I'm kind of an IDE junky. I really like messing around with them and trying them out. This probably offends real programmers who are actually productive. I don't blame you and I'm sorry.

So I've never used KDevelop before on account of I've never really written much in C or C++. In fact while I'm being offensive to those of you with legit skills the biggest thing I ever did in C was part of a project I did in VB 6.0 There was one section I couldn't accomplish in VB so I wrote a little thing in C that I could call from the VB code. I don't even remember what it was - it's been a few years now. I wonder if I wrote about it in my journal here? I may go look later. I'm the programming equivalent of the rich white kid with all the 'bling' who styles himself as a hard core rapper guy.

Well, I'm on Reddit and there is a post in r/python about a python plugin for KDevelop. And as I'm investigating that I see that there is also one for PHP. The PHP plugin must have been stable a while back because it is available via the Fedora repos. The Python one is pretty new so I had to compile that sucker from source. I felt pretty manly doing that. (manly is a bad word for this but I can't come up with another one that describes how it made me feel. i'm sure this is a product of my upbringing and culture and not due to a personal failing on my part.)

Anyway - it's cool. I mean really cool.

I got it installed, played with getting KDEDIRS right, running kbuildsycoca4 a few times and then figuring out how to get this variable set right in a permanent fashion - and then I could use it. I fire up KDevelop, click on "New Project" and I see that I have choices, one being "Python". Upon choosing Python I learn that I have even more choices. Simple Python Application, New Django project and Simple Qt GUI application using Designer. Verbiage and capitalization inconsistencies aside I was pretty pleased to see more choices than I would have expected and doubly so over the last. I chose it and created a project called test.

What did I get in my project called test? Well again, a whole lot more than I expected. It created 3 files. test.py, mainwindow.ui and mainwindow.py and it was capable of running right out of the box. This is pretty freaking cool in my opinion. When you run it there's a little window with a push button and a progress bar. Pushing the button increments the progress bar. Really - it doesn't matter what it does, the point is that everything is there that one needs to get the ball rolling I really, really like that.

It does bunches and bunches of all the IDE stuff you would expect. Syntax coloring, code completion, debugging stuff - all that junk. I'm pretty impressed. I'm a brand loyal person. I love feeling like I belong to a team. This is not a positive attribute on a number of levels but I don't care. It's a truth about myself I've learned to accept. So I really like the idea of becoming a more KDE person by using KDevelop. I've also dropped pidgin for Telepathy and learned to embrace Dolphin. I'm all about the buy in. Though I do not browse with Konqueror. I can only go so far. And my love affair with google takes precedence here. But now I'm rambling.

Another Python IDE that I haven't looked at in a long, long time is Ninja IDE. It comes with a dark them as the default setting and I feel like a rebellious hacker type person straight out of a Gibson story every time I fire it up. It's a Python IDE written in Python. I respect that. I haven't messed with it a lot but it is available via the Fedora repos now and at some point I may give it a more serious spin. I wondered how it would go when they first started and they seem to be hanging in there and building a nice product. The name as a recursive acronym thing is annoying but I'm willing to overlook it. They have packages for Lin, Win and Mac. How nice is that? Try it out. Write a plugin for it.

So with all that Valve is doing your Linux PC can now be your complete solution for development and entertainment. So many good tools just sitting there waiting to be used.

**Technical Note about the KDEDIRS thing. I am (if you read these regularly you already know) of course not all that smart. Fortunately I live in an age where I can get away with it. I followed the install directions and that left my plugin stuff installed into /usr/local but by default KDEDIRS (at least on my system) just has /usr. My initial gut reaction would be to modify it in ~/.bash_profile but I googled it and this was not the right answer. The right answer was easy though. I created ~/.kde/env and in there put a script that set KDEDIRS to include /usr/local and all was well. Though this is why I really look forward to this plugin getting to the repos because then I don't need to worry about this stuff any more. I just fire up apper, search by title on "kdevelop" and clicky-clicky she is installed. Or if I feel like being 1337 I su to root and type yum install kdevelop-python You know what I mean?

Netbeans, Intellij Idea - both look craptastic on 64bit Fedora. I've tried just about every vm option there is and a number of different fonts but none of it looks very good. I think the Python plugin for KDevelop may be a turning point for me.

Participated in a Hangout for the first time today. I've watched some that were recorded on youtube but this was the first where I've been a participant. I've got to say that it was pretty slick.

