What’s your bug #1?

Evan Prodromou recently asked the following on the laconica-dev list:

So, Ubuntu has a pretty famous Bug #1:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
The title is “Microsoft has a majority market share”. I think it’s a great part of the Ubuntu culture, because it focuses people on what they want to do with Ubuntu.

Our bug #1, by the way, is “/doc/contact”.
http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/1
Since this was long-ago fixed, I’d like to wipe this ticket* and replace it with an overall project purpose, like Ubuntu’s. But what would the bug be?

It got me thinking – and not just about Identi.ca and open microblogging as a federated, distributed alternative to centralized approaches like Twitter.

Moose and Squirrel - photo by Paul Lannuier.

No More Talkin’ Blackjack Bluetooth Blues

Thanks to Jay’s Technical Talk I’ve finally got my Cingular Blackjack working with my laptop (Kubuntu) via Bluetooth.

This means I can turn on internet sharing on the phone and get online from my laptop while on the Acela between NY and Boston, without the tether cable.

I’ve got a Dell Latitude D810, running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, and a cheap IOGear USB Bluetooth adapter, model #GBU221.

The “bluetooth” package in the Ubuntu universe repository is a metapackage which installs the “bluez” utilities – I have that installed as well.

All I had to do to get online via Bluetooth connection was:

1. Start bluetooth on the blackjack, since I don’t normally leave it running
2. Start internet connection sharing on the blackjack
3. On the laptop, do: hcitool scan (this looks for nearby bluetooth devices – note the address of your phone, which is a hexidecimal string like 12:34:56:78:90:ab)
4. Issue the command: sudo pand -c
   
   , using the address discovered above
5. Issue the command: sudo dhclient bnep0

Of course, once you know your phone’s address you can skip step 3.

I also tried the various instructions for tethering to USB and using the Gnome PPP application, but for me this would connect and automatically disconnect. Bluetooth’s preferrable for me anyway as that way I have one less cable to carry.

This relationship is off to a bad start

Coming across Roger Dooley’s post about Sears and their privacy policy (Sears- Marketers vs Lawyers, with a tip of the hat to Make the Logo Bigger) I decided to go check out the site he references, My SHC Community.

Unfortunately, no such luck (cue the “No soup for you!” clip from Seinfeld):

Was the problem that I was running Firefox rather then Netscape (Netscape? Really?), or that I was running Linux?

Read more…

Moving Windows from Dual Boot to Virtualization (Help!)

When I initially set up my new laptop, I opted for dual boot, assuming that from time to time in client work I’d need to be able to get to windows applications. Now that I’m moving to virtualization, I’ve run into an issue with my shared partition.

Hoping to avoid significant “I can’t get to that file now” problems, and not wanting to try out read/write mount of NTFS+ in Linux, I took a multi-partition approach, breaking up the hard drive thusly:

1. ext3 format, onto which Ubuntu is installed
2. ntfs format, onto which Windows XP is installed
3. vfat (aka Fat32) format, as a shared partition accessible from Windows or Linux
4. small linux swap partition, ignored by windows

This was great, as it enabled me to put things like firefox profiles on the shared drive, and then whether I booted Windows or Kubuntu I ended up with the same set of bookmarks, cookies, and the like.

It also meant all my “documents” (client folders, project folders, and so on) went to the shared partition. (In windows I mapped “My Documents” to point to what it sees as the E: drive, and in Linux mapped the mounted drive to /media/shared/).

Since then, however, I’ve decided that rather than dual booting I should move windows into a virtualization container, and run Windows XP inside VMWare Player without having to reboot.

(Experienced virtualization users at this point have likely already anticipated the problem).

Read more…

So Many Conferences, So Little Time

Lots of great conferences going on right now – wish I could be at all of them.

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule – there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.