Technology wars

Talk about not my day. This is my 24hour conical of technology out to hinder me.

1) Following the failure of my hand-me-down printer, I went out to purchase a new one. All I really need it for is printing envelopes, and my partner prints BW images. So I grabbed something cheap and nasty. A Canon Pixma IP1600, which ended up being broken straight out of the box. It just would not recognise the printer cartridge. So back to the shop with it… a day later anyway. I had bought it just before the shop closed, so I’ll have to do it tonight.

2) I finally got the production GridSphere box set up for me, after I went to create WAR files for my projects, I’ve discovered that the Gridsphere ant war target doesn’t work. In fact what it does is war up the gridsphere instance, not the project… damn it

3) NVU keeps going spastic on my web pages. It puts absolute, not relative links in the background style so I have to edit that by had, it crashes regularly, and the upload manager seems to hang. As much as I love where this app is going, it isn’t there yet. And it isn’t really a problem with the features, its a bug problem. If I ever get through the rest of this stuff I might have a look myself, but they are famous last words.

4) I also bought a new BlueAnt bluetooth headset, which is meant to do A2DP, which means stereo quality sound… But the software just crashes on my win2k machine, and on my winxp machine, which already has bluetooth in it, it doesn’t even recognise the device. Oh well. It guess it was too good to be true.

What a day.

Tomorrow will be better though!

The incomplete client

Of the 3 LJ clients I've tried under linux, none have the complete suite of features which I want/need. These features would be:

Client	WYSIWYG editing	Spell checker	Support for tags, moods, etc	Offline editing	Posting to different journals
LogJam	N	Y	Y	Y	Y
Drivel	N	N	N	Y	Y
Gnome Blog Poster	Y	Y	N	N	N

I'm currently using LogJam, and I certainly hope that in the very near future LogJam can take the gtk html widget, and make my life that little be happier.

A new BibTex filter

A new BibTex filter is on its way into Bibus as you read this. Its a total rewrite of the old filter, so it should now support common bibtex markup such as @string, and it will no longer choke when it hits unknown tags. It’ll just report them and continue. Now, back to what I am actually paid to do…

New packages

I’ve just added the latest bluez packages (Linux bluetooth stack) to my repository. As well, I have a 2.6.14 kernel built for the IBM Thinkpad t41, with Bluetooth, modem, wireless, trackpad, IBM ACPI, hard drive monitor, etc built in.

deb http://ihpc.jcu.edu.au/~jc118215/debian ./

Type pad to Drupal

I just bashed out the first installment of my Type Pad To Drupal module. It is pretty complete, allowing you to map type pad bloggers to drupal users, and importing all the comments. It also allows you to upload those pesky large export files to the server, and point to them from the script. Avoiding the normal PHP upload file size restrictions.

The continuing plague of dbus (0.23)

I’ve recently found myself stuck in between want and need. The need for a working system, and the want for some more modern gnome apps. And the sticking point. dbus.

dbus 0.23, the old API, was becoming pretty widely adopted round the place as a nice, simple, IPC protocol, especially when communicating between root and user apps, and especially in the hotplug hardware arena, where multiple apps needed to be notified. Then along came dbus 0.50, with a new API (which is to be expected in beta software), but what didn’t come along was updated to all the main debian packages which used it.

I’ve ended up recompiling lifearea myself, with the threat to do the same with the evolution plugins (so I can get my calendar back).

I have however bought a new toy. A bluetooth card, and headset. But the linux bluetooth stack (bluez) doesn’t even compile. Geez. Will this ever end.

(Not that I’m really complaining, but I’m sure we can learn a few things from this)