Sean's Mental Walkabout

Last night was our monthly MHVLUG meeting, and it also marked 7 years since our first meeting.

7 years… it’s kind of hard to imagine.  I was also really touched, multiple times last night, by the waves of appreciation I got from folks in the room.

Last night was a perfect night, even though it started as anything but.  At 4:30, Thor’s hard drive decided it was no longer a drive, and without a backup of the presentation, we were scrambling in the office to try to recover the drive, and come up with a backup plan, which meant finding another good base presentation online he could work from.  I still hadn’t gotten an ack back from the library, so had to call to ensure someone would actually open the door, and we didn’t get locked out of our space.  Pat called during setup, and reported that they were having a mail server meltdown at work, so he would try to get there by the end with the cake, but there were no promises.  This was exceptionally more chaos than we typically have to deal with for a meeting, but it definitely meant the night was starting off off balance, and we were just working to try to get it back on track.

As the meeting was about to start, Bruce Locke interrupted and got up and said a few words about how much he and others appreciated the efforts I’ve put into the group.  He then presented me with a set of gift certificates to our local beer mecca, that a number of members had gotten together and pitched in on.  I was really really touched by that.  While this is a labor of love, it’s very energizing to have such a tangible gesture of how much it means to others.

The talk was great.  Thor worked well off the borrowed slides, and we had a lot of great questions from the audience.  Sahana is a great project, and really demonstrates how much of an impact we can have on people’s lives as members of the open source community.  Sahana is actively being used right now in Haiti and Chile to handle the aftermath of their recent earthquakes.  We had at least one new face in the room, who had first attended our meeting last month virtually (over the live stream), and had come out for the face to face meeting.  As that was exactly what I was trying to get out of the streaming, I’m really glad it seems to be working.

I was given another comment of appreciation from the floor when I let folks know about the upcoming meetings we had locked and loaded for the year.  It is hard to get that far out ahead on the schedule, and it was great that everyone seemed to really be excited about our upcoming meetings.

The cake… was not a lie.

Pat showed up about 7:40 with the cake, just a few minutes after the lecture had ended.  We had people hanging out and chatting until 8, then 15 folks came out of the palace afterwards.  We had great conversation that went until 11.

As I was driving home, I thought to myself how perfect that all had really been.  Good people, a great talk, and lots of good conversation.  Really… just perfect.

A few years ago I bought an Oregon Scientific wireless weather station.  It’s a nice way to keep an eye on what’s going on outside.  The unit supports up to 3 of these remote sensors (shown here), and aggregates it at a base station.  It doesn’t have a computer interface, so while it displays nicely in the living room, I can’t get access to that data.

Once upon a time I bought some 1-wire thermo sensors that I was going to wire that into my computer for data collection.  After the house was hit by lightning, I got far more gun shy about running conductive cables from the outside to a computer.

It occurred to me recently that there was good odds that someone must have figured out to sniff that wireless communication.  These aren’t complicated devices, and Oregon Scientific seems to be letting different generations of sensors work with different generations of head units, implying that they have some pseudo standard protocol.  It would also solve my spark gap problem, as I could gather this data without any wires connected to the sensors.

After some googling I discovered that yes, these devices are operating in the 433 Mhz band, and yes, thanks to the folks at rfxcom, there is a unit out there which will receive this and spit it out in a reasonable usb interface.

Under Linux, this information can be very easily decoded with the heyu program.  This is really more of a command line system for home automation, but it also includes the rfxcom protocol and the decoders for just about everything Oregon Scientific makes.

