I have a new home

Awhile ago I bought jonhoman.com, so my blog is now there. No new content here.

How-To: Build Pidgin on Ubuntu Feisty

Over the past few weeks, I have started to get more involved in the Ubuntu community. I have fielded several question in #ubuntu. I even have a goal of learning to package some applications, including Flock.

There has been quite a bit of activity in #ubuntu on Gaim/Pidgin. Since the package in the repository has not yet been updated from Gaim2.0 Beta6, I figured I would write up a quick post on how to build Pidgin 2.0 yourself. This guide assumes you are using Ubuntu Feisty, though it can probably work on older versions of Ubuntu and perhaps other Debian-based distros but no guarantees.

First, download the latest source from http://pidgin.im. Here is a direct link to the latest source.

Now, extract the source to the folder where want Pidgin to reside. I keep applications I build myself in ~/apps/[Application]. So I open the terminal, and do ‘cd apps’, followed by ‘tar xvjf pidgin-X.X.X.tar.bz2′. Replace the X’s with the correct version number. Now you have Pidgin extracted into a folder.

Now, make sure you have all the dependencies required to build Pidgin by ’sudo apt-get build-dep gaim’. Next do ‘cd pidgin-X.X.X’, ‘./configure’, ‘make’, ‘make install’.

And now you can run Pidgin by ‘pidgin’. I also added Pidgin to my Gnome Panel. The command to run is ‘/usr/local/bin/pidgin’.

RE: The Coop

This was originally a reply to Dan Lackey’s post on Flock and the Coop extension coming from Mozilla. However, I realized I had more to say than just a comment on his blog and my thoughts deserved a separate post.

Dan,

Having been around Flock for pretty much the same time span as you, I would have to agree with you. As a community member, I spent many hours of my time over the last 18 months reading bug reports, SVN commits, etc. Sure those details are open, but you have to dig through mailing lists to find them.

I am faithful that Flock is not vaporware, but I feel, like you, that Flock needs to be more open. Sure anyone can browse through the code, file bug reports, and download “nightlies”. However, what makes or breaks an open-source project is the community. Firefox and Ubuntu are good examples here.

Flock is coming around though. The main wiki is starting to be a place for Design specs. IRC and the developer mailing list are starting to pick up again. But all of these communication channels are for the more technical user (yes, I know. this is a beta so many, if not most, are higher up the technical food chain. but there need to be more user friendly communication channels). For example, Flock’s community dude Evan sent a survey to one of the mailing lists. Ok, that’s a great way to get user feedback. However, the mailing list is a lot less visible than the official flock.com blog. The blog is one click away from flock.com, whereas the mailing list at least 3. So I would suggest cross posting things such as this survey, unless one wants to get feedback from a specific subset of the Flock community.

Ok, I think I am done. Don’t get me wrong, I think Flock is a great product and has enormous potential. I just feel Flock needs to be open in more ways than just source.

P.S. Evan, if you read this, I liked seeing some pics in your Flickr account from Flock HQ. Please make that a regular thing. Makes you all seem more human or something.

LoG and Trivium Concert Review

So I went to a concert yesterday. Lamb of God headlined with Trivium in support.

Gojira opened, a band from France. They opened the concert well and I might look into more of their music later.

Machine Head was next. I saw them in August on SotU and wasn’t impressed. Still not impressed. Very similar set list, new album out soon though.

Trivium played a good set list. They played most of my favorites from The Crusade and the best from their previous two cd’s. I really enjoyed their set, though I think they probably could have played a little longer. My only compliant was one song (forgot which one) where the band quit playing and Heafy solo’ed a line before the rest of the band started playing again. He really didn’t sound good on that line, but did hit the last note.

Lamb of God was amazing. They played all of my favorites from Sacrament. I don’t know the previous albums as well, and played some songs I haven’t heard before. That didn’t stop me from rocking out with them though. For one song, a buddy and I went into the pit. I re-injured my hand; it’s been a nagging injury that I keep hurting every time I play basketball. My buddy probably cracked a rib. That’s a sign of the intensity and brutality in the pits. When LoG came back out for their encore, the circle pits for their last 3 songs were insanely huge. Definitely a sight to see.

