be available by the time the stable release comes out, there's no way someone new to Linux is going to figure this stuff out on their own.
One small victory today. a web developer friend at work asked me if knew of a good WYSIWYG html editor, NVU wasn't powerful enough and he can't afford the commercial stuff, I showed him Quanta and he was very impressed, he's trying it out tonight and promisses me a report when I see him next, since he's already Linux friendly I think we can chalk this up as one for the good guys.
One more great thing, heard back from Jono Bacon today it looks like my little slice of the web is going to be syndicate to the wider world via planet advocacy, and if that's not a great reason to blog more I don't know what is.

2006-04-05T04:55:00.000-07:00

Went to Linuxcaffe a couple of weeks ago great place excellent coffee, great music, free wifi and a really friendly owner. The whole operations runs on free software, they let punters burn free music on cds and dvds and they will even burn you a copy of your distro of choice. If you're free software fan in or near the Toronto you should stop by and support this great local business, mention that you're a Linux fan and the staff will treat you like long lost familly. If you are thinking of starting your business based on free software the caffe owners are interested in franchising, which would be a cool way to beat Starbucks.
While at the Linuxcaffe I met up with a couple of guys from the Lugradio forums, Mig21 and jamonation , cool guys, it was good to let the inner geek out.

2006-03-14T17:58:00.000-08:00

There is no one quite as zealous as a new convert, the friend I talked about switching to linux in my last post has continued to make progress, though frustrated by some driver issues, the ATI drivers aren't all they could be, he only has basic mouse functions on his 6 button laser mouse, two button plus wheel due to not yet supported, and while some functions on his ATI remote wonder are working I have yet to figure out how to configure the rest, he is now living in Linux full time. This weekend I helped him add a second distro on a second partition, Ubuntu, he perfers Kubuntu but all things take time. Friday night I'm going to bring over Kororaa XGL for him to play with, he has an ATI 9600+ so the eye candy should be awesome. More updates to come.

2006-02-27T15:41:00.000-08:00

Fun weekend, spent Sunday helping a friend install Linux for the first time, Mepis, this was one of the more rewarding experiences I've had lately. My friend kept pointing out cool things linux did that windows didn't, things that I long ago accepted as normal, he was amazed by the number of programs that were preinstalled, we installed flash and java, didn't bother with mp3 and libdvdcss as he has no speakers at this time, that is a project for another day, we installed the ati drivers, this was to easy. He quickly got the hang of the file system and was intrigued by the command line, I told him to check out learn Unix in 10 minutes by freeengineer.org, this is a great resource for new users and those new to the command line. Synaptic was another revelation , with the debian repositories enabled there was an amazing collection of packages available, I'm used to this kind of choice but my friend seemed to have trouble believing it was all free. I explained the idea that software should be free as in speech and free as in beer, the philosphy behind it real got him excited, that he could give it to anyone and install it on as many machines as he liked. We setup his machine as a dual boot with Windows but when I offered to test the link to Windows in grub his response was "Oh, I'm not going back to that." I will hold his hand over the coming weeks, but I think we have a convert!

2006-02-17T02:24:00.000-08:00

I was recently ask to explain why FLOSS was more ethical then proprietary software by someone new to the concept of open source, after trying several of the more advanced arguements put forward by the likes of RMS, Raymond and Lessig I realized I was only confusing my questioner and that it was time for a much more simple explaination, here's what I came up with. "At some point when most people were growing up we had someone in our lives who cared about us and tried to teach us right from wrong, it could be your mom or dad, a teacher, an aunt or uncle or someone else, right?" Questioner "My mom", me "Great, and at some point when your mom was teaching you right from wrong she probably taught you that it was a good thing to share, right?" "Yeah" "Bill Gates and the proprietary software guys say if you share software you're stealing and commiting a crime, the free software community on the other hand wants you to share it's software cause like your mom we think sharing is good. What you need to ask your self is who do you think is a more moral person, your mom or Bill Gates?" "My mom of course" "Now do you understand why Free Software is better morally then proprietary?" "Yes" Try this arguement it seems to work.
In other news Mig21 and I are working on putting together a Lugradio fan meet up in conjunction with the Seneca College Linux Club Install Fest June 3rd if you are interested watch this space or check out the thread ont the Lugradio forums for more details.

