Scott's Blog

After a few power failures during a week of storms I rebooted my Ubuntu Linux computer and fsck found some errors. Next time I booted it found (and corrected) even more errors, until, eventually I wasn't able to boot anymore (couldn't find grub). I have a good backup system * so I wasn't too concerned (although this was my first real test).  I had run smartctl on the first sign of trouble and it didn't give any errors, so it didn't appear to be a hard disk failure. I figure this is an opportunity for me to setup 64bit version of Ubunt and I've also been thinking about dual booting to Windows ® because Steam looks like an easy and cheap way to install games. I put an old version of Windows XP in the drive and... it blue screened.  It just didn't want to install.  I tried two other versions and it also failed.  I then got the Ubuntu disk and it installed with no problems.  I tried Windows again, again it failed to install even though I had reformatted ...

Today I got a little sidetracked while working on my key-train (keyboard training) project.  I thought I might spruce it up a little by using a seven segment display for the digits (say for the words per minutes), similar to what kTouch has.  I found an open source font, but it appears to be difficult to just use a ttf font in GTK. So I figured, it's only 10 images, I'll just make them in svg. I vaguely remembered a heathenx inkscape podcast  describing how to make an LCD display and decided to use that at my base. Unfortunately, they didn't provide any source files in the show-notes (as far as I could see) so I had to watch and redo the drawings myself! By naming each of the seven segments I could create the 10 digits simply by deleting a few elements in one template svg file .  I can create the template as beautiful as I like and quickly create the 10 derived images with these programs . Unfortunately, both ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick don't hand...

Well I've done it again, started another open source project . Renata and I want Victor to learn how to touch type, but these days, it's hard to find a school that teaches just that. So I looked at what available in open source and found KTouch .  It's pretty good however I found some issues with it: The lecture files aren't very obvious. It's not clear, for example, that it has already loaded the default lecture file. The keyboard is rather plain looking. The scrolling text area you type in is nifty, but gets in the way for advanced users.  My typing speed is limited to how fast it can scroll back.  Also, as you get near the end of the line it's becomes difficult to see what characters are coming up, slowing you down and creating additional errors. Like many other typing tutor programs, it shows only one line of text at a time, it's not obvious how many lines you have left to do. The first time I ran it I thought it was going to go on forever. It doe...

I saw this week that Meet the Gimp is using my keyboard monitor program and gave me nice plug as well. It was thrill, but bittersweet, since key-mon still doesn't support the Wacom table (and I don't know how to fix it ). I also feel it could look a little better (at least that I can fix).

Street view has some great shot's of Lennoxville. Bishop's University View Larger Map Lion's Pub View Larger Map Also of the the house I grew up in in Montreal. Exibir mapa ampliado No street view for Kingston yet. But there's this areal view of where I used to go windsurfing. Exibir mapa ampliado

I've been busy and did lots of updates to key-mon , my keyboard status monitor. The big news is that it's now resizable! Normal size: Small size: Larger size: It can be scaled to any size not just three, here it is at 2x without the mouse and showing the meta (Windows) key: Heathenx is helping me get nicer looking images, especially at smaller sizes. For the really small sizes I needed to change the look a bit,  so now I have two sets of SVG files, one for the normal size and another for the smaller size. Creating the different sizes was a bit of a pain. GTK wants to read the svg from disk so any changes made to svg needs to be dumped to a temporary file.  Also GTK doesn't seem to have a parameter to load and resize, so I end up manipulating the svg so that it is scaled larger or smaller. The extra work was worth it, I think.  Some screencasts today are high resolution, so the key status monitor will be tiny.  Other screen casts are very small, ...

This weekend I was watching screencasters.heathenx.org a video podcast about Inkscape with the  Miro player. Heathenx had to apologize that his key status monitor wasn't displaying mouse activity.  This wasn't the first time I've seen problems with this utility, earlier in the year Meet the Gimp also had some problems getting it to work. I downloaded the program  and put in on my machine, and sure enough the mouse wasn't working for me either. Looking at the output, it complained that I have more than one mouse and it was going to pick the last one.  It lied, I looked at the code and it actually picked the the first one. I changed the code so that it did pick the last mouse and it worked.  I thought of submitting a patch, but I realized that arbitrarily picking the last one might break the program for others for which it was working. To my delight the code was written in Python, using PyGTK . It wasn't even that much code, I could probably write a simil...