Diamondcard rocks!

Posted on July 30, 2007 by Trick

I’ve been travelling for the last two weeks and have been trying (oh so hard) to get internet calling set up properly on my laptop.  The router in the flat I’m staying in is a POS, and is giving me a very hard time, so I have yet to make a proper phone call other than just testing.  However in the mean time, I’ve discovered Diamondcard as it is the recommended service for PC-to-Phone calling in Ekiga.

Diamondcard not only has a gateway for PC-to-Phone calling, but they also provide an international calling card service that you can dial to from most any country in the world.  The rates for the US are incredible – 1.7 cents/minute.  I talked with my family last night (bragging about le tour) for an hour — and it costed me all of $1.

I’m looking forward to getting PC-to-Phone set up properly, but regardless I have to recommend Diamondcard if you’re looking for a calling card + IP Phone service.  Thanks to the cool crew at Diamondcard!

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paris et le tour!

Posted on July 29, 2007 by Trick

So as a part of me taking a crazy vacation, I made it to Paris (for a whopping 24 hours) with one goal: The Tour de France!

Photos to make anyone who wasn’t there jealous:

BreakawayContador!Eiffel Tower

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GUADEC followup

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Trick

Wowzers, what a great time! Was intending to write about each day individually, but that’s certainly out of the question now. GUADEC was a great experience and I’m hooked on the community! A big thanks to everyone who helped put GUADEC ’07 together.

My favorite bits:

  • Staying at the hostel. It was a helluva long walk and really sucked on the rainy days, but it was a new experience. Forced random strangers to hang out and I met some cool people. Wish I would’ve gotten the names of the two guys running the hostel; they were very laid back.
  • There were some killer keynotes; most importantly:
    • Alex’s presentation of PyroDesktop. I don’t take much stock in the comments of folks who don’t like this technology. It’s something we’ve never seen before, and I think the coolest part is the potential to draw a new crowd of developers to the desktop! Alex, Chris & company: keep up the good work!
    • Havoc and Bryan’s presentation of the Gnome Online Desktop. Super sweet guys. Everyone loves integration. Now, lets see it happen!
    • Doc Searls’ closing keynote. Doc is a funny man. “Now bend over and give me some content!”
  • And my favorite sessions:
    • Larry’s presentation of F-Spot and the next wave of development. F-Spot rocks!
    • Telepathy and Tubes. You’ve heard the raves of others; I don’t need to spell it out here.
    • Joe’s presentation on Beagle and metadata joyfulness. Joe is a funny man.
    • Kudos to Jimmy K for holding his own during his talk on the new main menu development.
    • The Geodata standards project — creating a totally free database of mapping information.  Cool!
  • The Walkabout.  What a great bar.

Many thanks to all the folks who made going out and drinking absolutely hilarious, including Gabriel, Aaron, Michael, Aiden, Rodney, Toms, any anyone else I’ve missed!

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Going to Paris!

Posted on July 19, 2007 by Trick

This is mostly to brag to my siblings, if they haven’t heard yet…

I will be taking the Eurostar train from London on the 28th down to Paris, France.  Will stay the night, and then the next morning get up to watch the final stage of the Tour de France.  How cool is that?!

Any of my fellow free software hackers know a decent cheap place to stay a night in/around Paris?

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GUADEC Core Day 1

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Trick

Wowzers, what a day!

