nixternal

So, as most of you know, today was the release day for the new iPoops. I of course made jokes at everyone in the office who has one, and watched all of the complete idiots stand in line since yesterday hoping their iPoop had some Steve Jobs sweat on it. Anyways, woohoo, I could care less, but what I find funny is that people went and bought the new iPoops during the iTunes failure (Mako, there you go man! Add that to your list of errors, there are some good screenshots out there, or better yet Jono, Mass Fail!) and couldn’t activate their new waste of money. So, some people decided, hell, I will buy 2, put them on Craigslist and Ebay for $800. Holy smokes you Apple freaks, you are slightly iTarded! The AT&T store, about .75 miles from my hood, has all but the 2 they sold today, and the Apple store in Schaumburg still had some when I took a cruise by to see how many iTards were waiting in line. And people wonder why I hate the city of Chicago and enjoy the burb life, ya that means you Kevin ‘I use Ubuntu in my closet’ Harriss! We don’t have the silly hoopla the city has, and don’t have to stand in line, unless it is an $800 laptop on sale for $250 at Best Buy come the day after Thanksgiving.

Oh, and I just happened to stop by Best Buy yesterday and purchase my very own Ubuntu collection. Oddly enough, it was the last one and the guy at the desk started to act like he knew a thing or two, which was cool, though he didn’t know much except that Vista was better and not prone to hackers like Lie-nux is

OK, time to simmah down, watch today’s stage of the Tour de France and go to bed. Have a great iWeekend everyone!

Howdy lazywebbers!  I am currently in the market for purchasing a decent, relatively inexpensive portable music player. These are just some of my preferences for such a device:

• Must work with Linux of course
• Must support ogg vorbis either natively or by using rockbox
• Must be small, something around the size of the iPod Shuffle or a tad bit larger
• I don’t want to pay a lot for it, and I know you typically get what you pay for, but I will be using this while doing some extreme workouts and biking events.

I know if it is out there, you all will know. I went to a couple of stores today and none of them jumped out at me except for the Sansa Clip, which is nice and I heard it support ogg with a new firmware upgrade, plus it has FM radio on it. If any of you have this and it works well, let me know, as that might be the one I am looking for.

Big Bang
I recently started working for a local company here in Chicago called Cleversafe. It is a company that specializes in distributed storage solutions. And the best part about this, it is an Open Source company! Want to view their open source community, check out Cleversafe.org. I am the new Linux Packaging and Development Engineer. What exactly does this mean? It means I will be packaging up their application for various platforms as well as maintaining the appliance we create. The current appliance is built off of the CentOS 5 platform, but who knows what the future will bring, as I am eying Ubuntu/Debian as well as Foresight. Other stuff that I will work on in the future is the Open Source Community. After 2 days, I am in love with the place. Everyone is super cool, and it is just like every open source community I have worked with, so diverse with people from all over the world nestled into a very nice office space in the West Loop Gate area of Chicago.

Evolution
Oddly enough, being an open source company, they currently utilize Microsoft Exchange Server. The nice thing is, I don’t have to use any Microsoft products! That’s right! And their Exchange Server doesn’t even support IMAP or POP3, OWA only. KMail will not work with this setup, Thunderbird sucked just as bad, but Evolution, I am impressed. So you LUG Radio folks and your KDE PIM bashing, I will have to join you a little here. It took me a few minutes to figure everything out configuration wise, but as it stands, I have my Inbox, Personal Folders, and even Company Calendars. I have 2 minor annoyances thus far though, 1) Evolution wants to lock up every now and then, and 2) None of the alerts work from the Company Calendar. For 1) I may be the problem behind this, so I will have to test later tomorrow. For 2) I could very well be missing something, so if you use Evolution in a similar environment and have your alerts working with an Exchange Calendar, fill me in. The last time I used Evolution was way back in those Ximian days, and have since been using Mutt and lately KMail. Kontact is without a doubt the greatest in certain areas, and of course the areas I used it with (POP3). I have to admit though, Evolution is kicking ass with Exchange.