After plugging in the rfxcom device, it took me about all of 30 minutes to get heyu compiled and configured for my devices.  The first time you run the heyu monitor you’ll actually get big hex strings which are the raw data.  Once you tell heyu what kinds of sensors they are, you’ll get it decoded in much more friendly units.  Here are the relevant lines in the heyu config file:

TTY	dummy
TTY_AUX  /dev/ttyUSB0  RFXCOM
ALIAS Sensor1 A1 ORE_TH1 0xB1
ALIAS Outside A2 ORE_TH1 0x83
ALIAS Sensor3 A3 ORE_TH1 0xCE
ORE_TSCALE Fahrenheit

After configured and running, I now have sensor data being collected continuously:

gallifrey:~> heyu monitor
02/25 21:49:54  Monitor started
02/25 21:50:11  rcva func      oreTemp : hu A3  Ch 3 Temp 58.6F (Sensor3)
02/25 21:50:11  rcva func        oreRH : hu A3  Ch 3 RH 42% (Sensor3)
02/25 21:50:20  rcva func      oreTemp : hu A1  Ch 1 Temp 43.7F LoBat (Sensor1)
02/25 21:50:20  rcva func        oreRH : hu A1  Ch 1 RH 54% LoBat (Sensor1)
02/25 21:50:22  rcva func      oreTemp : hu A2  Ch 2 Temp 34.3F (Outside)
02/25 21:50:22  rcva func        oreRH : hu A2  Ch 2 RH 87% (Outside)

The next steps here are going to be gathering this into something that I can use for graphing.  I’ve now got all the sensors I was looking for to be able to build my better thermostat brain.  Next steps will be tying this all together and starting my graphing.

If you give presentations with powerpoint or openoffice slides at any regularity, it is well worth investing in a presentation remote so you don’t need to keep coming back to your computer to flip slides.  It lets you walk around more normally, not having to worry about getting back to the podium/desk/table for the transition.  That level of free wandering on behalf of the speaker makes the entire presentation feel much smoother.

Previously I had a targus remote that I got online.  It, like all other presentation remotes I’ve seen, has a usb dongle which advertises itself as a usb keyboard.  The remote triggers page up/page down, and maybe some mouse functions.  This means it works on any computer, any modern operating system, with no additional software.  While the targus was sufficient, it had been slowly dying over the last couple of years.  It failed for me at Ohio Linux Fest, and when, even after new batteries, it failed before my Git talk, I figured enough was enough.  I scoured amazon reviews, and decided to give the Logitech R400 a shot.  It arrived last night.

Holy crap, this thing is amazing.  First, and most importantly, the thing fits perfectly in your hand.  It has that same kind of ergonomics of the Tivo remote, where your hand is perfectly relaxed holding it.  It’s weight is enough to know it’s there and solid, and whatever surface material they used for it just feels touchable.  The buttons are in the perfect places so that I realize pretty quickly that 5 minutes into my next presentation I won’t even know I’m using it any more.  Whoever did the ergonomic design on the R400… bravo!

The remote is pretty simple, which is good.  Page up / Page down, F5 (which is play presentation in open office and power point), and a screen blank function which works inside of a fullscreen open office presentation, though I have no idea what key it actually is.  There is also an integrated red laser pointer, of pretty reasonable power.  The other notable facts of the remote are the usb dongle fits inside the remote itself, so there are not 2 pieces to get seperated and lost, and there is an off switch.  As this thing is going to live bouncing around in my backpack, so I always have it with me, having an off switch to ensure that accidental bounces don’t hit keys and drain battery is good.  It also has a nice neoprene case, which makes that less of a worry.

I’m really happy about this presentation remote, and can’t wait for my next group presentation to give it a proper work out.

P.S. For another $40 you can “upgrade” to the R800 which has a green laser and a countdown time.  That’s more than I need, but people love the green laser pointers. 

Last Wednesday, we did a live stream of the MHVLUG meeting for my Git presentation.  This was an experiment to try new ways of getting people engaged in the group.  Most people seemed to think it went quite well, though there were dissenting views that didn’t like the stream quality.  I think part of the dissenting view was because the expectations were that this would be a full on replacement for coming to the meetings, which I did not intend.

We used ustream to do the streaming, which has the advantage of working quite nicely with Linux and the Logitech 9000 webcam I’ve got (at some point I’ll do a detailed writeup on that).  Ustream’s streaming app is written in Flash, which is quite clever, and means all you need is Flash 10 to start broadcasting.

