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Friday, 12 March, 2010

12 Mar

I have decided to go to LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, WA next month. I almost went to last year’s LinuxFest, but something got in the way. This year, I have almost the entire year planned out, and this was included in my plans.

The only problem I have had with this decision is trying to find out exactly where in Bellingham the thing was being held. Usually when someone does an event like this, they provide the following on the site home page: who, what, when, where and why. The ‘where’ portion on their web page just says Bellingham, WA. Well, Bellingham is a big town – couldn’t they narrow that down a bit? Instead of my having to spend 20 minutes on their web site trying to find out that it will be held at Bellingham Technical College? That information was in a tier 3 page, with an unobtrusive link only from the Logistics page.

Despite my problems with their information about where the LinuxFest will be held, I am sure I will enjoy it. I intend to take my teardrop trailer over there and camp out at a campground close to the event. I hope the weather is nice.


I may end up at an auction tonight. I have been monitoring their web site for months now, and this is the first time I think I may actually participate. I have stopped by there on the way home from work several times, when a picture on their web site grabs my attention. The pictures have always been more interesting the the actual items, but maybe this time will be different.


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Thursday, 11 March, 2010

11 Mar

I am going to take my quad-core computer to the NILUG meeting on Saturday. I have installed four or five lightweight Linux distros on it as virtual machines, so I can demo each of the environments. These distros are particularly effective on old machines with limited resources. Most of the distros will run in 256MB of memory and with less than 5GB of hard disk.

The whole purpose of this exercise is to show people that there are alternatives to Windows 98, etal, for their old computers. Those alternatives are modern, fast and virus-free.


I got a phone call from the DMV last night. It turns out that the license tags for my Dodge Stealth, which I thought I had lost, had never made it to me. They were returned to the DMV last June because of insufficient address concerns. Since there is only one Michael Burton in Hayden, ID and I’ve been here for 26 years, I can’t think of what the idiot at the Post Office was thinking. Or not thinking. Anyway, I have to pick the tags up today so I will be legal when I use the car to pull my teardrop trailer to Bellingham, WA next month.


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Wednesday, 10 March, 2010

10 Mar

I added two new podcast feeds to my hpodder client and it wanted to download 47 ‘new’ podcasts. So I am firing that program. I have downloaded gpodder and I will use that instead, starting tomorrow morning. I have already imported most of the feeds I had in hpodder, but there are a couple more I need to add.


This weekend will be busy. There is a North Idaho Linux Users Group meeting in Post Falls on Saturday, where we will continue helping the uninitiated with the mysteries and goodness of Linux.

On Sunday, I will go over to the Spokane County fairgrounds to attend the Spokane Rock Rollers Gem and Mineral show. They hold a pretty good show, so it should be very interesting. This year the only thing I could use would be a slab saw, but they cost a lot of money, so I won’t be looking real hard.

Sometime this weekend, I will also need to back up the NILUG web site and upgrade its software. I will probably change the web site theme, too.


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Tuesday, 9 March, 2010

09 Mar

I am thinking about taking a Linux certification exam. To that end, I am reading up on the kinds of things they will ask on the exam. A lot of that is boring, as I already know it. The book I am using has over 1,000 pages and I am on page 64, so it will take me a while to get through it all. We will see how persistent I am.

I have another book that is about the same length, which is devoted to certification. It’s an O’Reilly book called “LPI Certification in a Nutshell”. Maybe that’s the one I should be reading. Not having an ebook reader has certain advantages, and devoting my time to something more constructive is one of them.


As I predicted, since I removed the snow plow and changed to summer tires, the weather people are now predicting snow. Typical of the weather to do this.


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Monday, 8 March, 2010

08 Mar

Looking for a replacement for the crappy, Cooler ebook reader, I went over to the Barnes and Noble in Spokane on Saturday to evaluate their Nook ebook reader. There were at least three things I didn’t like about it, so I didn’t purchase one.

The built-in fonts for the device are limited. There are only two fonts, and neither of them can be enlarged a lot. I enlarged to the largest size and I almost could not read the result, as it was too small. That alone would prevent me from purchasing the device.

The Nook is slow. The Cooler was slow to initialize, but the Nook is slow when you turn pages. Way too slow for me.

