I wanted to get an indication of which plugins everyone uses, so I made this poll.  Please vote for each plugin that you actively use.  Also, if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to post below!

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Set small reminders with Do

With the recent launch of GNOME Do 0.8.2, a plugin I wrote called RemindMe was released as well.  This small plugin allows you to set small reminders for yourself, by simply typing the reminder and a time.  You can set two types of reminders, a count down timer, like in the example image.  Or you can set a reminder for a specific time.  I’ve tried to make the plugin be extremely flexible with the time strings, so both AM/PM and 24 hour times are accepted and spaces are ignored.

By default, all reminders are allowed to be snoozed.  When the time is up, you will be presented with a small notification containing your reminder, and a button to snooze.   You can also create reminders where snooze is not allowed.

For more information about how to use the plugin, please see the wiki page where I’ve described in detail how to use the plugin.

Recently I’ve been doing some contracting work for a friend.  The project is pretty simple, but it gives me a reason to finally play with Mono’s sqlite database engine.  It’s actually really cool, and I’m very happy to say that it works extremely well on Windows + Visual Studio.  Normally my IDE of choice is MonoDevelop, but the project requires me to read information from an excel spreadsheet, which is not a very easy thing to do if you don’t actually have Microsoft Excel installed on your computer.  But anyways, it’s no problem, that’s where VirtualBox comes to the rescue.

But, that’s not really the point of this whole message.  The point of this entire post is to let people know how important it is to write descriptive error messages.  I was doing some stuff with a few records, and kept getting this exception:

SQL logic error or missing database

I was a bit confused by that.  I checked the actual database, and it was still there.  Sql logic error?  Where is the logic error in “INSERT INTO ….”?  After a bit of searching, I found out that sqlite actually uses this error message for just about everything!  The problem with my code is I was trying to insert records into the table that already had a record with the same primary key.  So, why can’t they write that instead of something so generic it could really mean just about anything?

Quite a pleasant sight for Do lovers!

Well, today’s finally the day;  After weeks of alpha testing and months hard work, GNOME Do 0.8.0 is released!  This is another monumental release for an amazingly useful application.  GNOME Do has increasingly become the cornerstone of my linux desktop experience.  From time to time I even catch myself stopping to think about how I would have done that if Do wasn’t just a “super-space” away.  Sufficed to say, “Longer than I care to think about”, is the answer I usually come to with regards to that question.

First of all, before I go any further, I’d just like to personally thank everyone involved with the project.  Everyone that’s helped in some minute way to make Do what it is today deserves thanks.  Some of these people include: David Siegel, who started Do as a college project, Jason Smith, who is largely responsible for “Docky”, Alex Launi, for some great work on the new plugin API and some of the most useful Do plugins around, Peng, for some more great plugins, and for helping me with some c# code I was writing for a plugin, and Cimi and Kalle for translations and much new insight.  There’s so many more people associated with this great application, it’s hard to thank everyone!

Much more information can be read here, the release notes on the Do website.

Now, it’d be wrong to talk about such a great application, and not show off any pretty pictures, so I’ll show some screenshots of Do here.  Some screenshots include things that I’m working on currently, and aren’t yet released.  Enjoy!

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I’m very happy to say that I’ve finally got my PulseAudio setup working.  Technically, it was “working” before, but I could never get any of the network functionality to work.  Using PADevChooser, I could “see” other hosts with PA installed under the server menu, but I could never move streams to other hosts across the networks.  Also, the RTP sink would never quite work.  On some computers it wouldn’t even loopback to the local speakers.  Something was obviously wrong.
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I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 (the Intrepid Ibex) on my laptop.  I’m happy to say that the upgrade process from 8.04 to 8.10 went very well.  When I first installed 8.04 I created a separate partition for /home (there’s a great howto guide here).  This made the upgrade process so incredibly painless.

After spending some time reinstalling some programs, I discovered that PulseAudio finally worked on my laptop.  Even though Pulse was included in 8.04, it didn’t work on my laptop and I had to switch everything back to ALSA.  I played around with Pulse for a couple of minutes, setting everything up and then I started to notice something strange.  Even though my system volume was turned up to 100%, everything still seemed too quiet.  I tried changing the device in System > Preferences > Sound, but nothing seemed to help.

