Edward Andrew Robinson

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Free Software Open Source Symposium 2007 (FSOSS07) this year and had a great time. While I did take some pictures I am still using my cellphone to take pictures since my digital camera has not been replaced yet (read poor university student) so I only took a few, and I will post them soon. If your interested you can check out the flicker page, they also recorded all of the speakers if you missed any. A few of the speakers I really enjoyed are:

• Bob Young, Co-founder, RedHat, CEO and Founder, Lulu.com
• Dean Jansen, Outreach Director, Participatory Culture Foundation
• Ross Turk, Community Manager, Sourceforge.net

I hope to be able to attend next year. Thanks everyone who made this possible.

I often recommend Ubuntu to people and recommend that they install programs like miro, and geany. Geany comes stock in the Ubuntu repositories and miro has great step-by-step install instruction for beginners, however as I make this post they currently have no official Gutsy support. When I recommend a program to a user I usually send them the command line install command sudo aptitude install geany as well as sending them instructions

Go to System, then Administration, then click Synaptic. From there you can search for geany and you should be able to double click the name then click install and Ubuntu will install geany for you.

In my mind both solutions extremely simple, but then I have been using Linux for a while now and am a computer geek. I was trying to set up ssh the other day for a friend and they where complaining to me about how on Windows they can just click the program the select run, I claimed that you could do the same thing in Ubuntu (with a deb file) but the claim was that the website (repository browser) was ugly, and well I cant really argue with that. Now that Geany is out I can go back to my friend with another solution and if they want to install Inkscape I can just say “here you go“.

The only downside is that currently adding a new repository is disabled, my two cents is that we should give the user a nice large warning then go ahead and add the new repository. Another anoying and easily fixed thing is that I was looking at the Ubuntu wiki for games yesterday and I thought “ohh I’ll add in some apt:// URLs so that users can just click to install games”, but currently the Ubuntu wiki doesn’t support apt:// URLs so I got them working on my own wiki, just to make sure that it was easy and started a list of my favorite applications.

I guess I really have 2 requests:

1. Enable AptUrl to add third party repositories, I’m going to download the code eventually and take a look at this and post a deb file if I make one. But It would be great if someone beet me to it.
2. Add support for apt:// URLs on the Ubuntu wiki.

Oh and thanks for such a great feature.

In light of the fact that I am now bald, today I uploaded a new hackergotchi to the planet ubuntu bzr tree. Uploading the picture was easy, making the picture was a bit harder. This is my first time using GIMP 2.4.0-rc3 and it seems that the selection tools don’t work the same way that they used to. In the old gimp I was able to make a selection the drag that selection around in order to remove it. It would seem that in the new gimp the only way to remove a selection (That I my girlfriend, could figure out) is to cut (<ctrl>+x) that selection. On the other hand the fuzzy select still works great.

TIP: when using fuzzy select you can use the ctrl key to un-select things that you have selected.

All in all I would say the update was a success. I just wish I had had a larger source image, (The large scale version of my new hackergotchi is a bit jagged around the edges, stupid digital camera being broken).

Large Version

From Me

Small Version

From Me

On a side note it would be fun to make a web page linking all the planet ubuntu faces to there websites / launchpad IDs, any thoughts on this? (Update: it could be just like the gnome one unless we all ready have one?)

Also I have three midterms this week, wish me luck.

A while back I posted about my top 10 feature requests for Gutsy on the Ubuntu Forums. Gutsy has brought some great new features to Ubuntu many of which I did not include in my original top 10 feature requests but if I was to do it again I probably would. In fact when I wrote the original list I had a bit of trouble coming up with 10 and in my opinion “Allow Us To Vote (like ideastorm, digg, etc.) On Ideas Here.” while it would be a grate addition to the Ubuntu Forums is not a feature for Ubuntu and hence a bit of a cop-out. All the same with the release of Gutsy I think its about time I revisited that list and commented on that list again and congratulate everyone who worked on it.

10. [IDEA] Nautilus “Restore from Trash” – Still not implemented. This feature would be quite hard to implement and for me it is a very low priority, but I can see why other users would want it.

9. [IDEA] Modify the installer so that it asks for Timezone instead of City. – While this did not happen, as far as I could tell there where a lot more cities to pick from during the install.

8. [IDEA] Reliable Kill for Fullscreen Applications – I think the best way to do this is still <Alt>f2 then type xkill then click the application.

7. [IDEA] Auto removal of old kernels - Unknown so I will assume no. (kernels are removed during a dist upgrade, thanks Kai Schröder)

6. [IDEA] Bring back screensaver settings - The new screensaver settings manager is still being used, how do I change a screensavers options in this gui?

5. [IDEA]: Warning about disk being full – Nope, per this blueprint on launchpad this feature never got out of the idea stage. (This feature might be included according to Kai Schröder … Thanks)

4. [IDEA] External Monitor Support – This feature is now included, however using the propitiatory drivers nvidia-settings gave me more options

3. [idea] Fix the delay when searching in Synaptic – It feels faster, but then this is a fresh install.

2. [IDEA] Graphical Frontend for xorgconfig (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg) – This works really well. I’m really glad to see this feature.

1. Allow Us To Vote (like ideastorm, digg, etc.) On Ideas Here. – As I said before this is a cop-out and It has not been implemented on the Ubuntu Forums, however the forum staff did a great job of communicating the forums needs.

So that gives us about three 3.5 (I rounded to three 3.5 because there was a few half implemented features ex feature 9) out of the nine (I’m not counting feature number 1) features that I blogged about all that time ago and that doesn’t even include the 10 rocking features in 10 days. All in all I think that makes Great Gutsy Gibbon.

I hope to have now found a new home at www.earobinson.org. Please report any broken links you find.

The other day I stumbled upon Chris Harrison’s internet map, the only problem I found with his map is that I wanted to know exactly which country each network connection was in. So using the DIMES public data repository, and 1site1moment’s country boarders I have mapped the internet for myself.

From Public

Feel free to download the source code and come up with your own internet map, I would love to see what other people can come up with.

UPDATE 01: Image is back up, If the source code link wont work for you email me and I will send you a copy. Feel free to host this anywhere you like just post a link back to this site.

UPDATE 02: Source code can now also be found here.

UPDATE 03: Would love to see what other people can do with this.

Over the weekend I cut my hair to raise money for cancer. I went from this:

To:

If you want to poke fun, please donate. Guess the means I need to update my Icon.

In other news my digital camera died over the weekend so all you get is pics from my cell phone .