Brian Jamison

I just had to scan 19 pages of a paper application. Problem was, I saved each file as a JPG, leaving me 19 different files. Not nice to email that. So I just stitched them all together into a single PDF called “app.pdf” using this command:

convert *.jpg app.pdf

I call that power and simplicity.

“Accidental Configuration Syndrome” (ACS) is what I’m calling the act of repeatedly and accidentally altering the configuration of an application and/or operating system. ACS leads to unnecessary confusion, frustration, and technical support calls. ACS primarily afflicts older people or those with average or less than average mouse and keyboard manipulation skills.

I’ve been providing technical support for my Dad and in-laws’ desktop Linux machines for years now. Linux on the desktop is an excellent fit for them, but they all suffer from ACS.

Just yesterday I restored OpenOffice’s primary toolbars on my father’s machine. These toolbars are his primary interface to OpenOffice - they’re critical tools, and to him they just went missing one day. Of course he had accidentally dragged them off of the primary interface, but I found that this is surprisingly easy to do. Try it; start OpenOffice and aim just two pixels below File on the primary File - Edit - View interface. Hold down the left mouse button and drag down as you might expect to do if the File menu were to appear. Did you just pull the main toolbar off of the interface? I did. Now try and put the toolbar back without screwing things up. I wasn’t able to, and it took me a few minutes to get it back to “normal.” Should the default action of a click and drag be to remove the toolbar? No. Should a mistake in a common usage action (pulling down the FIle menu) cause a major configuration action? Of course not.

Another example — at my in-laws, the main application bar in Gnome seems (to them) to change in mysterious ways. Application launch icons move around, appear and disappear without any apparent reason. What’s happening is that instead of left clicking to start an application, they accidentally right-click and select move, or accidentally click and drag. Once the damage is done, there is no easy way for them to set it right, because they weren’t intentionally making the change - they literally don’t know what they’ve done. Similarly, their desktop is periodically littered with multiple launch icons for solitaire in a failed attempt to simply start the program, again, a right-click presented a configuration option and literally in the blink of an eye they accidentally make a configuration change. To them it appears as if the program simply didn’t start - they don’t notice the new icon on the desktop.

Configuration states should also not be activated by keystrokes - the chance for ACS here is just as great.

The fix for all of this is simple, and it has nothing to do with educating people using computers. This is a user interface problem. We need to build applications and operating systems that assume people will primarily be using them instead of configuring them, and require explicit, deliberate action from a person to enable any configuration changes. Use, not configuration, must be the default state.

From Wattzon, an even more improved product label along the lines of the nutrition facts labels found on food products. The entire slideset is worth the time and puts a solution to our global energy dilemma in a practical, attainable (albeit challenging) light.

On the left, today’s required nutrition label. On the right, a proposed label containing the energy used to create the product and how much it would add to your energy consumption footprint. Click the image for the full-size version on the Wattzon site. Someday this sort of labeling will be required on all products sold.

I have finally managed to synchronize my palm Tungsten T3 to Google Calendar and Swiftdove (Thunderbird optimized for 64 bit + the Lightning calendar) as well as Kontact (aka KDE PIM or KOrganizer). I now have full read/write sync with all apps (with a few small quirks). This method should also work with Thunderbird/Lightning and presumably Sunbird but I haven’t tested that.

Quirks
There are three quirks that cash advance houston loan,cash advance loan idaho,cash in advance loannational cash advancequick cash payday loancash advance payday loansame day cash advance loan,same day cash advanceadvance cash loan overnight,advance cash overnight,overnight cash advanceadvance cash faxless loan,faxless cash advance,no fax faxless cash advance payday loaninstant no fax cash advance,account advance bank cash instant without,instant cash advanceonline cash advance,advance cash lcd online projector,online casino cash advance888 black jackplay blackjack online freelearn to play roulette,play roulette,american learn play roulettehow to play craps,how to play craps on the internet,learn to play crapscasino roulette download,casino roulette,play casino roulettefree casino game downloadbest craps gameonline casino blackjack,online casino gambling blackjack,casino blackjack game onlinevideo poker tournamentsplay online slots,free online slots no download,online slotshow to win at blackjackbingo game info remember slots,slots game,slots car gamebaccarat game download,baccarat game,baccarat the internet casino gameonline game gambling casinoblack jack game download,black jack casino game,black jack gamefree online gambling casino bonus,online casino bonus,online casino with bonus and free moneynew online casinobtdino casino onlinefortunelounge online casinoplay free slots gamefree on line video pokerfree cash casinovideo poker strategyonline casino siteplay free casino game onlineplay free casino slotsblack jack onlinefree casino playcraps online gameplay casino onlinecraps rulesfree video pokercasino gamble,online casino gamble,best casino gamble internet onlineflash video pokerplay free casino gamefree slots game,free internet slots game,free online slots gamebaccarat learn play,play baccarat,play baccarat onlineplay black jack for money,black jack play,play black jack for funfree craps game online,free craps game,free online casino game crapsvideo poker downloadsvideo poker,free video poker game,free online video poker I’m aware of.

Things I tried that didn’t work
I’ve been trying on and off to synchronize my palm with various PIMs under Linux since 2001 with little success. Backing up through Kpilot or pilot-xfer has always worked fine, but getting real sync has been pretty much impossible until now. It may not be the holy grail, it is one of the last pieces to the perfect desktop puzzle.

