Christopher Merle

Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, but first I need more coffee.

Category: Technology (Page 5 of 7)

Job Search

October 6, 2008 /

Well now I’m beginning my job search in earnest. I’ve uploaded my resume to Dice.com and applied for two positions. I’ll be submitting my résumé and applying for many more positions over the coming days and weeks. I am currently employed in Tulsa but will be moving to Tucson in December 2008. My employer is fully aware of the situation and is sad to see me go. My wife is a professor and is starting a new position in January 2009 in Tucson. My skills are portable.

I’m looking for either a web developer or web administrator position. My language of choice is Python and I’ve developed a few Django apps, as well as customized Zope/Plone. If you see the Tucson page I’ve uploaded my resume and listed some of my skills. So far I haven’t found an ideal position so I’m seriously considering doing consulting work as well as contract work.

Online Social Network Fatigue

July 17, 2008 /

I have my own blog (this), my own podcast (actually 2 but one is going away), my own facebook account, my own twitter account. I have a skype account, aim, yahoo im, icq, and a livejournal account. Oh, yeah and a linkedln account. I don’t have a myspace account. I have an email address with my ISP and I even have a gmail account.

Don’t get me started on the number of websites I’ve registered on so I could post. Or the number of listservs I subscribe to. I have having to register every time on a new website. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some websites I’ve registered on. If it’s not an important website to register but I want to access it I’ll use bugmenot.

So what’s the point of this post? I like to bitch.

Pycon 2008 Part I

March 22, 2008 /

While it’s still fresh in my mind I should go ahead and write up my Pycon 2008 report. I’ll flesh it out as time permits or add new parts. Overall I had a good time and it was worth it for me, but the event was not without it’s problems. I’ll have more positive things to say in Part II.

This is my third Pycon. I attended 2006 and 2007 in Dallas. I’m glad I listened to the latest TWID podcast while waiting for my plane to board from St. Louis. I couldn’t get a direct flight from Tulsa there, but did back. The one thing that stuck in my mind was 1000 people were signed up. There were 600 in 2007 and 400 in 2006. They said there were that many signed up for just the tutorials alone.

Thursday I got to the hotel checked in, called my cousin and then went downstairs to help stuff bags while waiting for him to get off work. I met a guy from LexisNexis and we worked out a great system for stacking the paper that was going to be stuffed in the bags which got changed to what was a less efficient system. Anyway there was a lot of people helping to stuff the goodies bags. My cousin Gary showed up and we went out to dinner with his family.

We went to a great Chinese restaurant called Yue’s in Elk Grove Village. I hadn’t seen them in person in almost 11 years though I keep in touch with him via email. Anyway, I got back to the hotel and had a beer in the bar and got my first shock. It was $6. I soon discovered at the hotel you were a captive audience. I’m glad most of the food was covered by registration because everything was overpriced. The room rate was reasonable though. The nearest place you could walk to was the convention center and other hotels. Even the ‘L’ was 3/4 of a mile away. I thought Dallas was pedestrian unfriendly, but Rosemont, IL has it beat. At least you could’ve walked a 1/4 mile from the hotel in Dallas and found a half dozen nice restaurants.

My first clue that things did not go well was I overheard some people talking on the shuttle bus back to the airport. They were talking about how lightning talks were sold to the sponsors as were keynote slots. I had noticed that there was a lower percentage of good lightning talks and panels than from last year. I realize that Pycon is run by all volunteers and what right do I have to complain when they are doing the best they can. Then I checked Planet Python and there was mention of Bruce Eckel’s rant.

I didn’t even know he was there. Bruce wasn’t even listed in the speakers list. I saw his name on the open space boards downstairs. I’m familiar with Eckel’s Thinking In Java. I thought that was cool. I thought I saw him chatting with someone. I was curious why he was there. Go see his blog to find out. He had some valid points in his post, but I thought he was being overly harsh. His major complaint was that it had become too commercial. Maybe it had. It really didn’t seem more commercial than it was last year. It was and it didn’t really bother me that much. But after reading the rant that it was the reason why the panels and the lightning talks weren’t as good.

One of reasons I go to Pycon is to meet other programmers. I also go to learn about cool things you can do with python. The keynotes this year weren’t as good as they were last year.

I’ll say this for all those who complained and this goes for me to. Help to make Pycon better next year. It doesn’t have to be much. There are a lot of people in the community. I had a good time helping to stuff the bags for the attendees and I wouldn’t mind doing that next year. More later.