2006-02-06T15:57:00.000-08:00

Iriver angst! installed the absolute newest libgphoto and gphoto2 software and it detects my Iriver perfectly but when I try to upload a file it tells me that it is unable to claim the device. I have tried shutting down any programs I can think of that might be trying to connect with the device but still no joy. If anyone knows a solution to this problem please let me know.

2006-01-30T19:55:00.000-08:00

Well so much for blogging more in the new year, been a very busy time lately since my last post a lot has happened. First off I am no longer a tech support nerd, I now train tech support nerds. Training is great and I really feel like I'm making peoples lives better, several of my student are nerds and we have talked Linux several times. Also at work they have started a linux server project, the IT staff consulted me on which linux distro to use, despite my temptation to recommend debian I ended up recommending CentOS, due more to corporate acceptability of Redhat and the fact that there are likely some admins familliar with Redhat then anything else.

Iriver Instanity, after frequent pimping of the Iriver on Lugradio, I got my new T30 home only to discover that Iriver are no longer compatible with Linux. further research show that the Iriver folks have switched from USM to the MTP protocol in Windows media player 10. Luckily the MTP protocol appears to be based on the PTP protcol used for digital camerasand is suported in the latest developer build of Gphoto2, I'll have to compile from source but should be no problem, plus plus geek points.

2006-01-03T02:27:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year to all, hope everyone enjoyed the holiday. Now that the holidays are over I hope to blog more regularly. I picked up the latest edition of Hub Digital Living (a free computer mag in the Toronto area) the other day and was thrilled to find three articles mentioning open source software, the first article part their DV, or not to DV series, was an entire article dedicated to FLOSS video editing tools, this article was well worth the read, even if they mistakenly refer to the GPL as the "General Purpose Licence", if your looking to do some video editing this article certainly provides a place to start. Open source software was also prominently discussed in the latest Moving to Mac article which refers to both OpenOffice and Firefox, although I was surprised that there was no mention of Camino the Mozilla Browser for Mac. Finally Firefox emerged as the clear winner in the Browser Wars article beating out IE, Opera and Netscape. It's always good to see the mainstream media mention FLOSS and this issue of Hub really shows how mainstream FLOSS has become.

2005-12-23T02:15:00.000-08:00

Merry Ho Ho! I have given up on trying to get answers from the politians, after several calls to each party I have completely failed to get a hold of anyone who has the slightest idea what I'm on about. In my riding it is unfortunately a race between the Liberals and NDP, the Tories have no hope in this riding. I am therefore going to hold my nose and Vote for Jack Layton, for the simple reason that I'd rather my money be squandered then stolen.
On the subject of linux games I have been given shit for not mentioning BurgerSpace an awesome clone of the classic BurgerTime, this game is hours of fun.
If any one is looking for a cool way to do VPN my buddy Vito sent me a link to this cool looking product Hamachi, seems like a cool way to do VPN, although why in the world they named it after Sushi I have no idea.

