ChipLog – Page 22

When In Doubt, Explode Violently

Workstation 5 for Linux Screenshots

The VMware Workstation 5 for Linux screenshots I took still aren’t up on the VMware website, due to busy schedules and other priorities. I have, however, been told I can make them publicly available, as the product is released. So, until they’re officially up, here are the Workstation 5 for Linux screenshots:

VMware integrated into the user’s desktop, with themed folder icons, MIME-Type icons and all.	VMware with the Gorilla GTK+ theme	A virtual “team” of VMs, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Windows 2000 Pro, and Windows XP, all networked together. Each “thumbnail” is an active updating view. Screen savers are fun in teams.
Another teams screenshot, without the settings dialog.	yet another teams screenshot, this time showing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 as the current VM.	Last teams screenshot, showing just the window and not the full desktop.
The settings dialog for teams. Virtual LAN segments can be added, removed, and modified, with artificial packet loss and speeds introduced.	The Snapshot Manager dialog, which allows users to add, remove, rename, and switch to snapshots in time.	The New Virtual Machine wizard
The Virtual Machine Settings dialog. Here, new hardware can be added, memory changed, and various options frobnicated.

Revenge of the bleep

Leave a Comment / Misc Computers and Tech

Hurray! Leo and Patrick and some of the others from the old The Screen Savers show have gotten together and started a “podcast.” I’m sure anybody reading Slashdot knows this already, but I’m still pretty excited about it. I’ve been watching The Screen Savers since it was created on ZDTV, and have been pretty upset about how badly G4TechTV mangled it. Now I have a radio show I can look forward to hopefully every week or so.

I’ve been thinking a bit about getting back into doing an online radio show. I used to host “Voices In My Head” on WOPN/Freenode Radio, back when that still existed. Ever since that station fell to the ground, I’ve been wanting to set up a new one with 24-hour independent music and weekly radio shows of various types. It’s something I’m seriously considering now. Maybe I’ll look into expenses and talk to a few people…

Life at VMware

1 Comment / VMware

I realized today that I’m approaching 8 months at VMware. The time flew by so fast, it’s amazing. I’m not even sick of it yet! 😉 The place is actually quite cool. They treat us amazingly well. We have flexible hours, the option to work at home when we need to, free food, a great environment, actual offices, really cool managers… It’s better than I would have ever imagined. And we have a lot of open source people there, too.

For those who don’t know, I work on the Hosted Linux UI team. That means I worked on Workstation 5, which we just released. It kicks ass 🙂 I’m proud of it. I’m still waiting for the screenshots I put together to go up on the site, though. I’ll post them when they appear.

What we need is more talented Linux people on the UI team. If anybody is interested, feel free to contact me with a resume and I’ll pass it along. We’re stationed in Palo Alto, California, which is a nice place to live.

I need to get a picture of our building, with the fountain and waterfall and beautiful trees, but for now, I only have pics of my office.

Pretty Shiny Monitor

Leave a Comment / Life, Misc Computers and Tech

So, a few days ago, Dell had a deal on a 20.1″ Dell 2005FPW Widescreen LCD monitor. We have the 20.1″ non-widescreens at VMware, and I love them, so I thought I’d throw some money Dell’s way and pick up a widescreen. I found out that I could also purchase a $35-off coupon on ebay for only $5, so I managed to get another $30 off there. All in all, before tax, it came down to $450. It arrived a few days ago, and I must say, it absolutely rocks. I’ve been using it in the living room, playing World of Warcraft on it. It makes such a difference 🙂 Everyone should get one.

Now that I type this, I see that Chris Lee purchased one too. Very cool. Enjoy 🙂

Galago Release and SCO

1 Comment / Galago

Well, I finally did it. The 0.3.0: Wrath of Squirrel release of Galago is out! No, seriously. It needs some testing, and I have a bunch of neat little projects in the works. If you’re in the Silicon Valley area, I’ll be giving a presentation at SVLUG in the near future. That is, if I can get everything working in time.

There’s been some concern of code theft in a project I’m involved in, so we put in place an SVN repository wrapping my Source COde authentication tool. This is an old project of mine, and for those interested, you can read about it. With SCO, you’ll never have to worry about code theft again.

Desktop? Hey, I have that!

2 Comments / GNOME

I guess I’ll play along with the screenshot posting thread too.

It’s pretty blank, but it makes me smile.

I can’t see.

5 Comments / GNOME

Let there be light!

Now then, I’d like to say that I applaud bringing awareness to this issue, but we’re preaching to the choire. Preventing users from getting support and reading gnome.org and Planet GNOME will only serve to piss off the users. They might read the message, but I doubt they’d be any more receptive to it. Everyone who does care probably already knows about it.

The message at the top is good, and we should draw attention to it, but please, let’s let people actually see the sites. This does not look professional.

I’d like to point out that there are some good blog entries about this subject on Planet GNOME that people are missing due to the blackout.

And with that…

Back to the dark ages!

(This is directed to Planet GNOME. It doesn’t make sense anywhere else.)