My goals for this experiment were pretty simple:

• see if the tech got in the way of the experience of the people in the room.  If it was too intrusive, the experiment failed.
• see if people connected to the stream that couldn’t make it.  At our height we had 8 people on that weren’t in the room.  That added to the 25 or so in the room.
• see if there was a reasonable interaction pattern between people on stream and people in the room.  Pat was able to ask questions via Joe, which I answered back directly.  Even with the 4 seconds of audio lag I think it worked quite well.  It’s actually a quite interesting communication model.
• see if the audio pickup was in any way reasonable, which is was.  I was really impressed by how good the audio was actually.
• see if the video was passable.  This is where there was a difference of opinion.  Some people wanted much higher quality here.  My feeling was the quality was about what I was looking for.  You got a sense of what was going on in the room, you could hear the speaker and the room well, but the slides were kind of hard to make out.  The fact that my talk was diagram heavy exacerbated this.

The conclusion: streaming of meetings will probably happen from time to time from now on, based on speaker preference, as many speakers don’t want their presentation going beyond the room.  The meetings are optimized for people in the room, as that live audience, and the interaction pattern there, is what people come out for, and why we are able to get good speakers (the first question I get asked when bringing in someone externally is what the audience size is).

We’ll see how it affects the group longer term, and if it exposes more people to what we are doing in the LUG.  We’re nearly 7 years old now, and looking at how we use new tech to get the word out is always something to consider.

Last night we did the first, of what I hope will be many, MHV Android Hack-a-thons.  The basic idea was to get folks together that are interested in doing android mobile development, and having others around they could bounce questions off of.  We did it at Panera because they have food and wireless, though future sessions probably have to move elsewhere, like Barnes & Noble, because the 9pm closing time came a bit too early.

Turnout was promissing.  Frank, Kershaw, and Muller all showed with their android phones and laptops, plus we got 3 other folks that just wanted to see what an android phone looks like.  Frank and Kershaw both had the Droid, Muller has a google issued G1, and I’ve got my Hero.  It was definitely interesting to see the differences across all of them, and supports my theory that there isn’t a straight road when it comes to android base platforms.  The Droid did some things the Hero didn’t, the Hero did some things the Droid didn’t.  A big reason for these differences is how modular Android is.  You legitimately can replace any part of the core interface with your own code.  HTC Sense, for instance, is a Home replacement.  You can write your own.  HTC also replaced the default mail, sms, contacts, and a few other things.  Some for good (mail, contacts), some for worse (messaging power bug).  But as a user you are empowered to replace the SMS system with a 3rd party app, which I did.

The evening started off with “oh, have you seen this yet?” which got a lot of knowledge cross shared.  Frank’s starting a wiki page to try to keep track of that.  I got out my laptop early and started working through the Sudoku example application in Hello Android.  It’s a pretty good example that includes many of the widget systems as well as the 2D graphics API.  I’m pretty impressed with the book so far.  Frank and Kershaw spent some time getting the SDK installed and poking it, and Muller was focused on the Android Scripting Environment to do some python on the phone.

All of use except Muller are still a bit in the “ooo shiney” stage, as I’ve had my phone for a whole month now, and Frank and Kershaw have had theirs for less than a week.  I suspect that future hack-a-thons will actually start generating a bit more code.  I continue to be impressed by the API model for Android, and really look forward to working on applications on it.  Yes, Java is not as nice and terse as Ruby, but at least I won’t have to write widget packing code.  And that makes me a happy camper.

In a week Verizon is launching 2 android phones, the droid and the eris.  Sprint will have the moment by then, which adds to their existing Hero.  T-Mobile has the G1 and the MyTouch.  For each carrier this gives you 2 phones to choose from:

• A hard keyboard phone (G1, Droid, Moment)
• An HTC phone with the Sense UI (MyTouch, Hero, Eris)

While droid has gotten all the attention this past week for being the first Android 2.0 device, I’m cringing a bit with what the reaction to that phone is going to be on the mass market.  It’s being placed head to head against the iPhone, which currently defines usability on the market.  From my experience on the 1.5 front, the difference between stock android (which the G1 has) and Sense on a 1.5 phone is night and day.