2005-12-18T06:51:00.000-08:00

Still haven't called the political parties, working in a call centre one tends to put off talking on the phone as much as possible. I have been following the debate over Linus Torvalds post to the Gnome Usability mailing list, this really is a tempest in a teapot, if that's how Linus feels he is entitled to his opinion. Personally I now prefer the Gnome desktop, though I was a KDE user until switching to Ubuntu. In part at least I can agree with Linus, Gnome doesn't offer enough advanced options in it's GUI settings menus, for some advanced functions it is occasionally necessary to enable them from the terminal window. What I'm not sure about is if this is a bad thing, the position of the Gnome usability people is that to many options confuse people and that anyone who knows enough to want to use the advanced options knows enough to enable them from the command line. Again I'm not sure this is really an acceptable answer, many users in the Windows world who are not power users in a general way will figure out the advanced options to do particular things they want to do, if we in the open source community want to attract those people to Linux we must provide graphical access to those options. That said the answer is not KDEs cacophony of buttons and check boxes, some of these confuse even me, and I'm quite geekish, and the look ugly as sin. Perhaps the answer is something more along the line of the current Gnome menus but with an advanced button thrown in that brings up an advanced menus with additional features, this seems like the best of both worlds. One thing the usability people need to remember is that a feature a user can't use is unusable.
I often hear people complain about the state of gaming on Linux but there really are some cracking good open source games out there, I killed most of yesterday playing Freeciv, this open source implementation of Sid Meyers classic Civilization has developed into something far beyond the original game, with hundreds of customizable options and the ability to play networked as well as single player games against computer generated opponents, this game available for Windows and Mac as well as Linux is well worth the download. Another open source game to which I have recently become addicted is Kbounce, this excellent KDE game requires the player to trap the bouncing balls in no more then 25% of the screen, this is harder then it sounds especially as there are more balls added at each level. Unfortunately your Windows and Mac using friends will have to sit this one out, another reason to move to Linux. If you like platform games check out Blob Wars, Metal Blob Solid, this interesting platform shoot em up is great fun, it's available for Linux, Windows, Mac and AmigaOS4. The only frustration with this game is I can't figure out how to get passed level 4 if anyone has figured out the secret of this level please let me know. Finally now and then everybody needs to frag, there are now a fair number of great shoot em ups available for Linux, but most are commercial proprietary software, for open source purists who feel the need for some blood and gore choices are more limited, fortunately there's FreeDoom a complete Open Source first person shooter base on the doom engine. Some of the levels in this game appear to need fleshing out but whets there is great fun and good for many hours of fragging.
Ash and I are off to my parents this afternoon for an early X-mas, on our return I hope to motivate myself to call politians and find out more about the positions of the political parties on matters open source. I may post an update later today.

2005-12-15T09:26:00.000-08:00

I have decided to go with a MythTV box as my next project, I like the idea of building something I'm really going to use day to day and that my wife can enjoy to. Also, this will finally give me the push I've been needing to buy a decent TV. I've been follwing the progress of Lugradio presenter Jono Bacon with his MythTV box and it sounds fairly do able, and lots of fun. I have heard oe slightly worrying thing, someone was telling me that standard TV tuner cards don't work in Canada, have not been able to confirm this, if anyone has more info please pass this on. I still have had no contact with the political parties, getting home to late to call, I hope to get in touch swith them this weekend, I am slightly annoy that there has been complete silence in response to my emails. One would think the parties would want to respond to requests of this type of info relatively quickly, esspecially during an election.

2005-12-13T02:00:00.000-08:00

Stil no word from the political parties, I will call them after work tonight. Been playing with the Epiphany web browser, it's ok, but it's no Firefox, I miss my extentions. Been Pimping the ubuntu again, one of my more talented students instaled it this weekend. further updates tonight.

2005-12-07T15:59:00.000-08:00

Productive night last night, sent emails to the 3 major political parties asking for info on their IT policies. No responses so far, but I kind of figured it would take a couple of days to hear back, if I've heard nothing by Monday. Tried to contact the Bloc to but I don't read enough French to find the contact us link on their site, if anyone who does read French wants to help me out please contact me and I'll forward you the questions I'm asking for you to translate and pass on, I'd appreciate it.
I'm assisting with a training class right now and one of my students asked to recommend a Linux distro, I recommended two, Ubuntu and Mepis, as he wants a full graphical environment, does anyone have any other suggestions? Been thinking about doing something interesting with my test box, either MythTV or Asterick has anyone tried setting up either of these type of systems? It's a duron 900mhz with 256 of ram so it may not be beefy enough for either of these projects in which case I will probably wait til the new year and buy a cheap box at factory direct or some other cheap PC store, that may be a better idea anyway as the case of the test machine is ugly as sin.

2005-12-06T02:43:00.000-08:00

Hi all, I am a Tech support geek from Toronto, Canada. I have been working with and advocating Linux and open source software for the past several years. I have started this blog in order to pimp cool pieces of software I have found and discuss open source issues.
One f the first things I want to pimp is Lugradio, I have recently become a huge fan of this awesome Linux podcast. Hosted by four of the funniest blokes in the opensource community this British podcast addresses serious open source issues in a light hearted funny way, it's definitly worth a listen.
In upcoming posts I intend to talk about the the positions of the Canadian political parties with regard to IT and opensource issues as well as cool apps and distros.