Just A Little Easier, Please – Networks

21 Comments / Misc Computers and Tech

The Linux desktop has progressed quite a bit in recent years. Ubuntu, out of the box, mainly just worked. I was able to quickly set up a nice desktop for my girlfriend using it. It was really nice to see the little things all fit together. For example, when we took a pic with her new camera and plugged it into the USB port, a dialog popped up asking us if we want to import the pictures. Now obviously, I expected that, and it’s not like that was invented in Linux, but it’s one of those nice touches that just makes life a little bit easier. Still, there is so much room for improvement.

I’ve been trying to think about what specifically I find annoying in day to day usage of Linux. I think my biggest gripe right now is how much of a pain it is just to move my laptop from network to network. I have five networks I tend to use. The first is my home network through my wireless router. The second is also the home network, but wired, through another router. The third is the network at work. The fourth is the wireless network back at my parents’ house, and the fifth is the wireless network at my grandparents’ house, which is next to my parents’ house.

Now, I don’t visit my parents that often, and I don’t connect to the wired portion of my network often either. However, I do switch twice a day between the wireless network at home and the wired network at work. And every time I do, I have to switch network interfaces, re-enable/disable the proxy servers, and change my Gaim account configurations (port numbers for going through the proxies, accounts I wish to auto-login, proxy settings, etc.). It’s just enough of a chore where I think to myself, “Ugh, must do this again.”

When I plug in a Windows computer into a wired network, a little bubble pops up saying that the Ethernet is connected, and it (usually) tries to configure my network settings. It doesn’t always work right, but hey, it’s an effort. It would be nice if we had such a thing in Linux. Maybe we do and I just don’t know about it, but if that’s the case, then we need an easier way for users to discover it and to configure it. Basically, when I plug in a network cable, I want my wifi connection to go down, my wired connection to go up, and a DHCP server to be scanned for. Now the wired-only portion of my network at home doesn’t use DHCP (yet), so it’d be nice for some kind of auto-discovery magic to happen, but really I should be using DHCP here anyway.

The little network selector in my panel is a nice start, really. It’s been buggy here, but it mostly works. However, it’d be much nicer if I could also configure proxy servers for each interface and network. Not tied to that applet, mind you. It would have to be a layer below it somewhere. When I change networks on the command line, the same magic should happen.

The Gaim auto-reconfiguration could happen via a Gaim plugin, which I’m very tempted to write. I don’t know what the easiest way would be to determine when a network changes on an interface, and when interfaces change. Perhaps some kind of D-BUS layer somewhere could intelligently broadcast this information in an easy-to-use form.

I don’t imagine a lot of this would be difficult to develop, and it’s largely a matter of putting the small pieces together (once written). It would certainly make this one aspect of my daily usage a lot easier. I’m sure I’m not the only one frustrated by this. I don’t know if there is work going on in this area or not, but hopefully someone will get the motivation to hack on a piece or two.

Weekend of Yay!

6 Comments / Life

Jamie

So I had the most amazing weekend. My girlfriend Jamie came down to visit. We hung out for a bit on Friday and then went to a nice Japanese restaurant near my apartment called Fuki Sushi. It was a very nice looking place, decorative, and the waitresses were even wearing kimonos. Next time we go, we’re going to reserve a spot in the back where we take off our shoes and eat sitting down on the ground at a table. The rest of the night, we just cuddled, watching anime and Dead Like Me.

Saturday, we got up and, after a while, took a tour of where I work. While there, we played some DDR and had some snacks. We then headed to the other building our company owns and watched some ducks splash around in one of the ponds. We walked around in there and saw that building, and just kind of sat around talking. Next, we went to Frys Electronics. While there, we picked up a copy of Soul Calibur 2, which we played later that night. She kicked my ass.

Our next stop was to a furniture store that I went to in November. The people who ran the place actually remembered me, and even remembered where I moved from. We were a bit shocked there. Anyhow, I picked up a couple of book shelves and a nice little wine rack.

For dinner, I took her to The Cheesecake Factory. Despite the 50 minute wait, it was really good, and she seemed to like it, especially the cheesecake 🙂 We spent the rest of the night playing Soul Calibur and just kind of goofing around, talking about things, etc.

Sunday morning, she had to leave. We had a nice breakfast before she left, but it was hard to say goodbye. All in all, though, it was a great visit. We both enjoyed ourselves immensely, and I can’t wait until we do it again.

Fyre

I’ve been playing with Fyre quite a bit lately. It’s a very awesome program, and they just released version 1.0.0. Cluster support and undos were just added (thanks scanline and purple_cow!). It’s a great way to waste some time 🙂

Electric Storm

Galago

I’m also contemplating putting out a Galago release soon. It’s been kind of semi-frozen for a long time. Work’s been done, but there’s not much else to do until people start playing with it. So I’m going to test it with D-BUS CVS and see how it works, and then start putting together some autopackages together. I need someone to build Ubuntu debs. I’d rather not spend much time on that myself. If anyone’s interested in packaging for any distro, please let me know, and feel free to drop by #galago on irc.freenode.net.