Fast forward to Sunday (no travel issues today, for the most part). Rather disappointed in the unconference sessions, ended up at PowerPress because I had no idea what that was. Turns out it’s a podcasting plugin, and actually looks interesting. If I had any use for it, it’d be great. I kind of wish I’d suggested a women in open source thing, since the planned session apparently disappeared off the schedule some point last week.

The afternoon was better – plugin/theme competition; rapid-fire presentations from Saturday sessions; 2.9 preview; and a Q&A with Matt Mullenweg (the co-creator of wordpress). I like seeing other people’s work, so the competition was interesting. The competitors can all be found here, since I’m not sure they’re released yet. The two themes tied, and the plugin that won was Conversation Starter. The rapid fire presentations were fun – in which presenters try to condense 45min panels into 5 minutes. Can’t forget the WordPress as a CMS song, as performed by Scott Kingsley Clark. Matt then had a Q&A session, with attendees asking everything from ‘how do I deal with trackbacks’ to ‘what is the future of wordpress’. For some reason I didn’t think he’d be a geek, but he was, and he was also a good (and funny) speaker. I couldn’t begin to summarize all that was said -I didn’t take notes because I got random inspiration for my class project website (so I was sketching that out) and my laptop had no battery. Knew I should’ve gotten the giant battery.

The day was over after that (though it was another three hours before I was home). Overall it was a good trip – a lot of information to process, saw a lot of people (didn’t actually talk to nearly enough of them), and had a nice weekend in NYC.

There’s a bug in the uvcvideo driver that kills the other USB ports, and causes suspend and hibernate to fail. You can apparently fix this by being ninja and hitting fn+f6 before it loads, but I’m not that good, so I just blacklisted uvcvideo. If you’re having the same problem, you can stop the driver from loading by blacklisting it.
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
and add the line
blacklist uvcvideo
anywhere in the file (to the end would be easiest, so if there is a fix you’ll be able to find it & unblacklist it). Of course, this disables the webcam. On one hand I’d been using 8.04, which also lacked (native) driver support for the webcam, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything really (after I reinstalled the OS I didn’t bother recompiling the driver, so I’ve been without it for a while). Still rather annoying, and I can’t tell if they’re working to fix it or not -but I certainly hope so.

The other main issue I had was a very, very annoying bug in the screen brightness. On startup, and whenever I adjusted the brightness, it would oscillate between the set brightness and a level or two below, making the screen flicker. There was apparently some magic where you could hold your right mouse button down for a while & it’d stop, but I’m not doing that every time. The fix mentioned in the release notes worked for me, which was to “edit /etc/default/grub and add nomodeset to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX, then run sudo update-grub“. Restarted, and there was no flickering. I could change my brightness, and no flickering. What a relief. I have yet to figure out if doing this has any negative effects.

Other than that I really like this release. I have native wireless again! [after a glitch, I had downgraded from 9.04 to 8.04, which didn't.] It does seem faster, though maybe not as fast as I’d heard. It also seems like my battery has slightly better life, not sure if that’s either true or related, however – I only installed it yesterday, after all. I’ve got a few screenshots, if anyone is interested. On a purely aesthetic note I’m very happy with the installed themes, it took very little tweaking for me to find something I liked. And usually I have to go an play with the panel backgrounds, edit the gtk config file…

click to enlarge: 1024×600

Not sure if these are actually interesting to anyone, but… First is my empty desktop (well, the USB drive I was using to transfer the screenshots to this computer is there, but otherwise). Next is the file browser, a few changes but nothing amazing. Third is fake-using GIMP – obviously when I have a 1600×900 monitor I don’t really *want* to use GIMP on a netbook, but it’s not impossible at all. Finally, we have the Ubuntu Software Center, which I’m not that impressed with. I mean, I understand the reasoning behind consolidating package management and all, so I guess that’s cool. And not everything can be shiny. It is super easy to use, just like Add/Remove Applications. I guess I’ve crossed some sort of elitist line, or something, since I prefer command line. But I can say that about a few things (like command line twitter, that was odd).

So there’s my view on things. A bit of trouble to start with, but overall shiny. I’ve got Geany, Exaile, and a LAMP setup, so I’ll be happy.