Finally, the Nook, like the Kindle, is positioned to sell books and periodicals, not just allow you to read them. That is its main object. There are way too many controls on it that require you to connect to a web site and buy something, that something being way overpriced. This reminds me of the printer industry and their insistence that their printer ink is more precious than diamonds.

I also went to a couple of ebook reader comparison web sites and viewed the comparisons. The bottom line is, I won’t be getting a new reader soon.


I started my spring chores on Sunday. I put away the snow plow blade on my truck and changed the tires on my car back to regular tires. This probably means we’ll be getting some snow in the next week, but I will just drive the truck to work if we do.


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Friday, 5 March, 2010

05 Mar

I discovered that the latest version of MonoDevelop has the stetic window designer built into it. This is a very good thing. It will allow me yet another way to create open source programs without using commercial software.

I played around with MonoDevelop yesterday and have an idea of what it would take to convert gdvdslides over to C#. There is a major difference in the way that stetic lays out controls in windows, though. You have to use containers to lay out the controls, and sometimes it requires a lot of containers. In Lazarus, the layout is static and you can anchor the control to any of the four edges of a window, so the Lazarus controls can act just like the ones laid out with stetic.

Another major difference is how events are connected. I haven’t played with that yet, but I expect it to conform to the ’signals’ and ’sinks’ method used by the underlying GTK library.


My ebook reader quit completely on me yesterday. Again. I will be looking into a real ebook reader. In the meantime, if you entertain thoughts of purchasing a Cooler reader, my advice is don’t do it.


So, mail delivery has gone from twice daily, seven days a week, down to once a day, 5 days a week. The more days you eliminate from delivery, the more money will be saved, so why not three days a week, or even two days? This is a typical solution to a problem caused by a government-run business. This is what always happens when government is involved in business. Got that, GM? AIG?


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Thursday, 4 March, 2010

04 Mar

I spent yesterday debugging the log file reader I am doing at work. There is still quite a ramp-up for me with Java and the Eclipse IDE. I have the reader running, but it doesn’t seem to be reading log files. I will work on that today.

Next up for me at work is to modify our report program to do more emailing. I will have to dig up some information about this on the Internet. I did some of this when I was working on the program for the latest release, but the new request is more complex and I need to get and store more (encrypted) information about the person who is doing the emailing.


I installed Mono and MonoDevelop on Ubuntu 8.10 yesterday. There was a plugin for MonoDevelop called stetic that I installed, which allowed me to do the kind of window design I am used to doing in Delphi and Lazarus. Way cool. The problem is, the stetic plugin does not sem to be available for Ubuntu 9.04. I am seriously unhappy about that.


I took the night off and finished re-reading War of Honor, so I haven’t done anything around the house that I should be doing.


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Wednesday, 3 March, 2010

03 Mar

At work, I started to test the Java log file reader I’ve been writing and found that I no longer have a valid way to do that. In the six months or so since I’ve done any Java stuff at work, I knew there had been changes due to the brand new console we wrote in Air and Flex. But I didn’t expect those changes to ripple in to our manager, which is an entirely separate system (although there are communication interfaces).

So I had to get someone to help me set up my system for the new software. What a pain. And it will all change on Friday, when we transition from CVS to Subversion for our change control.

At any rate, my system should now be set up so I can test the new log file reader. That should be fun…


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Not so silly, is it?


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Tuesday, 2 March, 2010

02 Mar

I’m not having much luck getting the latest (alpha) version of Lazarus to work. I posted the problem on the Lazarus forum and the suggestions that came back on how to fix the problem did not fix it. I still get a resource compilation error. I even get one on an entirely new project. There is something fundamentally wrong with the Lazarus alpha build.

The reason I am concentrating on this new version of the Lazarus IDE is that there are many fixes in it for problems I had to work around in gdvdslides. It certainly would be nice to put drag and drop back in the program.


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Monday, 1 March, 2010

01 Mar

The NILUG technical meeting was very good. I helped two new people put Ubuntu Linux on their IBM laptops. I also removed Lazarus from my laptop and installed the latest version. The only problem with doing that was an error I got when compiling gdvdslides. I will look into the error tonight.


I replaced a 25 year old bathtub faucet on Saturday. It was tough to get the faucet out, but the replacement was very easy to install. And it works better than the original one ever did.

I also re-worked my personal bookmarks page. It still uses collapsing menus, but the coding for that is very different and I like the way they work a lot better.


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