Richard A. Johnson

This way here, Harald won’t be able to add to his count. Anyways, I am giving a presentation next week for Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, it is on Friday, March 5^th, 2010 at 17:00 UTC. The topic I will be presenting is “Creating a PyKDE App.” I am slotted for one hour to attempt and teach everyone who shows up, how to create an application using KDE’s Python API. Seems easy enough right? It is, but I was thinking I would like to start some sort of application that has future potential, that hopefully an opportunistiK developer or two can take on, and maybe make something great in the future.

So what does this have to do with you? Easy, what would be a perfect application to start and present for this topic? I don’t want to create just a shell for something, I would like to at least have a little bit of functionality to it. Thus far, I have received one idea from @harriseldon on Identi.ca. Feel free to leave comments on this blog, or follow @nixternal on Identi.ca or @nixternal on Twitter and shoot me a message. Thanks everyone!

These days I seem to be getting busier and busier, however where I am getting busier and busier is not all in the same spot. I have the various projects I work in (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, KDE), consulting type stuff, my new cycling life, and various others. For the past few months I have been trying to get things done, and it just doesn’t seem to work for me. I have tried tool after tool, and none of them are my cup of tea at this point. The ones I have tried are:

• Tomboy
• todo.sh
• Tracks
• Remember The Milk
• Basket (there is a KDE 4 version coming which is kind of nice)
• and various others…

Which one do you use and why? Do you use an online one like Evernote or such? Tiddlywiki or derivative (if so, how do you sync it all up among multiple machines easily?). Right now, when I am sitting at my desk, my whiteboard is my favorite way to keeping track of things, however I am not always at my desk. I have a bunch of machines, all running Linux of course with most running KDE (GNOME and Xmonad are the others). I have a Blackberry Curve that I use a lot as well. Any pointers? Thanks!

Well, here I am, fiddling with my email still! I have been using GMail with IMAP now for about a year because a) I was to lazy to setup my own IMAP server again and b) GMail has decent spam filtering, email filtering, and the labels stuff. Plus it is nice when I can’t get access to one of my machines to fire up Mutt, I can just hit the web browser, though that hasn’t happened to me yet.

I spent quite a bit of yesterday and today fiddling around with some things that my buddy Greg posted about a month ago. See, I have had Mutt doing the generic IMAP thing with GMail and it works fairly well. The downfall is how slow it is. See, I get quite a bit of email, probably to much to be honest. Mutt + GMail grabs the emails just fine, but for some reason when I am going through my list of about 5,000 or so, scrolling is painfull. So I setup Greg’s way from his post, or similar to it. This helped tremendously, but I still am not all that happy with it. For some reason, the application offlineimap creates funny named folders for the [GMAIL] stuff. I used the patched Mutt so I have my nice little folder bar on the left. With the new folder names locally, my folder bar is a mess unless I widen it. Doing this tends to kill off a lot of the threads as they grow deeper and deeper.

Anyways, enough of that stuff. What I am looking for is the perfect IMAP setup. I just need the IMAP portion for email, as I use my ISP for SMTP. What is the perfect IMAP setup in your opinion?

Backing up what Jorge blogged about earlier, Penguicon 7 is just a few months away. It would be great to register now and also book your hotel room if needed. I highly recommend that you get a hotel room where the event is taking place. If you don’t, then you have to travel every night which means no partying for you, in which the grooviest of groovy happens. So head on over, REGISTER and RESERVE. Myself, some of the Ubuntu Chicago folks, the Ubuntu Michigan folks, and other hackers from around the midwest will be there. If you have never been to a Penguicon and enjoy having fun, I suggest you get to one, preferably this one. I felt so out of place last year, but my god it was a blast, just ask Jono!

