the stinkin’ blog

When I moved to my new position with Canonical one of the immediately noticeable items was the lack of a collaborative system (never really had a need due to their size). I am used to using a collaboration system of some sort even if they really suck. So I needed to figure out how to bridge a few gaps and be able to use my crackberry with thunderbird and allow my fellow employees to view/share my calendar.

The solution, tie Google Calendar with Thunderbird through Lightning and the Provider for Google Calendar. My first attempt failed because I was missing a library - libstd5++. After adding gcc 3.0 to my system, I had libstd5++ installed. I then added the latest Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar add-on and I was good to go after restarting Thunderbird.

The next step was simply creating a new network-based calendar, choosing Google and adding the private XML URI (from the Google Calendar settings) to Thunderbird, entering my credentials and voila, shared calendar shows in Thunderbird!

Now I can use Google Sync on my crackberry and sync it all together very easily. May seem difficult, but in reality it just required a bit of setup and I can now enjoy the freedom of Thunderbird running on Ubuntu tapping into the wonders of Google Calendar. Need to see what I am doing today, tomorrow or next month? Just ping me and I’m happy to show you!

The Ubuntu Server team has requested the assistance of anyone using Linux as a server in their environment to fill out a survey. Canonical, Ltd. (the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu) is diligently working to understand how the enterprise is using Ubuntu as a server and what needs to be done to make the server usable in the enterprise.

The announcement can be found here.

Stop over and spend some valuable time. If Ubuntu’s desktop is a sign, the server will be well worth the effort spent.

This week I have started a new position with Canonical and am at VMWorld 2008 being held at the Sands Expo Convention Center in Las Vegas. I am surprised to see that there are over 14,000 attendees to this conference this year and all of the known and unknown names in virtualization are here.

VMWare does appear to put on a good show although when I arrived in Las Vegas and went to registration Monday the lines were quite long and organization appeared to be lax at best. After a few hours the lines died down and all was good, but they did not handle the resource usage well for a virtualization company.

I have found a number of very interesting vendors here this week. The most interesting one is BlueBear. In addition to their slick titles like “Benevolent Director” and “404 User Not Found”, they have a very slick product code-named “Kodiak” that is not only a pleasant interface, but a usable pleasant interface. Built on Adobe Air, Kodiak represents your virtual network in a very usable map that allows the user to see the near real-time status of their virtual environment. The coolest part, it is going to be using a open source license. Others like Elastra are interesting in their model even if they have a bit of trouble in explaining exactly what they have to offer. I had done a bit of research on Trigence and was pleased with what I saw. They seem to be similar to Virtuozzo where they use containment virtualization to abstract the application from the OS.

Overall, VMWorld 2008 appears to be a great success for VMWare and the vendors attending. The attendees are smart, interested in what is being offered and forthcoming with information. In the coming weeks, I will try to highlight more about my trip.

I started a new job on Monday. I am now employed by Canonical USA, Inc. Canonical is the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu and is run by Mark Shuttleworth.

I am a ISV Manager responsible for recruiting ISV partners to utilize Ubuntu. Currently Canonical has a number of ISV’s utilizing Ubuntu for one purpose or another as well as a number of partners that support Ubuntu with their products.

This is a truly exciting opportunity for me to make a real difference and help drive the success of not only Ubuntu, but also Canonical.

Well, my time has come once again to be gainfully employed. So much for the free life.

I am off to VMWorld on Monday (15 Sept) to work with Canonical and then off to SFO for some meetings with Sun on Friday. If anyone is going to be around and wants to hook up, let me know.

I’m staying at Treasure Island…woo hoo.

JP

It is now Thursday and nearing the end of my three weeks of freedom from work. A rather cloudy day and I plan on getting my garage to a point where I can at least park a car in it. Hurricane Ike is stirring up the Gulf, creating some cloudiness, and some giving us some wind so that makes working in the garage all the more bearable.

It has been a good three weeks. I managed to get a fair amount done. Completed a number of projects, managed to clean up a lot of the overgrown yard, researched some new ideas, and did some relaxing with some PS3 games.

Off to get the garage out of disarray and into a better state of affairs.

I continue to be amazed at the ease of use of Ubuntu. Of course, the changes made to support new hardware in the Linux kernel helps, but this project was too simple.

I had purchased a simple little Logitech notebook camera a few months back and recently upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04). I simply went to download Skype, chose Ubuntu 7.04+ then right clicked on it with Nautilus and installed it via Gdebi Package Installer. Gdebi suggested 3 other packages to install with it and after logging into Skype it simply WORKED. No tweaking, no fiddling, no manually installing other packages. IT JUST WORKED.

Now if you only knew my Skype ID you could skype me. I guess you will have to ask nicely.

Freaking RIM. They are pissing me off. Acting as if they are a monopoly or something in preventing me from using my phone the way I want to use it.

I am trying to get my Blackberry 8310 to allow me to use DUN via bluetooth to provide an easy way to gain access where I only have a cell signal. Proving to not be an easy task.

I have used this link and it was a good start, but this link has MUCH more detail. Unfortunately the kapsi.fi link has nothing about Blackberry, but some good tips for discovery. And finally, this link helped with Ubuntu, but led me to find that my Blackberry is not supporting DUN?

Not sure why, but my Blackberry does not have DUN working. It seems that others have DUN on their 8310 so I am wondering why mine shows nothing! Argh.

More digging.