This is a followup to my original article on Open Source Screencasting with VNC in GNOME from a few days ago. Since then, I’ve been on a bit of an adventure learning about Flex, ActionScript, and finding out ways that I can manage to hack on this nifty little program with minimal pain.
The most important thing, is that I’ve found the free Flex2 SDK. The compiler and tools appear to be written in Java, so they’ll work just fine under Linux.
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Academics end up giving lots of presentations. Talks about results, proposals, progress, department functions. PowerPoint and projectors are nearly ubiquitous. A trend that’s becoming even more common is to have meetings where a portion of the group is at a remote location – such is the case almost anytime you have remote collaborators. The typical solution in this case is to send your slides around and hope that other folks can follow along.
This year my family finally decided to stop trying to shop for everyone and instead just draw names to see who is giving presents to whom. In the past I’ve been at such name drawing events and they always seem to have issues, such as two person cycles or when someone is supposed to buy a gift for someone they don’t really know that well. It’s also a little hard for us to draw names because we live so far from family.
Ubuntu has been incredibly successful in large part thanks to its ease of use and great packaging. However, one thing they don’t teach you is how to force your GNOME session to export environment variables to processes. When a process is launched from a terminal, you set these environment variables through .bash_profile, .bashrc, .login or other similar files. You can’t simply do this in GNOME.
The problem I’m facing is that I need a way to set a JAVA_HOME environment variable in emacs.
Today I gave a talk to WPLUG on MythTV. I think it ended up going pretty well and it was quite well attended. Most people seemed interested in seeing what they could do with scavenging some computers and trying to get started with MythTV on the cheap. That’s pretty easy if you just want to go standard def: pick up a WinTV PVR-150 card and you’ll be on your way. If you want to go high def, you’ll need a bit faster of a processor, the kind that most people may need to purchase a new system for.
Most modern packaged based operating systems have a facility for easily allowing remote systems to pull down updates. In the Windows world this is primarily used for distributing bug fixes and security patches through the Windows Update system, although major service packs may introduce new features. In Linux, depending on distribution and configuration, the system may download security and bug fixes, or it may download new versions of software running on the system.
Yesterday in my post about things to love in Ubunty Gutsy, I talked a little bit about how great it was to have Xrandr 1.2 finally available on my Laptop. There’s a little graphical utility to setup the screens under Xrandr 1.2 called grandr. However, it had some critical flaws, mainly it crashed on my machine and didn’t remember the layout of the screens at all. This made it less than ideal.
The newest releast of Ubuntu, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon, is less than a month away. In preparation for manning the GNOME booth at Ohio LinuxFest, I recently upgraded my laptop to the latest development release of Ubuntu Gutsy. This newest release features GNOME 2.20, kernel 2.6.22, and OpenOffice.org 2.3, amongst other things. This isn’t meant to be a complete review of Gutsy, rather, its what you should like about it – mainly because it’s what I like about Gutsy.
The recent demise of Zap2it labs and the subsuquent creation of Schedules Direct was a pretty remarkable change in the MythTV community. The community now has an almost official blessing from a TV Guide service to continue, a pretty big event for most open source projects.
However, due to the infrastructure of MythTV, it’s not easy to add a new TV listing service. Rather, the change from Zap2it to Schedules Direct required all users to upgrade their copies of MythTV to the newest version of the stable branch.
Today was the day for my yearly homepage update. The full diff of which appears below. For more history see the following previous posts: 2005, 2006.
:::diff Index: index.xml =================================================================== --- index.xml (revision 326) +++ index.xml (working copy) @@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ <my:infobox title="A Little About Me" minheight="255"> <p> <img src="resources/images/me.jpg" align="left" class="margin10pxright"/> -This is the requisite bit of information about me. I'm a 27 year old graduate +This is the requisite bit of information about me.