HTC really went to town to provide a very smooth experience to the user.  This is an interface that had a lot of user testing and human factors put into it.  This polish is what has gotten the Hero praise as being the best gadget of 2009.

It does not, however, provide a hard keyboard (and I’m not sure if there will ever be a cross over there).  A lot of people are going to go to the droid because of that hard keyboard, and large screen, which is totally understood.  But for friends that have been looking at the device I’ve tried to convince them to look at the Eris at the same time.  I really think the Sense UI makes the phone more compelling.  It adds this slickness to android that isn’t there, yet, in the base.  If user experience is your top concern, it’s worth looking at one of the HTC Sense phones when you contemplate your android purchase.

From this morning’s updates on ubuntu.

Version 2009n-0ubuntu0.9.04.1:

  * Add argentinas-dst-2009.diff: Disable DST switch for Argentina tomorrow,
    as the Argentina government decided yesterday. Careful planning is boring.
    Thanks to Margarita Manterola for the patch! (LP: #453165)

I find timezones fascinating, especially how much they get messed with for no particularly justifiable reason.

On Friday morning, I picked up my shiney new HTC Hero from Best Buy.  It had been nearly 4 years since my last new cell phone, and the tech at Best Buy was really confused about that.  It was the longest between upgrades for anyone he’d ever seen.  But in 2007, when I became eligible for a phone upgrade, the Open Handset Alliance was formed, with Sprint as a founding member, and I made a decision that I wasn’t going to buy another phone until it had Android on it.

Android is a Linux based operating system that can be used for smart phones (though many folks are looking to put it into all manner of small form factor devices).  Beyond the base operating system it also provides a Java SDK for creating applications, which is one of the cleanest development models I’ve seen to date.

In the past 2 days I’ve been putting my phone through it’s paces, and have to say I’m just down right psyched about this phone.  I was always a touchscreen keyboard skeptic, but the wideform + predictive correction in this phone pretty much washed away that skepticism.  The Sense UI (which is this 7 virtual desktops thing) is just awesome.  Each is configurable with widgets and icons seperately, and you get to have as many saved configurations of those as you like.  My brain is already thinking about widgets I could build to pull in some of the information I want into this UI.  The NFL widget that Sprint wrote and added showed this off quite nicely, as it gives you a heads up on your favorite team, including live play by play updates during the game.

The phone strongly integrates with google services (go figure!).  You feed it your google account info during setup, then your calendar is live synced, as is your contact list, email’s connected, and off you go.  You can break any of these links if you want, but having it all just work is great.  There is also strong integrate with facebook, myspace (which I don’t use), and twitter.  Enter you account details into the phone for facebook and the first thing it does is cross reference your contact list with your facebook friends and say “I think these folks are the same, want me to link them?”.  From there on out you get people pictures from facebook for those contacts, as well as their birthdays in your contact list.

While the app store is still a little light at this point compared to the Apple one, I suspect getting Sprint online this month, and Verizon next, is going to change that.  Application development is one of the reasons I was most excited about the phone.  While the iPhone looks cool, the combination of Objective C, having to own a Macbook Pro, and the random whims of Apple application approval, was just a no win situation for me.  With Android there is an eclipse environment + simulator that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.  The code is Java… or python, javascript, jruby, lua, etc via the Android Scripting Environment.  A checkbox in the phone preferences lets you download and install applications from anywhere.  Typically people are using QR Codes to encode their app installation urls, and there is an app on the phone that just scans those to install.

The phone just feels great.  With all the android phones that are about to come out, I was hesitating earlier this week about whether I should wait until the end of the month for the Samsung Moment with the hard keyboard.  I’m glad I didn’t.  This phone just feels awesome, and I can’t wait to start hacking on mobile apps later this week.

If you had told me the biggest community Linux event in the United States took place in Columbus Ohio, I don’t think I would have believed you before this last weekend.  But Ohio Linux Fest blew away all my expectations, with 1100 in attendance, it was a truly phenomenal event.  There were many great stories from the event, but I’ll just drop in a few highlights.