Religion
Free software is my religion, and with the new job, I get to exercise my religion on a daily basis and get paid finally So for those doubters out there, free software can pay, and pay well I might add. If free software is where you want to make a living, don’t give up! I spent about 14 years volunteering in the free software world always wanting that free software job. Well, I never gave up and now I have it. The only downfall, my time with Ubuntu and Kubuntu may be limited a bit. Looks like the weekends will be for Kubuntu and KDE, and as soon as I am settled into the new job a bit more, then I can start devoting time in the evenings.

So, if I am a little slow in responding, now you know. I know all of you in my previous KDE 4 posts keep asking questions and wanting this or that packaged, and as soon as I get some time, maybe this weekend, I will work on getting you what you want, unless of course someone beats me to it.

Oh, with the new job came a new work laptop, a Dell Latitude D830 which is a Core 2 Duo with the Nvidia Quadro NVS 135M. Thus far, using the binary Nvidia drivers, it is working well. I wish it were the Intel X3100, but since it is a freeby I will not argue And my lord is this thing heavy. 15.4″ widescreen that does like 1680×1050, insane! For those of you who may have been looking at this lappy, let me just say with Hardy (Kubuntu and Ubuntu), everything works out of the box, this include Wifi (Intel 4965 AG/AGN) and the Bluetooth! Rock on. Oh, and Kubuntu is getting just under 5 hours of battery time. Finally a lappy for me that works well with Guidance

Tomorrow afternoon Jeff, Gabriel (if he is feeling better), and I will set out from Chicago to Troy, Michigan for Penguicon. Looks like I will be hanging out with the Ubuntu Michigan crowd for the weekend, listening to some talks, drinking Jorge’s and Jono’s beer when they aren’t looking. Hey, I am a starving student, flat out broke. I have $20 in my name right now and searching for more before leaving tomorrow I don’t even have a place to stay yet, but I think Jorge said it best, who sleeps at a geek fest

Anyways, if you are heading to Penguicon, drop me a note here in the comments and if you want to buy me beer, food, or just hang out during the weekend, let me know

Yes, I am using my blog hoping to get in contact with my ride to Penguicon this weekend. Myself and Gabriel need a ride, which Jeff is, however he is impossible to get in contact with.

SO JEFF JIRSA IF YOU READ THIS! EMAIL ME, CALL ME, DO SOMETHING!

This weekend, April 4^th and 5^th, is the annual Flourish Conference, a decent sized free software conference held at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This years guest speakers include Bruce Perens, John ‘Maddog’ Hall, James Bottomley, Brian Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman, and me of course, plus many more. Some of the events being held include a mini-BarCamp, a Hack-A-Thon, and a Web Framework battle. If you are in or around Chicago, I hope to see you there! I will be giving a talk on the KDE community as well as KDE 4.

Lighter side of things, I updated my Vista box to SP1 this past week. I haven’t been attacked by the driver issues and what not, but I am getting killed every time I let the computer fall asleep. I can click my mouse button to wake the computer up, but upon wakeup, neither the keyboard or the mouse work. I was going to file a bug report, however I was unable to find their bug tracker

I see we are now a few weeks away from the 8.04 release. That is pretty groovy. Is it me or did this release cycle seem to go on forever? Dapper was 9 months yet seemed faster. Edgy was 3 months and was really fast. Feisty and Gutsy flew by, but Hardy, heck we still have a few weeks to go. What a busy cycle. I am excited with a lot of the new features with our beloved Kubuntu release. Thus far, Kubuntu Hardy with KDE 4 has been rock solid. The only issue I had during this entire cycle was the libc6 issue. Remember that one? That was fun

My blog was recently updated to Wordpress 2.5. I am not sure yet if I really like the whole new admin interface just yet. It seems a bit slower than the previous releases, but it does look a tad bit better in most ways. I didn’t have any problems either. Gotta love those one-click installs that Dreamhost provides. All I had to do was just update the database and rock on. None of the problems like with the previous 2.2.x releases that drove many of us up a wall.

Oh well, here’s to you and hoping that I see you at Flourish! Take care!