Richard A. Johnson

Not chicken! ShyCon

That’s right, the Chicago community is currently planning a conference to be held sometime in 2007 for free software enthusiasts. Right now it is in the beginning stages and hopefully we can make this a reality. We are in the process of spamming the Chicago mailing lists and hopefully soon we will have a site and mailing list up for this. So if you are in Chicago and are interested in helping plan such a feat, or have some great ideas on what you would like to see, please stop by #chicon on IRC at chat.freenode.net and say hi. Thanks everyone!

P.S.  November 2007 is the first date thrown out as a time line.

you guys caught a quick glimpse of a post I am working on accidentally. I hit publish instead of saving it as a draft. sorry about that.

Howdy folks. Today I purchased a Logitech QuickCam Deluxe for Notebooks. Not my best purchase by any means, but something my daughter, who lives in D.C., wanted me to get one so we can video talk.

I have been trying here, and reading how-to after how-to on getting a QuickCam to work. None of them have been successful for me. So far I have tried Camorama and it complains about not being able to locate/use /dev/video0. /dev/video0 is there, but Camorama doesn’t like it. I have tried Xawtv and still no success. The system (Kubuntu Gutsy) sees the camera and doesn’t report any errors, but it just will not work. Here is some of the output I have gotten from the typical locations:

lsusb

Bus 005 Device 003: ID 046d:09c1 Logitech, Inc.

dmesg

[ 1818.228000] usb 5-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
[ 1818.608000] usb 5-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[ 1818.876000] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[ 1818.888000] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio
[ 1818.956000] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (046d:09c1)
[ 1818.976000] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[ 1818.976000] USB Video Class driver (v0.1.0)

lsmod

uvcvideo               42884  0
videodev               29312  1 uvcvideo
v4l1_compat            15364  2 uvcvideo,videodev
v4l2_common            18432  2 uvcvideo,videodev
snd_usb_audio          81024  0
snd_usb_lib            17920  1 snd_usb_audio

If you have any ideas, a great tutorial somewhere, or know how I can get it to work, I would greatly appreciate your assistance. Thank you!

You’ve got to be kidding me: During my first session, the PS/2 mouse I’m using locked up, and I intuitively went for the Ctrl-Alt-Delete smartbomb. Nothing. Whatever your feelings about Task Manager, asking Windows users to do without an “oh crap” screen at Ctrl-Alt-Delete is unreasonable. That’s about as fundamental a comfort blanket as most of us have, and certainly a fair concession if the Linux community expects Microsoft users to switch.

Absolutely hilarious. I found this quote in this great review of a first time user of Ubuntu, and he says he is a non-techy. He installed Ubuntu on an older Compaq desktop, which admittedly I have had similar issues as he states with almost the same exact computer, however it isn’t an Ubuntu thing, because if I remember I tried SuSE back in the days as well as Debian and Slackware with the one I had. Anyways, he gives it a fair shake, and even though he had some minor quirks here and there, he seemed to fix them and get the system working. The lack of a Ctrl+Alt+Del, or a “Oh Crap” way out of a crash, yielded the opening comment, which I think was great.

Robby, man you and I have been through a ton growing up. You were apart of the craziest group of kids ever, and it was my privilege to have known you. No matter the craziness we put you up to, somehow, someway you did it, and made us laugh for more than 20 years. I never apologized for breaking your collar bone playing football when we were younger, but man I am truly sorry, however I am not as sorry as I am right now.

I just found out that one of my best friends, who I haven’t talked to nor seen in the past few months lost his life during Memorial Day celebrations at the Lake of the O’zarks in Missouri. Robby was the little kid in the neighborhood, yet he wasn’t afraid of anything. He was the first Johnny Knoxville, and he did stuff that would put the Jackass guys to shame. He was with a bunch of the kids that grew up in the neighborhood enjoying the water and the holiday when he decided to jump in to save a pair of sunglasses. Well Robby never came back and was found a couple of days later floating in the area where he went missing. This sucks big time, as this was one of the greatest people I had the pleasure of knowing. Robby, here is to hopefully seeing you again some day, and maybe playing another game of football, just don’t break my collarbone in retaliation. Loving and missing you Robby from me, KJ, Mike, Matt, Sean, Nick, Jeremy, Chad, Jason, Ed, and the rest of the HP goofballs!

Not because I have finished 3 out of the 4 courses for the 8 week summer semester, but because 2 of those courses required the use of Windows. No more! The GUI design course utilized VB because, well it is so simple to do. And the ASP.NET class is well, ASP.NET

Now, with that out of the way. I know Mono is out there, and Mono Develop, however it was damn near impossible for me to follow along using Mono instead of the glorious Visual Studio (actually I am a fan of Visual Studio, if only Linux had such a powerful IDE). I would like to take some time out and become familiar with Mono and Mono Develop now that I have finished the class and realize just how easy ASP.NET coding really is. So if any of you have experience in doing so, please guide me a little bit on if it is possible. Maybe the problem I had was because ASP.NET in Visual Studio is drag-and-drop like crazy!

Oh, and also, when is somebody going to come up with a Qt version of Mono Develop? I would love to run it on my laptop, but there are just way to many libs, so I run it on my desktop at home that runs Gnome. Thanks!