Initially I tried to get OpenSync to work. I failed with the command line tool, with Kitchensync (best name for sync software evar) and with Multisync090. The KDE PIM/Google Calendar sync failed every time, and I never could get my palm to sync. While that project looks quite promising for now isn’t ready for prime time, as they fully acknowledge on their site.

With a bit of effort, GCALDaemon allowed me to sync between Kontact and Google Calendar, as well as Swiftdove and Google Calendar. And since I was able to sync my Palm with Kpilot (and therefore Kontact) I figured everything would be fine. Alas, that didn’t work - Kontact would display both calendars but would not pass the palm calendar to Google, and vice-versa. I was about to give up when I tried one last trick - I noticed that Kpilot allowed me to specify the ical file to link to, and that GCALDaemon uses a google.ics to sync up with Google Calendar.

So I told Kpilot to synchronize with the GCALDaemon ics file instead of the Kontact ics and played some tricks. And it worked - with a little coaxing!

Howto
Here’s a guide for getting the tricky parts working under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) 64 bit. I followed the GCALDaemon guide as well as the Terminally Incoherent guide for Kontact

You’ll need Kpilot, pilot-link and Sun’s Java. The default Java that ships with Ubuntu 7.10 will not work with GCALDaemon. You’ll also need GCALDaemon and configure Kontact to sync with GCALDaemon - install this software and then use the tutorials I liked to above.

sudo apt-get install kpilot pilot-link sun-java6-jre

Once you have GCALDaemon working with Kontact and Google Calendar, you can begin the next steps. Once you’ve done the following steps ones all you need to do is sync your palm normally.

1) Make a backup of your entire palm (you may need to replace that /dev/ttyUSB1 with something else):

pilot-xfer -p /dev/ttyUSB1 -b /home/yourname/somedirectory

Having a backup is crucial, so don’t skip this. You were warned.

2) Open Kpilot, go to Settings -> Configure Kpilot and tell it to sync to the same google.ics that GCALDaemon is using. Mine is at /home/brian/.GCALDaemon/google.ics. Under the Conflicts tab choose Handheld overrides.

3) Synchronize your palm and wait until GCALDaemon transfers all of your appointments to Google Calendar. I had thousands of appointments so I gave it an hour.

4) All of the calendar entries in your palm may have vanished. Don’t panic. Sync again - all of the entries should be there. If not, restore the calendar to the palm using pilot-xfer. You don’t have to start over, just restore the calendar. Two way sync should still work with no duplicates.

That’s it.

To install Swiftdove, the 64 bit optimized version of Thunderbird that includes Lightning, into Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), you need to follow these two steps:

A) Add the swiftweasel repository to apt by adding this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/swiftweasel gutsy multiverse

B) Update the cache and install Swiftdove:

apt-get update | apt-get install swiftdove-athlon64

Swiftdove is noticably faster, and the inclusion of Lightning is a nice bonus.

Woot!

I was just browsing the results of the greener gadgets competition and Charles Brill has in my opinion the best idea of the lot, an eNutrition fact sheet that would accompany every gadget sold. I love it!

This should be required on all devices sold. I’d most like to know the expected lifetime for a product.

I gave a five minute presentation on biodiesel for Ignite Portland last Tuesday. Preparing was quite a challenge. I’ve given maybe 50 presentations on biodiesel which usually run between 1-4 hours. I knew that it was basically impossible to present the information I usually do, so I gave up on that and decided to present a mix of the things I thought were the most important, most entertaining and/or most misunderstood.

I left out things that seemed obvious - that it is better to bike, walk, use mass transit or just stay home. That there are a bunch of other things we need to do in addition to moving to entirely renewable sources of energy - combine trips, massively increase efficiency of our vehicles, buy locally, use flex cars, work from home, carpool… I figured these things were safe to leave out, given the audience would be smart, educated people with open minds.

I wish I could have covered algae in greater depth. I don’t think it is possible for us to get out of this mess without it (where ‘this mess’ equals peak oil + climate change). And there is no way our need for liquid fuel is going to go away, unless we go back to living in the trees. Liquid fuel is fundamentally a part of everything we do, and biodiesel has the least impact of any of our choices. Any of them. I did another ten hours of research on other renewables and caught up on the latest biodiesel research to make sure everything was up to date. I uncovered some new research that bears some further following up - it might be the case that some farming methods may have negative impacts. That’s why it is all the more important to focus on algae, which alleviates those concerns entirely. The best I could do on that was get the message out about not buying Palm oil biodiesel.

Anyway, I received overwhelmingly good responses both at the show and afterwards, and had a great time. I can’t wait to see the next round of Ignite presentations!

I’m in the process of putting Debian on a decTOP, and the first step is putting a bootable USB thumb drive together. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, so the decTOP gives me a good excuse.

You’re done.

I’ll test mine at a few public access terminals. I’m curious how easy it would be to boot from the USB drive instead of being forced to use the inevitably crippled and/or virus/spyware/malware-ridden boxes one usually finds.

I had the honor to speak about biodiesel on a panel at LEP High for the Focus the Nation Teach-in Day. The students had excellent questions, and I was really impressed by the experts on the panel from diverse backgrounds in sustainability, carbon offsets, environmental justice, wind power, salmon protection, forest preservation. I was able to duck into a classroom before my panel and hear a spirited discussion going on about global warming and greenhouse gases.

I also got a taste of what’s in store for my presentation for Tuesday’s Ignite Portland, in which I have a whopping 25% more time than I did on the Teach-in panel… 5 minutes compared to 4! It was a real challenge to compress what is normally a 45 minute talk down to 5 minutes. I love the format for the show, and I can hardly wait for the event.