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So, today I figured out what the storm of work is largely composed of, and that is school work. Unpaid, un-exciting, school work. I don’t think this is all of the work, but based on what I see I will be doing homework non-stop for the next 56 hours or so. Then, I get to start working again next week when another large project is due, along with midterms. As a nice cherry on top of all that, I found out today that I will have 3 of my 4 finals on the same day, the last day before Christmas break. At this point I’m so drained I have nowhere to go but forward. We’ll see what happens, will I end up in a mental institution, will I pass all my classes, will I be broke and living on the streets? Stay tuned for the next exciting update of my life.

I’m feeling myself ramp up. I’m getting more stuff done in a day, getting projects moving. I noticed today that things have been too quiet during my down time over the last few weeks. I fear that the work was waiting for me to come back. I had several jobs come into me today, nothing set in stone, but what appears and feels like the calm before the storm kind of thing. With several large projects due in the next couple of weeks, and midterms next week this could be a very interesting time. Things are moving on all fronts and new fronts. Still no word as to whether or not I might procure a part time job, but I’m still hopeful. Several coding things are coming in as well as some new ideas. I think I might be out of my rut and way beyond where I had hoped to stop. Only time will tell.

I recently, sorta by accident, blew out my Windows install on my main computer while attempting to install Ubuntu along side Windows. I was smart enough to make a backup of my Windows partition prior to attempting this modification, but in the process I decided to try something different. I ended up installing only Ubuntu on my main machine. I was rather worried in the beginning, because a lot of the things I do in Windows have not worked well in the past on Ubuntu. A few examples include: watching HD movies off of my file server, watching my recorded TV, gaming, triple monitors, and administering Windows servers. I can safely say that Ubuntu in just the last release, even though it doesn’t appear to have changed has made huge strides in making their OS as usable as possible.

Wine has done some truly amazing things in the past few months. With version 1.0 of Wine finally having been released a budding and maturing piece of software jumped into the spot light. All my major games are supported and running under Ubuntu without a problem. My only complaint is a drop in frame rates, but I think this is a small price to pay.

Second, video support is fully there when you need it. I used to spend hours tinkering with settings and config files trying to get my HD and SD movies to play on Linux. With Windows you have many options like the CoreAVC Codecs and Nvidia PureVideo codecs to name a few. Linux doesn’t have these advantages and took a bit longer to overcome some of these obstacles. I have been a long time MythTV fan for my video watching and TV recording, and can say that I’m proud to have been running a MythTV box without a single problem for over 3 months now, and to be completely honest I don’t think I could ever go back.

Another big problem I faced initially was administering some of the Windows servers I watch. The problems here start with such things as Remote Web Workplace which is only supported by Internet Explorer. My current solutions for these types of problems is a VM. Keeping a VM of Windows on hand has done a swell job of doing those little things that you have to do on Windows. The irony here is that I used to think Linux belonged in a VM running under Windows, and now here I am twisting that around.

The last issue I was facing is a more recent development, I finally procured a second graphics card and a third monitor. I had never attempted to set this many monitors spanning multiple graphics cards up in Ubuntu. This was the only thing that took some tinkering, two monitors is brainless, three takes a little work. I started by using Xinerama, which has been around for a while, but showed its maturity by working immediately. The only downside to Xinerma is that your desktop and all other 3D accelerated objects are forced into a 2D only mode. So, all those cool effects we have come to love in Ubuntu don’t work, and video games are rendered on the CPU rather than offloading their work onto your expensive GPU. The fix for me was to run TwinView on my main two monitors and a separate X session on my third. At first I was turned off by this solution because you can’t drag windows across X sessions, so it was like having two separate computers with their monitors next to each other. After playing around for a while, I realized how wonderful this setup could be and started using the separate X session for a MythTV frontend. I can now watch TV, play a video game, and surf the web all at the same time on one machine. Now, try doing that on Windows.

I can definitely say with absolute confidence that I have gone from willing Linux to be great to actually seeing a great Linux. No longer do I worry about setting up thousands of options, instead I have begun to dream up more. I see a bright future for Linux with much success to come in the future.

I’ve been a bit busy with work and school for the last couple of days. I haven’t made any further progress on the BlueProximity scripts as of yet, but hopefully I’ll get some time tonight. I did however finally run out of gas on Monday, I ended up getting 26.3MPG which is good bump higher than I normally get. A typical tank for me is 23-24MPG. So, just by coasting in neutral down hills and coasting to stop lights I was able to increase my gas mileage by about 4MPG. Personally the wear and tear on your breaks for taking all of the stop rather than letting the engine slow you down in gear is probably going to outweigh any advantage you get gas mileage wise. I’ll try to make another post tonight if I get any further along on my scripts.

So, I spent a few hours yesterday starting to see what I could do with BlueProximity. I got up to the point of locking my computer, turning off my monitors, and pausing my music. Today I spent a good number of hours continuing to experiment with it to see how far I could take my ideas. I decided to migrate my work to a VM since that is where I planned on running my final product. I’m attempting to kill off the 4 computers currently running in my room and dropping that down to 1-2. My solution is to migrate all my current machines to VM one by one. So, using VMWare 2.0 I was able to attach my bluetooth dongle to my Ubuntu VM under Windows Server 2008. It took a bit of work just to get the sound and bluetooth adapter recognized in Server 2008, but that is for another post. Once I had the adapter attached and working with local apps I decided to take it to the home automation level. I wrote scripts to control a fan and lamp in my room. I attached the serial port to the VM and sure enough whenever I leave my room my lamp and fan turn off and when I return they turn on. I migrated my music collection into Amarok for an idea that I’m saving for later (I’ll let you know if it works). So, I can leave my room and have my lights turn out, my fan turn off, and my music pause. Was that enough, nah not even close. I decided to start working with festival, a text to speech synthesizer for Linux. I expanded the Amarok pause and play commands to include nice fades and on top of that when I enter my room the music fades to 20%, reads me the song and artist of what is playing and then fades to my previous level when I last left.