The weak point was the audio. It was o.k. but sometimes there was a lot of echo. Other than that though it was pretty impressive. As our organization moves to Google Apps I imagine I'll be using it a lot more. When my kids see the goofy little graphics that can be put into the video they are going to flip.

The other two participants today were on Windows 8 - I was using my Fedora 18 machine. I had to install something to get it to work but Chrome helpfully gave me a list of options for the install and one was a 64 bit rpm. Nice.

I'm not naive about Google - and things could go all square shaped fast with them but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I love the convenience and functionality they bring to my life.

Last time I looked, the only webcam program I could find that sort of worked for me was Cheese - which is a Gnome application. I don't mind running Gnome stuff but I do like having KDE programs to use with KDE.

I checked again today and ran into Kamoso which is working really well for me. There really isn't any lag, it saves videos and photos very nicely. It's super slick.

I never did get Cheese to properly record video on this machine - but I do have the video card in there now so maybe it would work fine too. But I was really surprised by how snappy Kamoso is. Very nice.

I wrote earlier about how everything worked so well with my new multi-monitor setup. Then I started noticing issues. The title bar on windows would get borked up. Right click menus would start to look wierd. I tried loading the Nvidia drivers- they would cause the system to lock up and crash. I went back to nouveau but had issues still. Especially if I started up Firefox. The article on the front page today had a link to Eric Schmidt's daughter's write up on their trip to North Korea. Just going to that page would blow up Firefox. Then when I closed Firefox everything else would go wonky.

I messed with it a lot today and then did something I should have done right away. I went into my settings for KDE, started poking around and turning off all the desktop effects stuff. I want to cautiously say that I think this is the ticket. I'll keep working tomorrow and see if anything goes askew. This is really annoying. I have zero problems with intel stuff - but (and I don't know a lot about this stuff) if you want to run multiple monitors off a desktop machine then that means nvidia or ati and both seem to have their share of problems. I think I'm o.k. now but I should be able to load decent, open drivers that will just work. They don't have to be the greatest - just give me some stable basic functionality.

I can't remember if I mentioned it here but my wife got me Ticket to Ride Europe for my birthday. Pretty exciting. The instructions in the box were in Hungarian but downloading the English version was a trivial exercise. Actually playing the game requires no reading beyond the city names and they are all in what I assume is supposed to be the local name for the city at the time of the map - though they don't use non-latin character sets. If I remember correctly the time is 1901. Hungary and Germany are HUGE. Really - super big and worthy of all caps. There are a lot less countries than now and it's kind of fun from that perspective.

I've never played the original game on the American map. I watched the Ticket to Ride TableTop episode though and that's what made me want to get the game. I think the Europe version is actually better for our family. The addition of the train stations makes it a little easier to complete routes and that really helps my kids. I want them to have fun playing, not just feel frustrated all the time.

It's a fantastic, well designed game that is nice to look at. It works great as all 5 of us can play and the rules are pretty easy to grasp. That said, the fun of playing scales up well with the ability of those playing I think. With my kids it's all pretty straightforward, but I'm guessing with more adults there would be a whole additional level of trying to figure out what others are doing and stopping them if possible.

The game can be played on-line but I haven't tried that out. Not sure that I will. My favorite thing about table games is playing them with friends and family and just hanging out together.

Got to work this morning and I started up my machines. I went to start synergy but it didn't start. I thought I had fixed this. It wouldn't start because it didn't recognize the machine name. I thought I had changed it from localhost.localdomain in a permanent fashion but I was wrong. I determined to track this down once and for all. I finally did. Here is the solution. (sort of)

hostnamectl set-hostname jr-acerdesk.this.net

I say sort of because that didn't totally work. hostnamectl sets up a static hostname and a pretty hostname. When I ran the command without specifiying which I got jr-acerdesk.this.net as the pretty name and jr-acerdeskthisnet as the static name. So the output of hostname is jr-acerdiskthisnet and that was not going to fly with synergy. So I had to do it again but this time specify that I wanted the static name to match the pretty name.

hostnamectl set-hostname jr-acerdesk.this.net --static

If you are curious - changing /etc/hosts had no effect on this. Poking around I think maybe changing /etc/hostname would have fixed it but I'm not sure. Unless I missed something, and I don't think I did - there was no opportunity during the install to choose a host name.

Next issue was my firewall. It was blocking the synergy client trying to connect on port 24800. There is a gui for managing the firewall daemon so I went with that. The problem is I couldn't get the changes I made via the gui to persist. It took some digging but here is what did it.

