Tomorrow, Saturday April 26th 2008, the Ubuntu Kentucky LoCo Team in association with the BlueGrass Linux Users Group will be hosting the Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) release party. Here are the specifics:
Date: Saturday, 4/26
Time: 3:00pm - 7:00pm EST
Location: Woodland Christian Church
Address: 530 East High Street, Lexington, KY 40502
We're planning on having a couple of people speak about the benefits of linux, the newest changes in this release of Ubuntu and we'll even offer support to new users (bring your laptop along if you want some help!). I'm not sure how the power situation is at Woodland, but I'm sure we can accommodate at least a couple of people at a time.
We're also planning on having some sort of food (probably ordering pizza, and a few other things), so please, everyone come on out!
Friday, April 25, 2008
Friday, April 18, 2008
The Big Day
Well, today's the big day. After I get off work early, I'm heading over to Eric's house and he, fish and I will be leaving for Raleigh, NC for Foresight 20/20. It will probably be about an 8 hour drive, but it'll be worth it to experience a Linux conference for the first time.
In other news, I shaved my beard off. It wasn't growing in quite as nicely as I would have liked. I may try to grow one again in the fall/winter (like waiting 6 months will make a difference...). Here's a new pic of myself (oh yeah, I also got a haircut last night, so the goatee kinda matches the hairstyle for the moment):
In still other news, things have gotten interesting at work. Aside from the terrible situation with Vantage that's still there, our secretary came to me late yesterday afternoon (after 4:15 or so). She said that I have a new "top priority" for the next 2 weeks, passed down from the President of the company.
We have a long-standing contract with a customer and that customer did a walk-through of the plant about 2 days ago now. They visited our Quality Assurance department and... well, let's just say the QA department is in shambles. It looks like something out of the 70's that a tornado has bowled over. The customer in question saw this (apparently they hadn't seen it before...) and said something to the effect of "What kind of quality can we expect out of your products if your quality department looks like this?" Heh.
Because of this, the entire department has been slated for remodeling within the next 2 weeks (meaning, finished within 2 weeks...). A part of that remodeling is that I have to put Panduit (cable management on the walls) up in all the offices and run some new phone / data lines, since people are changing offices. Somehow they've used an entire 24-port switch for 4 people and a total of 5 computers... not sure how that works exactly.
Should be a fun 2 weeks...
In other news, I shaved my beard off. It wasn't growing in quite as nicely as I would have liked. I may try to grow one again in the fall/winter (like waiting 6 months will make a difference...). Here's a new pic of myself (oh yeah, I also got a haircut last night, so the goatee kinda matches the hairstyle for the moment):
In still other news, things have gotten interesting at work. Aside from the terrible situation with Vantage that's still there, our secretary came to me late yesterday afternoon (after 4:15 or so). She said that I have a new "top priority" for the next 2 weeks, passed down from the President of the company.
We have a long-standing contract with a customer and that customer did a walk-through of the plant about 2 days ago now. They visited our Quality Assurance department and... well, let's just say the QA department is in shambles. It looks like something out of the 70's that a tornado has bowled over. The customer in question saw this (apparently they hadn't seen it before...) and said something to the effect of "What kind of quality can we expect out of your products if your quality department looks like this?" Heh.
Because of this, the entire department has been slated for remodeling within the next 2 weeks (meaning, finished within 2 weeks...). A part of that remodeling is that I have to put Panduit (cable management on the walls) up in all the offices and run some new phone / data lines, since people are changing offices. Somehow they've used an entire 24-port switch for 4 people and a total of 5 computers... not sure how that works exactly.
Should be a fun 2 weeks...
Friday, April 11, 2008
Adobe AIR
I'll admit, I'm not very savvy when it comes to newer web technologies but I've got to say, Adobe AIR looks to be a pretty sweet product. I've been playing around more with Twitter lately (mostly today, yeah...) and I've found several AIR-based applications that act like instant messengers communicating with Twitter. Currently, I'm running Spaz. Not the most appropriate name, I'll grant you that, but definitely a neat concept and since it's supposed to be multi-platform I should be able to have the same experience with it on Windows and Linux. I'll be giving that a try when I get home this evening.
On that note, I won't be going home to stay after work. The wife and I decided we're going to a Lexington Legends baseball game this evening. I got online and ordered 2 tickets for $23 total, right on the first base line. I'm not usually a baseball fan, but I do prefer seeing it in person if I'm going to watch. I'll try to take some pics (if the game doesn't get rained out) and post them up here.
On that note, I won't be going home to stay after work. The wife and I decided we're going to a Lexington Legends baseball game this evening. I got online and ordered 2 tickets for $23 total, right on the first base line. I'm not usually a baseball fan, but I do prefer seeing it in person if I'm going to watch. I'll try to take some pics (if the game doesn't get rained out) and post them up here.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Foresight Linux User and Developer Conference
Foresight Linux (one of the Linux distros I've been working with lately) is having a User and Developer Conference from April 18th - 20th in Raleigh, NC. Click here for more information.
I'm going to be attending this event. Anyone else interested?
I'm going to be attending this event. Anyone else interested?
Laptop struggles
I bought a new laptop a few weeks ago (early-mid March). It's a very nice laptop, with the following specs:
In spite of that, I decided to give Vista on this laptop a fair shake. Right off the bat, I clashed with UAC (user access control). I hate it. Any time I wanted to do anything (I do a lot of system admin work) I had to "Approve/Deny" it. It took me just a few moments to find the setting to disable UAC, then I was back to working.
