Pythoneer

The article How to mount a remote ssh filesystem using sshfs very well describes what I have to do to have my disk mount on my Mac disk on my Ubuntu system.

After I got that working I only need to add the following two commands to “System > Properties > Sessions > Start programs”:

# Run synergy-client on ubuntu, so I can use only mouse
# and keyboard of the Powerbook after startup.
synergyc -n ubuntubox 192.168.0.100 

# Mount my user's Powerbook directory to the directory
# /media/macbox on the ubuntu maschine.
sshfs macbox:/Users/cain /media/macbox

(”ubuntubox” is the name for the ubuntu maschine and “macbox” is the name for my Powerbook, and 192.168.0.100 is the fixed address of my Powerbook).
Now I can just turn on my Ubuntu maschine and it comes up, starts everything and is just ready to go, of course I also turned on the auto-login, since there is nothing intersting on there anyway and it’s just the most convinient … cool

Yeah I had that too today, it really sucks getting such JS errors. The error I made was simply that I called

    dojo.addOnload("functionName")

instead of

    dojo.addOnload(functionName)

don’t quote the function name, as you would in some other cases. Nice hacking …

I just finished listening to the podcast on TalkCrunch (mp3 download) where Michael Arrington interviewed the founder and CEO of PayPerPost, Ted Murphy, Josh Stein a Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Rob Hof Silicon Valley Bureau Chief at Business Week. It was one of the best podcasts I had heard so far.

PayPerPost connects advertisers with bloggers that are willing to blog about certain products, that the advertisers choses and pays them for blogging about them. The advertiser has to approve the blog article before paying.

The business model seems to be discussed heavily in the blogosphere, as you can already see at the number of comments and links to the article about it on techcrunch. The podcast is a very interesting discussion about the business model, if it is ethical or not, the possible future of such service and other companies and facts around the topic. It is really worth listening to!
My opinion here is that PayPerPost does not need to be regulated by any higher power or is unethical. I found Michael Arringtons arguments a bit weak here, mainly he says it is not ethical when a blog post does not say that the author has been paid for. And he thinks that it is even worse when journalists write “anonymously” besides their employment (or contract). I just simply agree with the guy who comments that PayPerPost is just the same as “like when an actor in a movie just happens to pull out a Motorola cell phone and use it in a way that the brand is noticeable”. That is simply true, the movie doesn’t tell upfront “Attention: advertising being spilled on you, if you want or not”. And honestly there were so many concerns about Weblogs, Inc. and paying bloggers. And all this is forgotten and Jason Calacanis is moving on towards bigger goals. There is no big difference about how Weblogs, Inc. does it and how PayPerPost does it, PayPerPost just offers the platform without being the blog provider itself (which Weblogs, Inc. is) and they just connect those people. If people surf on Weblogs, Inc. they don’t know that the articles on there are from payed authors, until they digg deeper and want to find out.
Just let it go, I will be watching, it looks interesting.

What I like a lot about the way Michael Arrington is interviewing people is that he is walking the thin line of getting as many details as possible to driving them nuts by drilling for information as deep as possible. I had already a couple of grins on my face about his techniques and courage to do it. Great! Also the podcast with the Pageflakes founder Christoph Janz one episode later on TalkCrunch was driven very strongly by Michael to get the number of users of Pageflakes out of Christoph. Fortunately in the right moment Michael gave up and turned on to other important facts. That is what I mean by walking the thin line.
I remember very well how I was crossing a street and turning to go into the park when I started to have a big grin on my face because I was listening to the podcast and I felt that Christoph had to find good arguments to stay strong in this discussion or simply scream at Michael “we don’t disclose those numbers” :-). Fortunately when I had walked another two minutes (or so) when I was aside the nice river Isar and Michael said “I think we have beaten this topic to death” and I was releaved that I didn’t have to listen to another round of well argumented questions from him. One can hear that he is a lawyer. Great stuff Michael, keep it up! Beside Venture Voice and FLOSS weekly this is my favourite podcasts.

16th-17th December there is a BarCamp in Nuernberg, which is not too far from Munich. I will plan to go there, let’s see how many people I can gather that will join. I am not really sure if I can really contribute something for a session … I will have to think about it, may be Dojo, Django, MySQL or Python … But I would also be interested to get some connections, may be find someone interesting to kick off some project(s) with … we will see.
Anyone from Munich around who would accompany me?

I had created a custom package with the name “my.seqctrl”, creating one is as easy as

dojo.provide("my.seqctrl");

my.seqctrl = function() {
   // object code in here
}

Now I included the package wrong and finding the bug took me way too long, I really got pissed. I only got the message:

my.seqctrl is not a constructor

But it is! What I did was calling dojo.require like this:

dojo.require("my.seqctrl.*");

Just watch out to never make this mistake. It looks so right but is so wrong and the error message just points you to the wrong place. I guess that is why the new dojo packages get included in the .* way.

Thanks to this blog article I found Katapult, which is basically the same as QuickSilver for Mac OS X, without which I couldn’t live anymore. And since I have my Ubuntu screen placed right beside my Mac’s screen and am using only one mouse and keyboard for both thanks to synergy, I was moving over to the Ubuntu screen and wanted to start an app by hitting APPLE+Space … doh … no way. So finding Katapult just really makes working with Ubuntu easier. Though it is a KDE app Ubunbtu let’s you run it and you don’t even realize that.
Ubuntu is just great.

A couple days I just got an email that another one of my dojo patches made it into the source. Nice to see. I had a problem dragging multiple objects along with the actual dragged object. And the events called upon dragging actions had not been decoupled and blocked the drag’n drop code. So that is fixed now, thanks for committing it. I am looking forward for Dojo 0.4.

Finally I got around to setup a proper system at home, after a while of thinking that a laptop is the overall best solution I am happy to have two 19" BenQ FP93G X, one connected to my main machine, the still in use G4 15" PowerBook and the other one hooked to some older AMD about 2GHz running Ubuntu.

And today I connected the awesome sound system SoundSticks II from harman/kardon. After a little of searching I also found out how to turn up the volume. And they even had thought of allowing to adjust the direction the satellite speakers point, this sound is just awesome. And now listen to Pet Shop Boys Sodom (Trentemoller Remix) (link to iTunes) and this system was worth every cent!