Richard A. Johnson

So, I check my bank account about 45 minutes ago, $1 charge from iTunes. Interesting, as I don’t:

• Use iTunes
• Have an iTunes account

So I call my bank, they give me the phone number of the merchant. A quick Google shows me, A TON OF PEOPLE WITH THE SAME ISSUE! Luckily I got shafted a $1. There are people with anywhere from $0.99 all the way up to almost $1,000. HELLO APPLE! If someone flops down $1,000 on iTunes, wouldn’t that make you think a little bit? Maybe a little ring-a-ling of the security bell?

I canceled my card so no charges will go to it thankfully. Somehow, someone grabbed my card number and didn’t do it recently. I haven’t used my card now in like 2 months. But if it was taken prior to then, then why did it take so long for them to use it? I wonder who got hacked where I have used my card in the past?

The winner of all of this? KMyMoney2 and GnuCash, as they both showed me the charge as soon as I fired them both up. Way to go Linux apps!

Oh ya, where is Ctrl+Alt+Backspace gone? I use Intel Jorge, no shitty drivers here :p That was a joke by the way, I know where it went, and if you want it back, install Kubuntu, as we provide you the option to enable it

/me runs and hides

For years I spent a bit of time writing various things. Whether it was for some publication, a news paper, a web site, or technical documentation, I seemed to have my bouts of Writer’s Block. One thing I would do to combat my block would be to head on over to the local library or head over to the book store. Once I got there, I would go down random isles, pick up 1 random book from the isle, and then head to another. I would do this until I had 10 books on various subjects. Most of the time the subjects or books contained material I either knew nothing about or were books I wouldn’t be caught dead reading.

After I had the books, I wasn’t planning on reading the entire book, I was going to do my version of un-intelligent speed reading. A trick I learned while in High School, which of course never worked since I failed most of my reading assignments What I would do is read 1 paragraph from each chapter of each book. Typically this would take me about 20 minutes and if I was lucky I would pick an interesting paragraph. Just a note about me, I am the unluckiest person in the world, hint hint. So after reading my paragraphs in all of the books, I took a second to see if I could come up with a witty statement, combining something from everything I read together to make one hell of a mess, but at times they were pretty interesting. Anyways, this technique would help cure my writer’s block a majority of the time. If it didn’t, then depending on how I felt I would try the procedure over again, this time with magazines or news papers.

So now this leads me to another type of block I have been experiencing lately. Developer’s Block. I am completing a couple of development projects soon that were ideas created by others in which I was asked to work on. Now I am finding myself trying to figure out what I want to work on next, and for some reason, I cannot think of anything. The last couple of projects have been web based projects, one based on Django and the other based on Drupal. The Django project is the first real project I have worked on using Django, and I have learned a lot. I absolutely enjoy Django as it is still a challenge for me. I had worked on a Django application at my last job, but found myself getting annoyed because, as Mr. Movie Phone says, “It was the crappiest piece of crap in craptown.” The Drupal project has been mind-numbingly painful as I have never been a huge PHP fan and never spent the time learning it before doing it, though the same went with my Django project as well.

So now what I am to do? I wouldn’t mind working on another Django project to be honest, but I don’t know what I want to do. I know I would like to start the application from scratch and work it through. It is funny, we go back 3 years and I wasn’t a Python fan. Now that I have messed with it for the past couple of years, I absolutely enjoy it. I would really like to work on a desktop application again but I don’t know what. I was thinking about KHelpCenter in KDE as it is an absolute mess that needs to be cleaned up, but there are stipulations I feel to it. I think documentation for one in the Linux community needs to be generic or easily readable by all platforms. I also feel that there is a need for a collaboration on a help viewer. Then in KDE there are these What Is tips for the applications that can be tied in, and recently I read an idea for KDE help that was really interesting, though I didn’t fully understand it.

So because of that, I am feeling that I am currently in a state dubbed Developer’s Block. Have any of you experienced such a block? If so, how did you overcome it? Maybe I am experiencing this block because my mind is in various types of development environments all at once. Web based, Python, C++, help, etcetera. Where to go from here?

Nothing more really to say, just wanted to bring it to all of you wonderful translator’s attention. Here is the LP page for Kubuntu Documentation. Thanks!

It is that time of year again where many people from around the world participate in what is known as Earth Hour. Earth Hour is one hour where people from around the world have the opportunity to switch off their lights for 1 hour. This year though, you will get the chance to vote for either Earth or Global Warming. Flipping your light switch off for 1 hour is a vote for Earth, and leaving it on is a vote for Global Warming. When does this occur? It happens between 8:30 PM and 9:30PM your time for 1 hour.

In may part I plan on not only shutting off my lights, but also my computers, websites, and all electrical equipment in the house. I figure for 1 hour I will chill around a candle and maybe read a book.

Thanks to Brian Clark from GNOME, he has brought to my attention as well as to the attention of Planet GNOME readers, that there is an Earth Hour plugin for WordPress. I have already installed on my blog here and I think it would be cool if those of you with a WordPress blog showed your support and did the same. It doesn’t shut your sight off for an hour, but during that hour it displays a custom page showing your support. Pretty cool!

Just wanted to drop a quick post about a really quick coding project (ie. 5 minutes) to incorporate a very simple Remember The Milk plasmoid for KDE 4.2.x. I utilized the Google Gadget GTalk code and just very easily implemented the RTM gadget. It works well, it just doesn’t have all of the functionality of other RTM clients. There is a full-blown RTM plasmoid coming soon, but I couldn’t wait and needed something right now.

So if you are interested in using it, you can get the tarball over at KDE-Look.org, or if you need Kubuntu installs, both Intrepid and Jaunty, hit up my PPA.

The Ubuntu Chicago LoCo Team is currently in the process of sorting out the details for an Ubuntu Jaunty Release Party. Right now we are fairly certain the date will be April 25^th, 2009 and that the location will be somewhere in the city limits of Chicago. We haven’t worked out the venue nor the exact times just yet, but we are working on that. Right now, some of the options for a venue that have been brought up are:

• Illinois Institute of Design (Our favorites at this time pending our buddy Kevin’s approval).
• Risqué Café (One of our favorite hang out spots near Wrigley Field)
• Portillos (The best Chicago style hot dogs – though we don’t know how well it would be for a venue)
• Goose Island (Chicago’s finest brewery and restaurant – great for all ages as they have amazing Root Beer as well – WiFi was an issue last year)
• ….have a place you would like to offer and think would be a great spot?

If you in fact have an idea of another place to hold such a venue, please either stop by our IRC channel on Freenode in the channel #ubuntu-chicago, or you can Join our mailing list and then us an email to ubuntu-us-chicago AT ubuntu DOT com.

If anything changes, please keep an eye on this blog or Jim Campbell’s blog.