I also finally got around to making a blurb for the slide-down header thing, and will continue to add in sharing links. All this housecleaning isn’t just because I’m avoiding schoolwork, surprisingly enough. November will be a busy month, so I’m preparing. I’m going to be attending WordCamp NYC, and I plan on releasing post-from-site v 2.0 sometime before then*. I’m excited for wordcamp, not just because it gives me an excuse to go into NYC (for someone who grew up on LI I didn’t go nearly as much as I would have liked), but also because of the tracks – they’ve got an advanced developer track & a hacker room. Also I’ve never been to a developer conference, so it’ll be a new experience (though I guess it’s not strictly a dev conference).

*Hopefully the week before. New features will be multiple file uploads, submission using AJAX, and better support for internationalization.

In other geekery, I got my windows 7 key, so I can install that whenever I get a chance, and Ubuntu 9.10 is coming out soon so I’ll have to install that too… Now I’m not sure if I want to leave my old laptop alone, just update the Ubuntu partition & leave XP, and install Win7 on my Wind. Apparently it can handle it? So says a few reviews of the beta, that’s all I get from a quick google search. And then there’s the question of whether I want to dual boot Win7/Ubuntu there… Decisions, decisions… Whatever I do, I’ll make sure to post about it here.

Also a learning experience is trying to balance having a ‘real’ job (recent grad, what can I say) with doing on-the-side plugin stuff, with having time to be social and sleep/eat. And not spending all my waking time on the computer. I know it’s possible, but finding the right balance is difficult.

Noteworthy things: I recently installed a few new programs (on ubuntu) – exaile and gnome-do. Gnome-do is shiny, not sure how much more useful it’ll be than the generic run-app dialog, but I like the fact that it gives my windows button something useful to do. Exaile initially seems like any other music player, though it has an odd method of organizing my music – which isn’t to say I don’t like it. I went from iTunes to Rhythmbox, which both use panels of genre-artist-album. So anything different is interesting. Anyway, the bit I just discovered and like best? The ‘dynamic’ option to extrapolate a playlist based on the current song (via last.fm) Great for me, since I’ve got like 15GB of music (not that that’s an excessive amount, but it’s enough that I forget what I have).

As far as firefox plugins, I’m probably late in getting on the bandwagon for Firebug, but it’s also incredibly useful – specifically the item layout bit, and the network analysis.

I don’t think I’ve added anything awesome to my windows computer lately. I freaked out a little because I only had 1GB of hd space left, so I may be removing the Ubuntu partition on that laptop. I don’t use it anymore, not now that I’ve got another laptop that’s strictly linux.

I’d also like to eventually finish the new theme idea I have for this site, but it’s relatively low priority, so. We’ll see – the idea is continuing the alien-abduction theme, but a different setting. I should maybe get on designing a logo too. Branding and SEO-type things are much lower on my priorities list than maybe they should be.

So okay, in both cases we still need to build it. How should it be built? The base would likely be wheels, not legs (because then we’d need to bring in how to walk, which is difficult, and honestly that’s not the important bit), then some kind of torso where all the computer bits would be, and some kind of power source (which I didn’t even get into). The arms, which were originally suggested to be chainsaws, would probably be better off as blades, I’m thinking circular saw type things. Well, maybe not. Admittedly, this is where I loose ground. Blades seemed lighter and easier to direct, but with enough power I suppose chainsaws would be too. Regardless, the robot would need to be made of some heavy duty materials, since I doubt the world will be nice to it. I mean, assuming a zombie hoard attacks it, it would probably be gnawed on.

But back to the controlling of it. As I said already, remote controlled would make the programming much easier, but I think would loose some of the functionality in that someone would need to be the one manning it. I also think that part of making this is so that we-the-survivors can just hide out in where ever and let it protect us. But to honestly get this working, we’d need a team. So, as I was conveniently on my way to robotics, I figured we can just take over the robotics lab and make the grad students do the programming. I’m sure my professor would find it an excellent learning experience.

That was way more entertaining than it should have been, but now my robotics hw won’t be nearly as painful. Practical applications!

In any case, I’d like to add the ability to also display post categories, and whatever else you may want to have on a navigation bar. I’ll release the basic one first though, likely through WP’s plugin system (subversion? really? seems like an awful lot of touble just for a plugin…). Then I’ll probably work concurrently on a next version incorporating the above, and forked version which will allow dropdowns, if only because I just discovered jQuery and want to play. Or maybe some other functionality abusing jQuery (I don’t know why I hadn’t heard about this before, but I love it!).

Anyway, aside from plugin news I’m finally opening this site up for real, with just a warning. Since I’m never going to stop playing with the design of it anyway. So, ‘perpetually under construction, please watch for falling code.’ And now to play with plugins some more (… what homework?).