Running alsamixer in terminal only showed one mixer track — as it should if PulseAudio was enabled, and this read 100%.  After quite a bit of searching I found out what was wrong.  It turned out that one of the tracks (front) on the alsa hardware mixer was turned down to about 50%.  There’s no way to see this through the gui.  The only way to fix this is to run alsamixer in a terminal like this:

$ alsamixer -D hw:0

This will bring up a bunch of bars representing all of the mixer tracks available on the hardware device.  After turning all of these up to 100% and exiting alsamixer (press ESC), everything was working perfectly again.

Hopefully this will save someone stuck in a similar situation from a few hours of headbanging.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but just now made the time to actually do it.  I’ve been following the development of GNOME Do for a while now.  After playing with it for a while and learning how fast and easily things can be done with GNOME Do, I decided that I should write a plugin for the project.

I’ve been using VirtualBox a lot recently, mostly for programming and testing applications on different platforms, without actually having to restart my laptop.  After I saw that there was no VirtualBox plugin, I thought that this would be the perfect plugin to write.

After a couple weeks I have built a nice, stable GNOME Do plugin for managing VirtualBox virtual machines.  The plugin allows GNOME Do to perform actions on your saved virtual machines.  The plugin will index the current state of your VM and only allow you to perform relevant actions as well.  For example, if you have a VM that’s currently powered off, the only actions Do will show you are to either turn on the VM or revert to a saved state (if there is one).  For VM’s that are currently running, you can pause, turn off, save state, or take a snapshot.  Dynamic modifier items also allow you to start a VM in either headless mode, or GUI mode.

I’ve made a small YouTube video showing the various actions that are exposed to GNOME Do through this plugin.

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I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 (The Intrepid Ibex) on my desktop computer and was pleasantly surprised to see that it didn’t have any problems loading the LiveCD.  I’ve been using Ubuntu since Gutsy (7.10) on my laptop, but the LiveCD would never boot on my desktop.  I’m not quite sure if it was the strange combination of two video cards, twin monitors, Nvidia and or SiI raid chips or what, but 8.10 was the first LiveCD that actually worked on my desktop.

After getting a chance to poke around and see what’s new, I’m pretty impressed.  Usability and stability is great.  All of my hardware worked right out of the box.  Installing Nvidia’s display drivers was so simple, just a couple clicks and a reboot, and now my multiple monitors work properly.  I was also surprised to see that my printer was installed without any interaction.  All I had to do was plug in the printer during install and the drivers were installed by default!

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I just got back to Munich last night from Berlin.  Berlin is a very cool city, which I will have to visit again sometime in the future.  Now however, it’s time to pack everything up and say good bye to Munich.  Munich has been a great home to me for the past 4 months, and I’ve had a great time here.  There’s not much that can keep me away from this city, and I’d love to come back… someday.

I’ve still got a couple of errands to run before I head out to the airport, but that time is fast approaching.

So, with this short entry, I say, “Good Bye”, to Munich and, “Hello!”, to Los Angeles!

I went to Oktoberfest yesterday with a couple of friends that I met in Germany. It’s hard to explain the level of sheer awesomeness in any amount of words, so I’ll just sum it up as: “Wow”. It was much more than I expected. It was actually more than just a beer hall drinking festival, actually. It was more of a county fair. There were lots of carnival rides, and food stands, and of course, beer halls! Actually, its like a county fair that revolves around drinking.

The beer halls were pretty amazing. There were about 8 or 10 of them, and while it’s usually very hard to get into one of them, we somehow got in. Once inside, you’re taken to a completely different world. It’s bright and very ornately decorated, and so many people you are basically standing shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone.

Even though it’s crowded, the atmosphere inside is great. Everyone is so (understandably) happy, people are singing and dancing on the tables, and pretty much everyone was very friendly. It was a great experience, and I’m glad to have some friends here in Germany that could take me. I will definitely be coming back – that’s for sure.

I’ve included some pictures after the break.
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