Saturday, February 27, 2010

doing well on the mobile; not so well on the blogging

Went to pycon, the tiny Vaio made a great "useful machine for sitting down and working", the G1 made a good "keep up with #pycon on twitter so I can find dinner plans" tool (mostly using twidroid, but it did get me to switch to seesmic, just for the easier access to saved searches (and larger fonts.) I actually used a paper notebook for note-taking, as I have in previous years; didn't do any sketch-blogging, just took photos, but writing notes was just better for my concentration (which was actually surprisingly good this year, I was apparently getting enough sleep :-) In the end, that meant that I kept up with stuff online the same way I would have if I were home, there wasn't really a "mobile" context to the trip, and I wasn't planning to do talk summaries until I got back anyway.

The pocket 'scope showed up, still haven't got a workbench. I did pick up a georgiarobotics textbook and robot, and immediately started playing with it via their python toolkit, "myro". (The source has some tantalizing roomba mentions - I may try getting it to work with the iCreate too and have them play tag or something :-) I did get about halfway through the first chapter of the textbook, and I have ambitious plans to combine this with CLR(S) 3rd edition as part of a general "oh, right, I do have a CS degree" refresher (inspired by Raymond Hettinger's talk) as well as actually leveling up in robots for their own sake.

It would probably also help if I got all of my blogging efforts fed together into a common "flow"; google buzz helped with that a little bit, and the pycon talk about pubsubhubbub suggested some other interesting things that I've half started on. Perhaps I should just set a rule limiting the amount of time on blogging-related-coding to a specific fraction of the time spent on blogging-related-blogging :-)

Sunday, February 14, 2010

it's all in the wrist (it's all about the keyboard)

Gave up on the android clients (too big or too buggy), blogtk is a failure too (that title problem? Apparently it crashes when you type a title, so they disabled the field. Feh.) Blogger's web interface has save (but not autosave?) and works in the android Browser, but only under "edit HTML", which is tolerable for the moment.


I really should not be embarking on my own client at this point, though once the next ASE ships with real GUI support, I may have to take a shot at it. I still end up wanting an external keyboard, and the Vaio P is actually a reasonable size for one, so I should give in and use it directly. For now, though, this is still about mobile posting and not just writing, and even on a netbook, it doesn't really "feel" mobile...

Monday, February 8, 2010

Titles are *not* optional

Let's see if blogtk can handle mobile-offline writing for later posting. I see a save/open saved post menu, after all, but while I can type entry contents, I don't seem to be able to select the Title field when not connected (which doesn't make a lot of sense.) (It appears to work, though the save format turns out to just be 6 cPickle'd strings, yay python :-) (Hmm, Title doesn't work now that I'm connected, either...)


Went down to NYC for the weekend; ate at Oceana and Serendipity3 and Cosi and Zabars (and the American History Museum Cafe, and the Loeb Boathouse Cafe, and Nathan's.) Took the Bolt Bus down, which had power, wifi, a comfortable ride, and precise timing; I took the Acela Express back, which had power, no net, wider seats, and a 2-hour departure delay (that had *nothing* to do with the DC/New Jersey area weather, a mechnical failure that was fixed in Baltimore was blamed.) Combine that with the 5x price differential, and I'm probably taking the bus on my next trip down.


Speaking of which, walking around Central Park with a camera was a lot of fun, I'd like to try it again some time when it is more than 30F out (though 30F and sunny and not much wind was actually tolerable for an hour or two at a time.) Casually getting pictures of cardinals, woodpeckers, brown creeper, house finch, hawk, nuthatch, grackle, and a host of more common birds, even though it was near-freezing, was a great way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Optimized for travel; biased for shooting

I picked up a second-hand Sony Vaio P from a friend who got it in Japan. Scarily light, 220dpi screen, comfortable keyboard, thinkpad-style eraser-mouse... I've just about completely switched over to it as my "laptop that I actually carry", though I haven't really "vacated" the T60p yet. I'm actually running a stock Lucid Lynx Ubuntu daily build on it, so I have "slow" X but in exchange for that pretty much everything works reliably, including suspend/restore (there's a backlight issue but changing vt's in and out of X seems to solve it.)
I haven't ported my XMPP client over yet; it looks like python-pyxmpp gives a lot more rope and actually has Kerberos/GSSAPI code, but it fails to come up with sane service names (and if I force those, it fails to actually complete enough of the negotiation to get any traffic from the server.) However, pidgin actually does GSSAPI, so I may stick with that for a bit.
I was also inspired by all of this to figure out how to set up ratpoison to use trayer and the various applets, including NetworkManager (which is a lot saner than it ever used to be, I may be able to stick with it and not go back to my adhoc scripts after all.) I've even completed an end-to-end run of my camera/usb stick/kphotoalbum/flickr upload workflow on it, that worked just fine.
My biggest remaining problem is actually font sizes. I've had bad luck with telling xulrunner a minimum size to use (many pages seem to get confused and end up overlapping characters - even amazon's wishlist dropdown ends up wrong...) but having not touched it for this install, hitting ctl-shift-+ twice ("Full Zoom 150%") gives me pages that are readable *and* not disproportioned or otherwise broken. Unfortunately I haven't found an alternate path -- .fonts.conf.d is apparently ignored by everything except ratpoison itself, gnome-font-properties is gone, gnome-appearance-properties puts up a window and then crashes, xrandr --dpi doesn't seem to actually do anything... I still need to try creating a xorg.conf (that's right, I get 1600x768 with the server defaults, yay!) to set DisplaySize, and maybe there's a gnome config I can tweak with an editor, we'll see.
What all of this means is that I can have my camera *and "studio"* and a weekend's worth of clothing and toiletries in a very small bag, I can be nearly unencumbered and just go places and take pictures... and one thing the 100-pictures-a-day lifestyle has taught me is that if you're going to get pictures of interesting things, it helps hugely to be "biased for shooting" - arranging your self so that it takes more effort to decide *not* to take a picture of something than to just take one. This means wearing a camera, not just pocketing one, or at least whenever you have a hand free, there should be a camera in it. A slightly large camera (a superzoom rather than a compact, I mean, not a full DSLR) helps with this because having it in hand is easier than "putting it away".
ps. if I pretend that the Vaio P counts as a "mobile" client, this is another mobile test, using gnome-blog... which fails, debbug228236 is still open after 6+ years, and I had to use the web interface to fix the title :-{ drivel crashes with an FPE, blogtk looks a lot more real so I'm trying it next - it seems ok on titles, but edit mode gets paragraph breaks wrong...