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=work --add-port=24800/tcp

I had to specifiy the zone because I have the ethernet connection on this machine set to a zone that is different from the default zone. If it was default that could be left out. I think there is an xml file somewhere I could have dug into but that's not really my idea of a good time. Hopefully the gui tool for managing firewalld will improve soon.

The kio_mtp work is available in the F18 repos. I am having a very difficult time getting it to work consistently with my Galaxy S3 though. I'm not sure why. The Nexus 7 devices I've tried work flawlessly. Something is up with the phone. I'm not sure what. I'm trying to contact the developer and see if I can help provide information that might point a solution.

Downloaded Fedora 18 yesterday and installed it on my Acer desktop. Everything is pretty sweet.

And all that messing about with the video card that I couldn't get to fit in the case? Yesterday I was looking for a usb cable at home and found a video card in my desk that I had totally forgotten about. Looked at it and thought, "I bet this will fit in there if I put the low profile plate on the end and slide the VGA port down to the other slot opening. It did! So I bought a $40 video card for the little short metal plates that came with it. Well - my partner here in the office is building out a new system so I gave the card to him. He'll make good use of it.

So I'm up and running a new os - with both monitors -- which I have to say just worked. So sweet.

I've got more space on my desk now - which I like and I think this will actually help my work flow a bit by simplifying things. 1 machine to work on - 1 machine for email and junk.

I think I've figured it out mostly. I've got the mechanism down I believe and now it is just a matter of nailing down some specifics. I used a program called cvt to find the modeline for the resolution I wanted. Then I tried it out with xrandr and that worked pretty well. I did all this with the guidance from this Arch wiki article.

Then I used the layout they show for creating an entry in xorg.conf but I didn't do it in xorg.conf I created a new file in /etc/xorg.conf.d as per this post.

I logged out, logged back in and had the option to change the lcd to the desired resolution. The only remaining issue is that while everything I can find says this monitor is 1440x900 - when I maximize stuff it goes off the right edge. But I can figure that out.

*******************************
My original post is below:
I've got a cheap LCD monitor that I use at home. It's decent but it does have one real pain in the butt issue. It doesn't report itself properly to computers. I don't know the details - I just know that regardless of what I connect to it and regardless of the OS - I have to go in and straighten it out.

Today I started using it with my laptop running Fedora 17 and sure enough I don't get the correct resolution as an option. Fedora doesn't use xorg.conf any more and the tools I've found all just give me the same set of options that don't include the right resolution.

I'm open to suggestions on how to get it to handle this correctly.

So - I took the Desktop Acer home, opened it up to start planning surgery and realized even with the top open, the video card wont fit because of a big row of cables that plug in to some pins pretty close behind it, as well as another above it towards the front. I don't know if any video card would fit in that slot.

I know the one below it can be used because I have another Acer that uses a mobo with the same layout and it has a wireless adapter plugged into the lower one. Of course it's a tiny, tiny card.

So I wont be running two screens from that machine any time soon - probably not ever. Instead I'll just move the linux laptop home and use the second monitor from the little Acer laptop. I'm moving the Acer desktop at home to the entertainment center. It solves a few problems, like the really bad time we've had getting netflix to work consistantly from the wii. I can also get rid of the transformer that was letting us use our dvd player as I wont need the dvd player any more. That was my last piece of equipment in there that couldn't handle local power.

I hooked up the pc to the tv with hdmi and it looks and sounds great. I could do better I'm sure with more work and equipment but we aren't audo or video philes - we're pretty easy to please when it comes to that stuff. Now I just need to get a wireless keyboard and maybe a remote. The front of the acer is all black except for a silver acer badge. I can probably pry that off without too much trouble.

Well - I do dumb things a lot. I hope a byproduct is your entertainment.

So I have an Acer Aspire X3810 on my desk. I'm typing this post with it. It's my primary work machine and I like that little guy. Next to it (I just described this the other day - sorry) is a docked Latitude that's pretty old. It still works good though. BUT I started thinking that I'd like to free up some desk space and it really isn't necessary to have the laptop. I just need to put a video card in the desktop and then I can drive both my big monitors off that. I'm not losing much really - the laptop screen is not that bright and I never use it. Whatever I'm actually looking at gets shoved over to the big lcd.