The concert did give me one scare. During one of Trivium’s opening songs, the crowd was really pushing around, trying to get up to the front. A few people in front of me fell down, so I tried to brace the people behind me so no one got trampled. But I got pushed on top of them. For a second, I was pretty scared. Fortunately, someone pulled me up and then I pulled up the other guys. No one got hurt!

World Domination 201

First of all, Merry Christmas everyone. Hope you all enjoy the holidays.

Secondly, I read through Eric S. Raymond’s essay titled World Domination 201. In this essay, ESR points out that the Linux community has until 2008 to get ready for the next shift in computer hardware. And because of this shift in hardware, a shift in software will also take place. In 2008, the low end PC’s will all have 64-bit CPU’s and the market will have to pick a new standard for the 64-bit architecture.

He listed several issues that are requirements for this new standard:

“The issues we believe to be requirements for the new 64-bitdesktop standard platform are, in order of increasing painfulness:

• Drivers for all major existing hardware.
• 32-bit legacy platform emulation.
• Surviving the killer app.
• Enabling preinstalls.
• Support for all major multimedia formats.”

Point one and five stick out in my mind as quite important. As I have been following the Planet Ubuntu articles in my spare time, binary video card drivers and multimedia codecs have been a point of major discussion. Basically, Ubuntu might be enabling binary (non-free) video card drivers in its next release. This will allow users to enjoy the eye candy of transparency, rotating cubes, etc. Multimedia codecs allow users to listen to MP3’s and watch DVD’s, both are not free.

I have not finished the World Domination essay, so I am not exactly sure where ESR stands on this issue though I am assuming he is agruing for free alternatives to the binary drivers. I agree that to win the average computer user, Linux will need to work out of the box. But will that cause the Linux community to be just like Windows and Mac OS X? Should we be willing to go away from the roots that started this movement to win the desktop market?

Those are questions that I am unable and unwilling to answer myself. And I will probably still be loyal to the Linux community either way.

technorati tags:linux, esr, ubuntu

Blogged with Flock

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So my fifth semester of college is done. About frickin’ time too. I am looking forward to Christmas break, a lot. I don’t go back to school for a full month, which gives me plenty of time to work, relax, code, game, etc.

New Things:

• My podcast downloader works. I need to think of a good way to check if the feed is updated or not. Right now, it always downloads the enclosure even if it was download during a previous run of the program. Anyone interested in trying the program out?
• My roommate is playing Gears of War. He has been stuck on the last boss for at least an hour now. I am laughing inside.
• My little bro got his first girlfriend. Dave, if you read this, congrats dude.
• I am excited for the Spring semester.
• Flock 1.0 has been pushed back to an early 2007 release. Pretty sure this hasn’t been stated officially, but Mike stated it in the forums.
• Everyone Loves Raymond has turned into my favorite TV show. Ever since Lost has taken a break, ELR has taken a special place in heart. I also watch all the Heroes episodes online and am really looking forward for new episodes.
• Looking forward to the Lamb of God/Trivium tour. Pissed that I am missing In Flames for basketball.

More on point #4. Why the heck would I be looking forward to school? Well, I am actually taking a programming class this semester, which is always a plus in my book. I also got to skip the first semester programming class so I don’t have to labor through too much old material. I am semi-scared about coding in Java. I didn’t have the greatest experience learning Java in high school so I am a little apprehensive about it. But I am sure pretty it won’t be that bad. Also, I am taking an Info Security class. This class should be pretty fun and interesting. Security is definitely one of my passions and the course follows the necessary items for CISSP certification so if I do well in the course, I may try to get my first cert.

Yay! I updated my blog again. Awhile ago, Lloyd pointed out that I don’t post often enough. Hopefully that will change. Probably not though.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, school, java, tv

What’s New

Well, this afternoon I was greeted to a message from my girlfriend telling me to “update wordpress”. I guess she reads my blog and wants to read what she already knows. So here goes another overdue update on current events.

On my way back home from my second trip home to see my dad, I had some time in the car do some work on my coding project. I developed some basic functions to do pretty much everything the application is doing right now. The next thing on the todo list to figure out a method to name the mp3’s. Right now the name is hard-coded, but I have something in mind that should work. Just too lazy to try it out.