  • Jono’s talk was excellent.
  • Video taped the morning sessions in Recital; the F-Spot presentation was great. Larry is working on some sweet ass stuff. Sync’ing our photos online — integration with web services — I think a common theme is emerging!
  • Hacked on libgphoto2-sharp and Banshee. Frustrated like no other. gPhoto doesn’t have any magic support for the lame underlying case-sensitive-insensitive FAT32 filesystem. I guess I kinda figured this would Just Work. I’ve been fighting with this for six months and sure enough, I just need to hack 50 lines of code.
  • Telepathy: it’s tubular, dude!
  • Too many metas: Joe, thank you for taking care of my metadata. You need to publish what you want from us software hackers so we can help take our desktop to the next generation.
  • Havoc’s presentation was great. Full integration of Gnome and the web will make our desktop as useful as possible. Web services are all the rage these days and we’re all dying for that One Way To Link Them All…and I think this is the right approach. Bind our online lives with an online desktop and you’ll get my Mom to switch to Linux.
  • To compliment Havoc’s talk (not just because Gabriel is awesome) but Gabriel is right: we need a Free Service License. Havoc mentioned it, and Gabriel has already been thinking of it for a week.
  • Been meeting a bunch of people; particularly many of the Novell hackers I’ve heard of and met online several times.
  • Went and drank the free beer, and the nice cheap doubles of Southern Comfort…on an empty stomach. Ended up back at the hostel relaxing and eating a really nasty fish ‘n chips.  No, that’s not proper british fish ‘n chips…it was deep fried with french fries.  So greasy it made me nearly sick this morning…

Still grumpy about libgphoto2.  Going to see about fixing it in libgphoto2-sharp, and then push the changes down to libgphoto2 proper.

GUADEC continues!

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GUADEC Warmup Day 2

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Trick

So I arrived in London around 6 AM; everything went quickly.  Plane ride was fun, albeit quite cozy. Took the paddington express train, which is super slick, jumped on the underground to Euston, and wandered around for a while until my train up to Birmingham. The train ride up was so much faster than I had expected — we don’t have quick, cheap trains like that in the US! By the way — if you want a fun bit of adventure when travelling…don’t bring a map of your destination city with you. Half the fun is wandering around (looking quite touristy with my huge bag) and trying to figure out where the heck I am. Then buy a map :)

I’ve been meeting up with a number of GNOME folks that I’ve known over the last year and a half online, and it’s been a great experience. It’s kinda cool to have a team of Banshee hackers and supporters all roaming around. So many ideas! The hacking itch needs to be scratched this week. Big time.

So rather than turn up and go to sessions, what did I do? I walked across town with a bunch of the guys and watched the big football match. It was a blast! I went thru about 3 sets of batteries taking pictures, which I’ll post soon. Lots of funny action shots of people missing the goal. Hilarity.

Then of course, went out and got some beers and the fixings for some good ‘ol homemade pizza. Brought it back to the hostel where we’re staying at and made some pizza! Thanks to Aiden for helping us out and making it a lot of fun. Combine that with some beers, and then meeting up with a few folks later at a bar, and it was a great evening.  Also managed to give away an Ubuntu live cd to one of the guys working at the hostel — he was quite curious about free software and wanted to give it a try.  We didn’t even have to try to “sell it” — he asked for it!

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Travelling – let the adventure begin!

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Trick

(I wrote this on Sunday, July 15th, 2007…but it seems I never saved it…so here’s the recap!)

The day has been quite interesting!  Points of interest:

  • If you see some Netflix movies on the ground, return them.  The subscriber will appreciate it.  I left two Netflix returns sitting on the top of my truck and drove away.  They’re probably sitting out in the road somewhere, smashed to bits.  D’oh!
  • I found parking, in a zone that won’t be street cleaned in the next few weeks, in less than five minutes.  Yes, it’s possible.  7600 N. Greenview — great parking!
  • So I had left a few more things to pack last minute than I had realized.  So I stuffed it in the back of my truck, found a parking space, and then transferred it all up to the cab (which actually locks).  It’s stuffed — drivers side included!  It is quite a sight to see.  Will post pictures.

…and the adventure begins!  Was plenty early for the flight and all went well.  More to come later!

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Passport!

Posted on July 13, 2007 by Trick

So I’ve been planning this trip to the UK for GUADEC as well as to visit the London office of my employer, and I fly on Sunday. I applied for my U.S. Passport a month ago, paid the rush fees, and I got it about two hours ago! I couldn’t be happier that this has worked out.

I’m completely astonished by this process. I’ve kept good details on what all it took, and I think these stories need to be told so that my fellow Americans can petition the proper authorities to get enough $$ in the State Department as to be able to provide this ever-increasingly-popular service of getting a passport. Expect a full report in the next few days as I collect my notes. I really wish I had stopped to collect email addresses of the folks I was in line with as to see whether they get their passport today. If you’ve been dealing with the passport fiasco here in the U.S. recently, please drop me a line as I’d be interested to hear your story!

