Open Life

Creative Live Hey people I just got a webcam and since everyone know, peripherals are a tricky thing on linux. Yes there are, but you can’t just buy the first one you find.

So first what I did was looking for a software that will use it. I found a couple of them, first is Ekiga previously known as GnomeMeeting and is the classical video conferencing tool on the Gnome Desktop.

Second is the openWengo project which also support video conferencing. Is a shame that neither Gizmo or Skype has support for webcams yet.

Second I look at the driver that it uses on the Ekiga Wiki page. I went to the page of the driver, this driver needed to be pretty standard and start going on the project page and get more information and installation process. This gave me the level of compatibility which was 5 star.

I went on cross-searching on Mercado libre which is the e-bay like environment for buyers and sellers. Finally after some deep searching I decided on this webcam. So far I just ordered so I am still need to verify it.

So today I actually got into OLPC site once again, it all started when I was bored and download the FOSDEM video about the OLPC. One graph on the presentation of the video woke up my curiosity. It was a map of the earth with each country having different colors, like a rating for each country.
I wanted to download the presentation but failed, so my second choice was going to the website. However I found something better, a wiki of the OLPC project.
So decided to find what this colors actually meant, I start doing some searches for keywords related to ratings which gave me no result. The next step is to search for the country, I did a search for mexico and that gave me a whole profile page and it indeed had the grading.
Now that I saw that I look for the link where you can link up to the grading scale. In this case mexico was a red and there was other colors. The grades were the following:

• Green
  
• Red
  
• Orange
  
• Yellow
  
• Gray
  

With the Green it means they will inmediately adopt Linux, in this countries there were already some interesting countries with not so lagging technical knowledge and with a great pump of technology.

Some other countries that were close to the challenge actually declined adopting linux such as Romania. Mexico, had an interesting stage, it was a 'Red' country which means that they might adopt it once is already working.

Interesting question is what will this make to the country waiting a few years. If they adopt it, there is also the challenge from the same government and just administration within the education.

The education ministry has had bad ventures within education and technology, it will be a shame projects such as OLPC get dirty under the bureacratic and corrupted government that can turn a good idea into uselessness.

Recently I read a post about a wikipedia scandal where government officials were deleting and modifiying posts of some of the government projects such as the same Enciclomedia which is an Encarta hooked into more interacting blackboards.

Unfortunately there had been many issues on that way. kOLPC

Usually I dont blog other than OpenOffice.org but having this blog on an Opera community and this been a Opera hack, I think it deserved the attention.

So I don't know much of bash script and I am learning so doing a simple script that will allow me to get rid of some of Opera annoyances --- or GUI annoyances really.

The Problem
My damn employer network force us to use a Proxy everytime we want to access he interweb. So every morning I come in the office I need to run Opera and quickly get the Alt-P keystroke go to Advanced > Network > Proxy Servers and check the HTTP/FTP/HTTPS checkbox to enable the proxy in all. This is quite irritating.

The Research
Asking on the forum I remember that most of this preferences are ASCII parameters in .ini files. So I asked on the forum looking for the right .ini until I found it under ~/.opera/opera6.ini

Did a less opera6.ini |grep Proxy gave me what I was looking for:

[Proxy]
Use WAIS=0
Use Automatic Proxy Configuration=0
HTTP server=internet.ps.net:80
HTTPS server=internet.ps.net:80
Gopher server
WAIS server
Automatic Proxy Configuration URL=
No Proxy Servers=
No Proxy Servers Check=0
FTP server=internet.ps.net:80
Use GOPHER=0
Enable HTTP 1.1 for proxy=0
Use HTTP=1
Use HTTPS=1
Use FTP=1

The last 3 is what I was looking for, so it seems the script should not need any complex XML parser/Regular expression script to a complish this. So instead I used vim command line interface with bash. I end up with vim + bash and some advanced flags will let me be able to perform:

• Open the file
  
• Position on the exact line
  
• do a search and replace from 1 to 0 and viceversa
  
• Save and Quit
  

VIM is a very popular editor so a friend suggest me this external flags, specifically the -c flag that stand for command.