OpenSim Presentation

My main reason for being out there was giving a technical presentation on OpenSim.  I’ve done this presentation in a few other places, so this information I was quite comfortable with, and even had a bit of live demo.  Because I had a last minute tech issue with my laser pointer I wasn’t really paying attention with how full the room had become once I got started.  I must have had at least 200 people in that room, and 250 is probably not an unreasonable guess.  Compare that with the 15 I had a Linux World last year, and you get a sense of how much more committed people are here to the tech agenda.

I had intentionally kept the content light and short, as I’d always run over in the past, and the OLF folks are very strict on time keeping (which I highly appreciate as both an attendee and speaker).  With my talk going from 4:00 – 4:55, I had slides, then a live demo, then figured I’d open up with questions.  The slide portion went over ok, but it was hard to guage where the audience was at, when I got to the live demo at 4:25, things seem to perk up, and as I’d already gotten a quick audience question when starting up OpenSim I decided to go for broke, and just end the demo after 10 minutes and open up the floor for questions.  Leaving a 20 minute question gap was a gamble, because I’d been in a few other presentations that only got 1 or 2 questions at the end, but I figured I could always go back to playing with things if it got really quiet in the room.

It didn’t.  I had questions from all over the floor, must have answered at least 10 of them in that 20 minutes.  That even included a question from Doug McIlroy, the evening’s keynote speaker.  After the talk I had another half dozen folks follow me out and ask more questions out in the hallway, always a great sign.  I couldn’t have asked for a better audience, and really appreciate what the organizers of Ohio Linux Fest are able to pull off year after year.

The Guys from NOOSS

Before I left for the event I was found internally at IBM by on of the guys from the Northern Ohio Open Source Society to do an interview with them on OpenSim for their live all day podcast.  That was a great time.  Even though I’m becoming less active in the OpenSim project now, I’m hoping this push to get the word out on the project helps further grow the community.

As we wandered out from the after party the NOOSS guys had moved their recording setup to the lobby, and enticed us with some Great Lakes Brewery beer and Scotch to hang out on the NSFW portion of the podcast.  Don’t go and listen to that unless you are a brave soul.  It did however let me put in a plug for my Brother In-Law, Andy Tveekrem, who has recently left as brew master of Dog Fish Head, once was the brewmaster of Great Lakes Brewery, and is planning on setting up a Brew Pub in Cleveland next year.  I’ll have to get word out to the NOOSS guys once they open, because their impecable taste in beer means I’m sure they’ll find a home there.

It’s worth the 11 hours in the Car

There were so many other good times, too many to retell here.  Joe, my driving companion, took some video on the trip, which we may manage to cut down to something reasonable for posting online.  It took us 11 hours each way to get there and back.  Before the trip I was really concerned that it was going to be a lot of driving for not much.  But this event was definitely worth the drive, and I’m already planning on going back next year, speaker or not.  It was a really great event.

Years ago when I was using the Ion window manager.  Ion had many very nice features, not the least of which was goto window by name, which you could do from an interactive console or script into other tools.  I created an “e” command, which loaded the file in emacs, then moved you to the emacs desktop window.  This was a great minor productivity boost.

Ion went off the rails for me in a number of ways, so I left, and started using stock gnome in ubuntu.  Using a combination of tilda, superswitcher, and devilspie you can get very close to the functionality that I missed, with the added benefits of all the modern bits of the gnome desktop, like dbus, nautilus, and hardware just working and doing the right thing when you plug it in.  But I never got goto window by name back.  I played with libwnck for a while 2 years ago, and never could figure out what I was doing wrong.

Yesterday, with an hour of idle time in the morning waiting for people to get back to me, I decided to look at the problem again.  This time I started with the libwnck perl bindings, because getting rid of the compile time meant I could experiment a lot more in less time.  After about 20 minutes of guessing on the API I figured out what I had probably missed before, the screen object needs a second stage initialization.  After 20 minutes more, I had gwbn, a perl program that took a regex on the command line and moved my desktop to the first window that matched.

The code is available on github now, and probably on cpan or a ppa for ubuntu before too long.  Now I have my “e” command again, and am a very happy camper.