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:w

Posted on June 18, 2007 by Trick

Yes, that’s a VIM :w (not some new fangled creation), as in, I’m actually writing something here!

I haven’t written in three months, and haven’t committed any code in four…as I’ve been a bit distracted by a few things, notably:

  • That whole job thing. Turns out when you write code 8 – 10 hours a day it drains the coding life out of you. Am still working on overcoming my hate for coding past 8PM. I’m convinced that gedit/vim silently rearrange my code after 8PM so that it has more compilation errors, driving me to stop coding.
    • Perhaps it’s the immense rage caused by running Lotus Notes 5 (under Wine, no doubt!)
    • Perhaps it’s the fact that PHP likes to silently fail or cause strange errors?
  • Cycling season is finally here. Finally. Gotta love that good ‘ol mid-western weather for keeping me indoors for so long! Started riding 50 miles/week, then ramped up to 75/week, and then last week jumped right up to 145 in a week (which is hurting right now). Just shy of 500 miles for the year so far; not bad considering I’ve got another 10-12 weeks of good weather and 1,000 miles left toward my goal.
  • Being goofy. Yes, I’m a goof.
  • Kicking some serious ass in the IT department’s completely unofficial but incredibly serious(ish) mini golf tournament. It’s an intense sport I tell you.
  • The fact that bars in Chicago are open till 4 in the morning — enough said. This is simply trouble for a guy like me!
  • My truck has been in the shop more hours than I’ve driven it. I’m giving up — I am going to sell it; I don’t need it anymore!

I’ve been up to a few interesting things lately:

  • Setting up my own shiny new Linode to host vanstaveren.us stuff (websites, email). Exim + Dovecot makes for one heck of a good email server. I should probably write about Dovecot as it’s pretty swift, not too challenging to set up, and the LDA makes it even better. Cooperates much better than my old host’s IMAP server. Don’t ever consider 1and1 for any kind of hosting unless you like server load averages in the double digits, spiking up to 50+
    • Thanks Aaron for pointing me to Linode!
  • Trying, oh so hard, to make my Nokia 770 listen to a simple Ogg Vorbis stream (or even a file). No seriously, I think I’ve spent quite a few hours on this, and I can’t get it to work. I’m getting near ready to re-flash it and start over I’m so distraught. Isn’t Ogg Vorbis one of those things that Just Works on a modern Linux machine?
  • I’ve set up my own rsync mirroring system for Gentoo’s Portage tree. My Linode box (sam) sync’s every night, my server here at home sync’s from that, and my other three boxes (including my box at work, behind a firewall, over my VPN) sync from there. Think how much traffic Gentoo users could save their mirrors if they only had a similar setup!
  • I’m finally — yes, it’s true — starting to work on Banshee again, working on MTP stuff. I’m going to be traveling in a month and my goal by then is to be able to send tunes and playlists to my device with zero trouble.
  • I’m planning to go to GUADEC; this will be my first, and hopefully a lot of fun! Hopefully while there I can gather up a bit more motivation to get back to writing a bit more code :) I’ll also be visiting my job’s London office the following week. All in all it’ll be a sweet trip! If anyone is looking to split a room in a hotel, please drop me a message — I’m certainly looking for a roomate!
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Banshee Alarm Plugin v0.2

Posted on March 9, 2007 by Trick

Just as a quick update, Bertrand Lorentz has put together a second release of the alarm plugin, v0.2.  For those of you who love Banshee so much that you want to hear it first thing when you wake up in the morning, this plugin is for you!
We’re moving unofficial Banshee stuff like this to a Google Code project, at http://code.google.com/p/banshee-unofficial-plugins.  With the use of the fabulous svnsync tool provided by Subversion 1.4, I’ve migrated the entire repository (history included) that was on svn.banshee-project.org to the Google Code project.

If you are ever looking to start a Banshee plugin, or want to see some random hack plugins, check it out.  I’m also happy to give SVN access to anyone who wants to make a commit or add their own module.

Happy hacking!

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