The Solution
I finally got something like this:

 vim -c "601" -c "s/1/0/" ~/.opera/opera6.ini

This enabled me to do a search and replace the 0 by 1, but now I need the opposite but instead of having another 1 liner I tried to just use an if... else and have it run.

The code end up like this:

if [ "$1" = "-e" ]; then
        vi -c "610" -c "s/1/0/" 
           -c "611" -c "s/1/0/" 
           -c "612" -c "s/1/0/" 
           -c "wq" ~/.opera/opera6.ini;
   else
        vi -c "610" -c "s/0/1/" 
           -c "611" -c "s/0/1/" 
           -c "612" -c "s/0/1/" 
           -c "wq" ~/.opera/opera6.ini;
   fi

I finally got this script stored on a command I called unproxy stored at /usr/local/bin with everything hardcoding and no 'intelligence on the script'. Ths mean that it doesnt validate that there is indeed a proxy, it's just a dumb command.

using the iff I can switch it on or off depending on the flag I show it:

unproxy -e (-e for enable) 

unproxy 

In the end the configuration profiles changed to just 0:

Use HTTP=0
Use HTTPS=0
Use FTP=0

Dell put a new concept that as shoking as it might seem, the revolutionary concept was to ask their costumerss what computer they would want. So the suggestion box is open and many people spoke. Pre-installing open source such as Linux and OpenOffice.org on their box.

Well, the OOo community has taken their word worth and started moving with an open letter to ask Dell that OpenOffice.org is ready for them. Having OpenOffice.org pre-installed on all their machines with Linux or Windows. OpenOffice.org runs on Vista, XP, Linux, OSX, and other operating systems such as Solaris. In the end Dell might have more tought on justifiying why this free, open source office suite solution is not available on their desktops and laptops that their costumers are asking for and also providing a value added proposition in the market.

Michael S.Dell, Chairman and CEO
Dell Computer Corporation
One Dell Way
Round Rock, Texas 78682

Dear Michael

Dell Computer Corporation has become one of Fortune's “America’s Most
Admired Companies” by providing great value, high quality computers and
peripherals, but most of all, by listening to your customers. Your
recent “IdeaStorm” initiative is the latest example of this. Here at
OpenOffice.org, we were delighted to see that the second most requested
feature by Dell customers was to have our office software pre-installed
on Dell systems. This request attracted more than 25,000 votes in two
days.

We believe that OpenOffice.org 2 software perfectly matches Dell’s
values. OpenOffice.org 2 is high quality office software, the result of
over twenty years’ continuous software engineering. It runs under all
common operating systems. It offers everything users expect from office
software, plus some bonus features that may pleasantly surprise them.
It’s easy for customers to use, with a familiar look and feel, and can
read and write a wide range of file formats, including Microsoft’s. On
top of all this, being licenced under open-source terms, it represents
outstanding value for money for you and your customers.

Let’s have a conversation about how we could build an “OpenOffice.org
supplied by Dell” product to give your customers what they are asking
for. We’d also be happy to accept any financial contribution that Dell
might offer to help ensure that OpenOffice.org continues to evolve in
the future.

Sincerely

John McCreesh
Marketing Project Lead
OpenOffice.org

Is interesting how many people will are in awe with Vista but probably will never meet what is on Linux with Beryl and XGL. So with Vista you get about 5 new effects, maybe the thumb generation, the windows fliping on a deck-like card manner.

However Beryl has probably 100 effects, between the famous rotating virtual cubes, wobbling windows, and great animations.

Vista will probably eat your pants off when it ocmes to hardware, it will ask for more than 1GB of ram just to run. Linux on the flipside, will just require 250 mb of ram with an NVIDIA and ATI card.

So maybe people will never know about this project, but if you got to this blogpost, you are not one of them. So if you really want a 3d experience you should check out youtube and look at the many videos about XGL and Beryl.