So, Netbooks. I am in the market for one and have been doing my research. I know this for sure, I need at least 10″ of screen, because the smaller the screen the smaller the keyboard. If any of you know me, I have a set of paws the size of most human heads Thus far, the best keyboard I have found is on the HP Netbooks. I have tried the Asus eeePC 10″ and it isn’t bad, but I don’t like it. The other’s, well they are horrid. I was hoping the Lenovo had a good keyboard, but after further inspection tonight, I am better off with my Blackberry. There just happens to be one downfall for the HP (Mini Mi which comes with Linux and no command line). There is no external VGA port, and I do a lot of work behind a projector. I know there are these USB to VGA converters which I think are great, however upon further review via the Intertubes, it seems these little devices are horrible. So, are there any of you out there with a HP Netbook and if so do you use one of these USB to VGA converters? Is there anyone using a USB to VGA converter and if so which one do you have and do you like it?

I plan on throwing Kubuntu on it, so if any of you out there are rocking Kubuntu or KDE 4 on a Netbook, I would like to hear your experience with doing so.

Since I live in the US, have big hands, and Netbooks are made for people with small hands, can I sue for discrimination? :p

Hey my fellow lazy webbers! I am looking at getting a new mouse that is elegant, sleek, and super mobile. Right now there are 3 models that fit this category that I like pretty well:

1. Logitech VX Nano
2. Logitech V550 Nano
3. Logitech V450 Nano

What I like about these 3 is that they have the super small USB dongle that doesn’t stick out much from the side of my laptop, therefore allowing me to keep it plugged in at all times, even while transporting it. I know that with the VX Nano, the middle mouse button click doesn’t work like typical middle mouse buttons. Instead of doing what I am used to, it changes the type of scrolling action. Click it down and you have typical wheel scroll with the little clicking action. Click it down again and you have that super smooth non-clicking action scroll, which is by far my favorite and the reason I have been using Microsoft rodents for the past couple of years.

My question is do the V550 and V450 do the same with the middle mouse button for you owners out there? If you have any of these rodents, please tell me which one you have and if you like it or not. Right now I can pick up the V450 at the local Circuit City for $35 USD. $45 for the VX and I think around $50 for the V550 (maybe cheaper).

I have found a how-to page for the VX and getting all of the buttons to work, even in KDE. Do any of you use one these rodents in KDE/Kubuntu as well?

EDIT: I picked up the VX Nano and I am using it now. All I can simply state about this rodent is WOW!!! I paid $45 at Tiger Direct for it, definitely worth every penny I paid for it. Simply amazing. Thanks to everyone who left a comment pushing the VX Nano and the VX line. You all totally rock!

OK, here is the scoop. We have one appliance that gets a custom partitioning via kickstart and a bit of Python love. Once the partition is complete, we install the base packages and then our appliance package. During the installation of the appliance package, it reads in the size of the multiple partitions it has available and their sizes. This all works like a charm. Side note, our Kickstart scripts are being run through Anaconda from CentOS.

As it stands, when the partitions are created, there is 5% by default that is utilized with every partition for super user access. This way here, it saves you from running out of space and being unable to access the drive. This is great on directories such as /boot, /var, /, /home, and etc. But when we partition our 750GB drives, we want a large growing space that doesn’t need this 5% reserved blocks percentage. Typically when you use mke2fs to create the partitions, outside of Kickstart and Anaconda, you would pass the -m flag with 0 (zero) as the variable. This would get rid of any reserved space, therefor allowing you to utilize the entire space. With the default 5% on 4×750GB hard drives, we lose a total of 150GB of space. That is a lot of space to lose, especially when our appliances main duty is storage.

I know we could add a %post section to our Kickstart scripts, call tune2fs -m 0 /partition/location, and then reinstall our appliance package so it can read the new drive partitioning, but is there any other way to do this? Someone said to use mke2fs.conf for this, however Kickstart and Anaconda documentation is far from good when it comes to tricky configurations, and it seems nobody else in the world is doing this. Does anyone know how to go about using the /etc/mke2fs.conf with Kickstart so I can have the drives partitioned with the -m 0 flag from the get go?

/me wishes we used Debian/Ubuntu with FAI!