I managed to hook the laptop up to my TV through HDMI (yeah, the XPS has an HDMI port... how awesome is that?) and watch some Hulu.com on the 56" TV. All was going well, then I noticed that the wireless-n wasn't connecting at the appropriate speed to my D-Link router. My wife's Windows XP machine (don't get me started...) has a Belkin wireless card that consistently connects at 270Mbps, whereas my Vista machine was only getting 130Mbps.
After doing some research, I found out that it was due to the bandVista was using to connect (20Mhz vs 40Mhz for the higher speeds). However, if I changed it over to 40Mhz, even if I was sitting next to the router I'd lose connection after so many seconds.
Because of all this, I decided to give Linux a whirl on it. I first installed Ubuntu 8.04 Beta. Realizing that my wireless card had a Broadcom chipset, I knew I was in for an interesting time, but I didn't know the half of it... Apparently there's a bug in the linux kernel (between 2.6.23 and 2.6.24-14) that stops Ndiswrapper from working correctly, which means it stopped me from using my wireless card. I tested this on both Ubuntu and Foresight Linux 2.0. There were workarounds before the Ubuntu update was released, and I could manage to connect that way, but it was shaky at best.
Once I heard about the Ubuntu update (I think it was a kernel update, to 2.6.24-15-generic), I formatted and reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 Beta. I installed Ndiswrapper, the Windows wireless driver, and I was off and running. I set up my Nvidia card, all the "restricted" things (flash, java, codecs, dvd playback, etc.) and I was ready to roll. However, I soon noticed that even though Ndiswrapper was working and I could connect to the network just fine, I would randomly drop the connection. I'd be watching a video on Hulu.com and it would just stop playing. The only way I could get it to go again would be either to restart the system or "sudo rmmod ndiswrapper && sudo modprobe ndiswrapper" then wait for the connection to reestablish.
With that said, I've got my laptop at work with me today and it connected to our wireless-g network flawlessly (it even has WPA turned on, which I've never been able to configure on linux before without some major work). I set it up to ping google non-stop, and it hasn't dropped a single packet.
I think the final configuration (at least for the time being) for my laptop is going to be Windows XP Pro SP2 and Foresight Linux 2.0 (they don't have the kernel fix yet, but I can workaround and I'd really like to give it a fair shake). I'll update with more information as it becomes available.
- Dell XPS M1530
- Intel Core2Duo T5450 Processor
- 2Gb DDR2 RAM
- 160Gb SATA HDD
- Nvidia 8400GS 128Mb Video Card
- Dell 1505 draft-n wireless card
In spite of that, I decided to give Vista on this laptop a fair shake. Right off the bat, I clashed with UAC (user access control). I hate it. Any time I wanted to do anything (I do a lot of system admin work) I had to "Approve/Deny" it. It took me just a few moments to find the setting to disable UAC, then I was back to working.
I managed to hook the laptop up to my TV through HDMI (yeah, the XPS has an HDMI port... how awesome is that?) and watch some Hulu.com on the 56" TV. All was going well, then I noticed that the wireless-n wasn't connecting at the appropriate speed to my D-Link router. My wife's Windows XP machine (don't get me started...) has a Belkin wireless card that consistently connects at 270Mbps, whereas my Vista machine was only getting 130Mbps.
After doing some research, I found out that it was due to the bandVista was using to connect (20Mhz vs 40Mhz for the higher speeds). However, if I changed it over to 40Mhz, even if I was sitting next to the router I'd lose connection after so many seconds.
Because of all this, I decided to give Linux a whirl on it. I first installed Ubuntu 8.04 Beta. Realizing that my wireless card had a Broadcom chipset, I knew I was in for an interesting time, but I didn't know the half of it... Apparently there's a bug in the linux kernel (between 2.6.23 and 2.6.24-14) that stops Ndiswrapper from working correctly, which means it stopped me from using my wireless card. I tested this on both Ubuntu and Foresight Linux 2.0. There were workarounds before the Ubuntu update was released, and I could manage to connect that way, but it was shaky at best.
Once I heard about the Ubuntu update (I think it was a kernel update, to 2.6.24-15-generic), I formatted and reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 Beta. I installed Ndiswrapper, the Windows wireless driver, and I was off and running. I set up my Nvidia card, all the "restricted" things (flash, java, codecs, dvd playback, etc.) and I was ready to roll. However, I soon noticed that even though Ndiswrapper was working and I could connect to the network just fine, I would randomly drop the connection. I'd be watching a video on Hulu.com and it would just stop playing. The only way I could get it to go again would be either to restart the system or "sudo rmmod ndiswrapper && sudo modprobe ndiswrapper" then wait for the connection to reestablish.
With that said, I've got my laptop at work with me today and it connected to our wireless-g network flawlessly (it even has WPA turned on, which I've never been able to configure on linux before without some major work). I set it up to ping google non-stop, and it hasn't dropped a single packet.
I think the final configuration (at least for the time being) for my laptop is going to be Windows XP Pro SP2 and Foresight Linux 2.0 (they don't have the kernel fix yet, but I can workaround and I'd really like to give it a fair shake). I'll update with more information as it becomes available.
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