The Acer case is small so I went on-line and looked at low profile cards. I ended up buying an ASUS GeForce 210 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Low Profile Ready Video Card, EN210 SILENT/DI/1GD3/V2(LP) from Amazon. That was the dumb part. I didn't even think to crack open my case and take a moment to look at the setup. I just read "Low Profile" clicked add to cart. I had it shipped to a buddy who went back to the states for Christmas and he brought it back to Hungary with him.

SO - I get it and I'm like a little kid on Christmas. I unplug everything from the back of the case, slide it open and realize immediately there is no way the card will fit. It's got this honking big heat sink on it. The slot it has to go in is millimeters from the top of the case. If the heat sink were on the downward side of the card, it might work, but it's on top. Well - I thought about it and I've decided I'm just going to cut a hole in the top of the case. It can't be removed. The case is one wrap around piece that provides top, bottom and one side - then the other side slides off. Tomorrow I'll bring my Dremel (and the big fat transformer I need to run it) and I'm gonna cut a big hole right in the top. I'll take pictures of course. I think it's actually gonna look cool in the end.

A guy I work with in the office said, "You'll have dust problems." I reject this view. The whole side of the case is pretty much full of all these round holes for air flow. If I keep things tight I don't think this will be that much worse.

Of course the kicker will be if I do all that and it doesn't work well. It's been a while since last time I tried running multi monitor with linux using a second video card so I'm hoping it will all be better than it was then.

We were driving home from a ski trip and stopped to get gas just outside Budapest. The entire front of the place we stopped at was covered in a big advertisement for Afro Coffee. I thought it was pretty crazy so I took a picture. Well - it's a whole company. They say, "It all began with a dream. The dream of presenting to the world a new image of Africa. The image of a self-aware up-and-coming continent." And I think I can get behind that dream. Though I'm not sure if selling the idea that Africa == 70's Black America is really the best vehicle to achieve that goal. Maybe I'm wrong.

OK - the video is 95 minutes long -- Qualcomm CES Keynote. And I just dare you to watch it all. I couldn't do it.

So here is a summary with photos and a distilled video of some better moments - Verge Qualcomm CES best of .

If you go straight to the summary it may motivate you to try getting through the full thing. Pretty crazy.

When I typed that title, I originally typed synergys - because that's what I type whenever I start the synergy server on this machine. Funny.

Anyway. I'm sitting here at my desk. I've got 3 machines. A desktop and 2 laptops. Almost all my work happens on the desktop and the laptop to it's immediate left. That laptop is docked and connected to a 19inch lcd. So basically most of what I do happens on 2 Fedora machines that sit side by side. The third machine is my little Acer running Windows and it's there to have Outlook up. (Well until March when our organization ditches Exchange for Google Apps.)

OK - here is the interesting part to me. (Just now anyway) Sitting just to the left of my keyboard is my phone. It vibrates in response to a few events, including arriving email. So when I'm in the office I don't look at the Acer much. When my phone vibrates I glance over at it, see if it is an email and if so if it is one I need to deal with. If not I just keep working. This is so nice. I don't want that machine to do notifications via the speaker - that would be annoying and I probably wouldn't hear it anyway. I'm wearing head phones plugged into the box furthest to the left. If my little laptop could vibrate that would be sweet.

I read Snowcrash again last week while I was on vacation. We've gotten a lot closer to it since I read it the first time - but there is still a way to go on some of that tech. I like this added feedback option my phone gives me. I live in the future.

I have written here before about the problem of connecting to android devices via usb on Linux since they moved to MTP. Well I have found some relief. This is a solution for KDE, which I happen to use. But if you don't use KDE then you may want to stop reading here. The help comes via Alex Fiestas, KDE developer and he has written up what has been done so far on his blog. You may have seen that blog recently in all the attention it got about some of the improvements to screen management that are coming to KDE (something else I'm excited about.)
 
What the blog post doesn't mention and I think this could be helpful is that to follow his instructions on compiling the MTP support stuff he's written you need libmtp and libmtp-devel. (I think so anyway. I just had libmtp and I got an error the first time I compiled. All went fine once I added the devel package.) There is a ppa for Ubuntu listed and I am sure my distro, Fedora, will have this in the repos before long. I installed it and hooked up my Nexus 7 and I could actually see files and do stuff to them. In the past this was not the case at all. I'm pretty stoked. I imagine this will just get better. There are other ways to get files on and off my android devices but I really like to be able to hook them up via usb and look at everything with dolphin.