SpeedBreeze

Note: If you use any of the information in this blog post and trash your computer, it’s not my fault. I’m not liable for anything that happens to you or your equipment.  This information is provided as-is with no warranties, expressed or implied.

During late spring 2008, I used up about $600 of my personal savings to buy an ASUS EeePC 900.   In retrospect, the EeePC was probably one of the best purchases that I ever made.  It’s amazingly light (a little over 2 pounds) and gets decent battery life.  These two features were especially handy during my trip to the Plone Conference Sprints in Washington DC in October 2008.

In my typical geek/modder/hacker fashion, I proceeded to trick out the default Xandros operating system. I replaced the default tabbed interface and IceWM with the super-light XFCE desktop environment.  I even installed a rudimentary compositor so could have translucent windows.

At the time, I didn’t see the need to install a new OS.  Xandros *is* a derivative of Debian, after all.  What I didn’t realize is that ASUS made modifications to core libraries used in Debian, such as libaudio.  This made compiling certain applications rather difficult.  I also saw some weirdness with the Java classpath.   The only development environment that I was able to get running was the Plone toolkit: buildout, ZopeSkel, etc.  In other words, the default ASUS-modded Xandros operating system isn’t a very good operating system for software development.

Enter Ubuntu Eee Easy Peasy (it was renamed due to a trademark issue).  Essentially, it’s an unofficial fork of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux made specifically for netbooks.  When version 8.04.1 of Easy Peasy came out, I tried to install it, but couldn’t get my flash drive to successfully boot the LiveUSB copy of it.

Last night, I managed to get Easy Peasy to boot off of my flash drive.  When I decided to install it, I decided to manually partition the hard disk.  My EeePC 900 came with 2 hard disks.  The 4 gigabyte disk holds the system files and mounts to the “/” directory.  The 16 gigabyte disk holds user files and mounts to the “/home” directory.  Since the EeePC doesn’t have a swap partition (to prevent the flash memory used for the disks from being trashed), there’d probably be two partitions: one on the 4 gigabyte disk, one on the 16 gigabyte disk, both formatted with the Ext-3 filesystem. Right?

Wrong.Don’t delete this.

When I looked at gparted, the GNOME partitioner, I noticed that there were a total of 5 partitions.  Not shiny.  To inform readers (and future me) with what these partitions probably are used for, I’ve put together the following handy tables.  The information used to compile the “notes” and “label” columns of the first table was borrowed from the “What is on Partitions 3 and 4 ?” EeeUser thread.  The information for the “drive” and “filesystem” columns was found using the following command:

sudo fdisk -l

Finally, the information used to compile the “size” column was taken from gparted.

Drive: /dev/sda

Drive: /dev/sdb

I was recently troubleshooting an installation of Plone and tried to install one of the hundreds of Plone products.  Immediately after restarting Zope, four ominous words (and a long trace) appeared on the screen: No traversable adapter found.  After an hour-or-two of troubleshooting, I found out how to solve the problem.

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The title really says it all.  Seriously.  I recently had the chance to make a very special trip to the Googleplex. It is an event I definitely won’t forget for a *really* long time.

I met and socialized with a students and mentors from all over the world—including from Thailand, Russia, South Africa, the UK, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium and the USA—to celebrate the conclusion of the first-ever Google Highly Open Participation Contest.  In addition to all of this social interaction, I had the chance to ride roller coasters at Great America, tour the Googleplex, talk to other GHOP students and mentors, eat at two of Google’s famous cafés, and listen to a set of amazing presentations by various tech luminaries who work for Google.

Today, I decided to put together a recap entry about the activities of the two days and what we did during them:

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RoboGames was a week ago, and like many others, I had an awesome time.  One of my robots, called “Red Fury”, even won third place in Junior Division 500g mini-sumo.  In between matches, I managed to snap a few photos of some of the major attractions at the event. Read More »

I’ve recently had the chance to test and program Sun’s SPOTs. Sun SPOTs are small, programmable, self-contained microcontrollers that can be used to build robots and control other larger devices. These microcontrollers also contain a variety of sensors, including a temperature sensor and an accelerometer. Read More »

Today, I was at SDForum’s second-annual “Teens Plugged In: Teens in Tech” conference.  Everything went pretty smoothly and I met many new, interesting people.

During the long day, I managed take at least five decent photos (I was too busy talking to people), which are showcased below.  As usual, you can click on any of the thumbnails to make them larger. Read More »

I went to the Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend.  In the five hours that I was there for, I met lots of really cool people, took 163 photos, and took over an hour of video footage.  It’s taken me a few days to sort through all of my media, but I’ve collected a few of the better photos and decided to post them. Read More »

SDForum, a Silicon Valley non-profit that runs various technology events throughout the year, is running their second annual “Teens Plugged In: Teens in Tech” conference.  The goal of the conference is to bring local teens, venture-capitalists, entrepreneurs, and product managers to discuss teens and their feelings about technology.

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A while back, I heard about Shaun Inman’s Mint statistics software. I saw the low price tag and the easy-to-use interface and thought that it was an extraordinarily enticing deal. Read More »

A few weeks ago, I read about a planning summit run by the Plone team that was supposed to occur at the Googleplex. My initial reaction to this was that it would be a cool event to go to, but the likelihood of being able to go to it would be minimal, since I was so new to the Plone developer community.

Just two weeks ago Read More »