TED is cool

February 27, 2008 /

TED is this who’s who of elite geeks conference held in Monterey, CA every year. I watched a video about the conference which showed what it was all about. Then I went to their website and found lots more videos of talks and performances. I’ve seen some very cool and very entertaining stuff. The first really exciting video was about a multi-touch interface for a computer. And then I watched a lot more fascinating and inspiring videos and then I saw one today that amazing. In fact it was empowering.

The Fab Lab developed by MIT is revolutionary. It’s a personalized factory. But that’s only the beginning. In a lot of ways it’s even more revolutionary as the OLPC and the BOGO light. All of them can change the world. Watch Neil Gershenfeld:

Dual Boot: Vista and Ubuntu

February 23, 2008 /

I got a new laptop, a Toshiba a205-s5814, and I wanted to make it dual boot. It came with Vista and was planning to downgrade it to XP, but I’d heard that you can XP-ify Vista to make Vista more usable. Basically you turn off the really annoying features and the resource intensive desktop effects. I’ll write a post about it later, maybe. I’ve made it usable enough that I don’t mind using Vista. And by XP-ifying it it’s a lot peppier. Now on to Ubuntu.

So I did the usual Google search and found How to dual-boot Vista with Linux (Vista installed first). Followed the instructions and voilà!. It worked. Except for the wifi. Wifi is always a challenge to get working under Linux. I have Fedora Core 4 installed on a Dell 600M. More on that in a moment for both wifi stories. But first a word about VMWare.

My friend Sean strongly recommended 1) I downgrade to XP (because Vista sucks ass. It really does suck ass.) but my XP-ifying made Vista less sucky and usable. 2) I install VMWare Server and install Ubuntu under it. I did try that first. VMWare Server wants you to install IIS. You don’t need to. Just do a custom install.

I installed VMWare Server and then I created a 30GB space to install Ubuntu in. I did the install everything worked great including the WiFi. The virtual machine just used the native drivers on Vista. I had to monkey with the settings to get the display right. The only thing I couldn’t get working was the desktop special effects under Ubuntu. I also wanted to install Compiz-Fusion and if the normal SFX didn’t work then it wouldn’t work either. I figured it was a VMWare limitation so that’s when I did the dual boot install. Turns out I didn’t need to do that. I had the same problem after I installed Ubuntu as dual boot. So I googled again. I needed to install xglserver.

Dual Boot

I followed the instructions for making the laptop dual boot. Vista allowed me to shrink the partition using the Disk Management Tool. I created a 36GB free partition. I rebooted with the Ubuntu CD (7.10 Gutsy Gibbon) but I had to hit F12 Boot Menu to select the CD to boot from. I did the install.

One note about the instructions. When you get to the part where to install Linux it says to select “Manual – use the largest continuous free space” but the screenshot and my screen said “Guided – use the largest continuous free space”. Choose the latter. I was confused and afraid that it might install on the Vista partition. It didn’t. Ubuntu installed just fine and rebooted the laptop.

Up came Grub and I selected Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)”, the last item in the list to make sure Vista still worked and it did. I rebooted again and selected Linux. It came up just fine except for the wifi. I played around a bit but since I had no network connectivity and was spinning my wheels I hooked up an Ethernet cable. It found the network right away and I did all the updates and installed Compiz-Fusion. I also installed xglserver to get the cool special effects. CF is a bit buggy and the computer froze up a few times but I monkeyed around with the settings and haven’t had any problems since. Back to the wifi. See the links at the bottom if you want to skip to the actual solution.

WiFi

I spent about a day and half figuring out the wifi problem which was less time than it took for my Dell. WiFi support for Linux sucks. It’s better than it was, but it sucks almost as much as Vista does. I had to buy a PC card with wifi for my Dell 600M, but I used our friend Google again to find out what cards were supported. I ended up using MadWifi. I went through the list of cards and found a NETGEAR WG511T. I had to find the correct rpm for FC4. I won’t go into the gory details, but I got it working. You just have to make sure the kernel and the rpm match and that the driver works under that kernel. Now for the Toshiba

After a few false starts and installing the wrong things, I discovered that my laptop uses a Realtek WiFi driver which does have native drivers in Linux. After searching again I found a modified driver for RTL8187B (see link below). I installed it and followed the instructions for connecting. It created a wlan0 driver I activated it put in my WEP key for my home wireless network and I connected. I had to once again monkey with the settings but I got connected.

So if anyone else got an a205-s58xx series Toshiba I hope this helps you if you decide to make it a dual boot with Vista or use VMWare.

Links

Modified drivers for 8187B

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