On the college front, after talking with the chairman of the Computer Science department I am skipping the 1st semester of the intro programming class and going right to the 2nd semester. This is welcome news since I have already taken a similar class. But since the classes were only 3 credits (the courses at my current university are 4 credits), the chairman wouldn’t take 6 credits for 8 credits. But at least I am a semester closer to graduating.

Other than that, not much to update on. My dad is doing well. The first few weeks were tough, but it sounds like he is doing better now. I have spent quite a bit of time playing Gears of War. It’s a great game for the Xbox 360 and probably the first must-have title for come out.

Also, this post was a great chance to test out the new version of Flock. Hopefully it will be ready for primetime sometime in December.

Blogged with Flock

Tags:

Update of Another Kind

Well, it seems that I have at least one reader interested in the progress of pyNetcast. Unfortunately, I don’t have any progress to report. I haven’t found any time to work on it yet. However, I do have something that I feel I should write about. Many of you may already know, but for those that don’t:
On last Wednesday, I found out that my dad had brain tumor and was to have surgery on Monday (yesterday). He has been hospitalized since the tumor was found on the MRI. I left for home around 11pm Friday and got home around 4:15am (had to wait for Tanya to get done with work).

Yesterday, he went into surgery around 3:15pm and was finally out of surgery around 8:30pm. The doctor spoke with my family and I shortly after my dad was in recovery. My dad was able to say his name, my mom’s name and the name of his church. This was a relief since his speech was one area the docs were worried about. The tumor was quite a bit larger than was anticipated. Instead of being around the size of a golf ball, it ended up being about the size of a raquet ball, large plum or a small orange. Take your pick. All in all, he is doing well.

I spoke to him this morning for a minute and he sounded tired, but good. This evening, my mom told me it looks like all of the tumor was removed, so that is a good sign. It seems like his recovery is going well so far. He was even able to get out of bed and sit in a chair for 15-20 minutes.

I want to thank all of the people who kept my dad and my family in your thoughts and prayers recently. You are all greatly appreciated. I will do my best to keep current information here on my site.

Oh, and Manda, I hope to find some time to work on the project this week. But don’t be mad if I can’t.

Project Update

Well, in my last post, I wrote about my plans to write up a simple pod(net)cast client that ran in the terminal and could download whatever feed I wanted to subscribe to. Well, I have made a few steps forward an actual useable product.

Thanks to a few fellas in #python, I am making use of the feedparser module, which definitely is making this a lot easier for me. Instead of me trying to get the text of a unicode object into a list, the feedparser module parses whatever feed I throw at it into a dictionary. This makes retrieving various pieces of data really easy, for example, the enclosure href.

Right now, my program (temporarily named pyNetcast since pyPod is actually taken it seems and also because I don’t feel like risking a lawsuit from Apple) parses the SimplyTech feed, gives me the href for the first enclosure, and saves that href to an mp3 file.

On the to do list:

• Figure out how to know when the feed has been updated and when an episode has already been downloaded
• Download more than the first episode
• I would like to see some sort of progress displayed when downloading the file. Right now, all the program displays is the blinking line
• Subscribe to more than one feed, though this is easily accomplished
• Be able to update and download silently
• And some other stuff that I can’t remember

Hopefully I will find some time to keep plugging away at this program in the coming days. In the two nights I have worked on this I have made decent progress. I have to remember to make better use of Google.
  

Coding

Last spring I thought about coding a podcast downloader in Python. I figured I would find time during the summer. Well, that didn’t happen. I probably had the time, but I was too busy playing WoW. I am going to try my hand at this project again. Hopefully I get somewhere this time though.

I am planning to write a basic podcast client, which will probably be command line based. Basically what I want it to do is allow me to subscribe to some podcast feeds, check for updates in the background via a cron job, and then download new enclosures when the feed is updated. Pretty basic, but still the most involved project I have tried.

I was in class yesterday and started doing a little planning in my head, but I am still pretty unsure on quite a few of the details. I know what I want the program to do, but pretty unsure how io implement my idea. Dive into Python has some examples of HTML and XML processing in Python, so hopefully that will be a useful resource.

So, why the renewed interest in this project? Well, for one, my programming class this spring is using Python so I have been trying to get ahead of the game. For another, I decided to look into using SVN locally so I need a project to work on.

If you are familiar with Python and have any knowledge to pass onto me or tutorials to share, please do. I haven’t done much coding in Python so I might be a little behind the curve.