Some of you might be thinking there can’t possibly be more. Well, I have several other ideas that I plan on implementing including integrating a sunrise/sunset calculation to decide whether or not to turn the lamp on when I enter the room. I also what to add a proximity script so that if I’m in my room and it gets dark then my lamp will fade on at sunset. I want to do something similar with my fan using weather data. I haven’t decided if I just want to use online data, or if I should get/make a USB or serial thermometer to get conditions inside of my room. Another idea I had was to include an email checker in the proximity script and to fade out any playing music and play the “You’ve got mail” sound when there is new mail in my GMail account. I know of several other things I really want to do, but they’re dependent upon me saving up enough money to buy a network based IR blaster.

While searching for some info on bluetooth proximity detection I came across a post on the Ubuntu Forums explaining a new program that will lock/unlock your computer for you base on whether or not a set bluetooth device was within a certain distance of your computer. The natural device to use for this would be a cell phone, but now days you could use a bluetooth headset or any other matter of bluetooth enabled device that you keep on your person. Suprisingly enough I was able to setup my iPhone to work with the program and a basic USB bluetooth adapter. One option offered by the program is to execute any command during the lock and unlock phases. By default it is set to turn on your screensaver and lock your screen. The post mentioned your ability to add scripts to do various things like pausing amarok, changing your status in Pidgin. Unfortunately, I use Banshee and no script was written for it. So, I threw together two small scripts to do this for me in python. In the command section of just add “&& python /script/location/banshee_pause.py” (without the “” and substituting in wherever you saved the file). Do the same with the play script for unlock. Now you can walk away and have your Banshee music paused and it will resume when you get back.

Banshee Pause Script

Banshee Play Script

Credit for the Scripts and Ideas Goes to:

http://www.madsoft.org/2008/06/10/interfacing-banshee-10-with-dbus-and-python/

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=702372

I can’t believe we’re already half-way through this week. I feel like time is moving and I’m standing still. I seem to have broken my focus again in terms of school work. I can’t seem to motivate myself to get started on any of it. I know that once I start I can’t stop, and yet I can’t seem to find the inspiration to start.

I started working on my new server this week and have received my rackmount chassis. I’m very excited to finally be moving on a project I wanted to start over 6 months ago. The next step is to save up enough money to buy the new motherboard and processor. Unfortunately they account for $500 of the total cost. It’ll probably be a week or two before I can order them.

I’ve been trying out some hypermileage techniques recently. I’m not sure how well they will work out until I get through my current tank of gas, but I’m optomistic. I’ll post my results when I finish up my tank. In the mean time I will also be trying to figure out how to be more productive with my time. I find that I do a lot during the day, and yet I feel like I don’t accopmlish anything. There has to be a way to increase my productivity further. I think I will attempt to plot out some times tomorrow to see how much time I spend doing different things. I have a feeling that my largest piece of lost time each day is my driving time to and from school. This accounts for roughly 2 hours of my day. Perhaps I can come up with some ingenous way to make this time more productive.

So, looking back I was considerably less productive this weekend than I had hoped. Nothing I had hoped to accomplish was done, I ended up working on both Saturday and Sunday. I had planned on working today (Sunday), but only for around 3hrs. This seemingly small job turned into a 6hr computer marathon. Like an idiot on Saturday night I started to play around with the idea of putting Linux on my primary computer which runs off of a RAID 0 array. I had never been able to get it to work, but decided to mess with it. I ended up blowing out my array, thankfully I had made a backup in case this happened, which killed my Windows install. I decided to split the array and run Linux on one drive and Windows on the other. I had to wrestle with Linux for several hours to get my three monitors working. In the end, I got everything working, but at the expense of my compiz effects that I love so much. Perhaps with Intrepid Ibex I will be able to make this work. The only high note I can leave this weekend with is that I made some good money today towards purchasing my new server. On the downside I have lost two days of work on my projects as well as valuable homework time. I may see if I can get something accomplished on this front tonight before I hit the sack tonight. Monday is going to have to be extra productive to put me back on schedule.

For the first time in 13 years of working with computers I was told by a client that they don’t think I know what I’m doing. I should have known this was inevitable having worked with so many people, but I can honestly say I wasn’t entirely prepared for it. The client caimed that an error message stating that “A program has stopped responding” was my fault and that since it popped up after I had worked on her computer coupled with several other minor problems that I was the idiot. This coming from a person that knows when she double clicks the “E” on her desktop that a magic window appears on her screen. I was generous enough to cut my rate and have put in over 8 hours on a stupid project that I billed a single hour for (old people are the stingiest people on earth). This will now mark my third return to work on this computer because the user wasn’t quite sure what she did with her computer. Every shortcut, every button was a guessing game trying to re-create the old computer she had that I never saw. I can safely say that I will not be working with many senior citizens in the future that don’t have computer knowledge.

So, yesterday was not as productive as I would have liked in terms of my projects. However, on the brightside I did work a 5hr job which will help financially at the moment, and may even help me start to procure parts for my new server. This weekend I have a good amount of homework I need to complete, as well as a single job on Sunday which will take around 3hrs. So, I should have some time to get a lot of work done on my projects. As an update for you TF2 fans, I realized I hadn’t posted any screenshots in a while, so here is what I found in my screenshot folder.