O' Reilly User Groups

O' Reilly recently added NEWLUG to their User Groups program. I'm very happy that they were willing to help us out.

SimpleGeo Video showing geolocation services at SXSW

Here is an interesting video showing the location aware services that were being used during the 2010 South by SouthWest (SXSW) Interactive Festival. Maps on this video come from the OpenStreetMap project. This video comes to you courtesy of SimpleGeo, Inc.

SXSW Interactive Checkin Visualization from SimpleGeo Inc. on Vimeo.

Services shown in this video:

• Foursquare
• BrightKite
• GoWalla
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Bump
• BlockChalk
• fwix

Technology is awesome. It looks like location-aware services are going to be the next big thing, given the surge in smartphone ownership and use.

Hands-on video of a mass production Pandora in the wild.

As Pandora consoles start reaching the hands of actual consumers, we get the excitement of seeing consumers of the product trying out the product that they have waited so long to receive.
Here is an HD video of a Mass Production Pandora, showing the relative size compared to a Nintendo DS, and footage of the handheld in action:

Exciting stuff! I can't wait to get mine!

Dan Pink- Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.

I would like to share with you a video taken from a Dan Pink presentation for the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) regarding his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It helps explain the emergence of Linux, Open Source, and services such as Wikipedia.

Abbreviated, animated version:


Full, non animated version from the RSA youtube page:

I encourage you to explore the other videos that are available on the RSA Youtube page. There are some amazing and insightful videos there. Also, visit thersa.org to learn more about this organization.

How to install Formatta 7.0 on Ubuntu 10.04 using Wine

I do some volunteer work for the ELCA, and I recently found out that a good deal of the forms that the ELCA uses are in the ".pff" file format. For those of you that have never heard of the ".pff" file format, it is a format used for the Formatta Filler Tool. Currently, there are downloads available for Windows and Mac, but there is no mention of Linux. I will explain the steps that I used to get this program running on Ubuntu 10.04, without any assistance from the software maker, using WINE. For more info on WINE, read the WINE wikipedia article.

Go to Applications --> Ubuntu Software Center.

Search for "wine" and install "Wine Microsoft Windows Compatibility Layer (Beta Release):

Once installed, download the Formatta Filler 7.0 PC file.

Go to the location that you downloaded the file, right-click the file, and select "Properties".

Make sure to click the "Allow executing this file as a program" check box.

If you don't check this check box before you continue, you'll get a "blocked" error when you try to run the file, like the one below:

Right click the file again, and select "Open with Wine Windows Program Loader" and follow the prompts.

Your program should now be available under Applications --> Wine --> Programs. Sometimes, you may need to reboot for the GNOME menu to update itself.

You should now be able to run your program in Linux.

Keep in mind that with this method, your mileage may vary. Not every Windows program will work, but some of them will. I still prefer native Linux applications, but this is a way to bridge the gap when a Linux application simply doesn't exist and an alternative is not available.

Qimo version 2 released!

Today marks the official release date of Qimo for Kids version 2, a distribution based on Ubuntu 10.04 but specifically targeted at kids. As mentioned in my preview post of Qimo version 2, a new character has been introduced to the Qimo lineup. She is a polar bear named Illa ( sounds like 'ee-la'). She comes with her very own desktop theme, as shown below:

Links to download the distro can be found on the project page, but I'll also post the link to the torrent here:

Torrent: http://www.quinncoincorporated.org/qimo-2.0-desktop.iso.torrent
MD5: fcc629f107e8ca8766b15bc6e5c32e5c
SHA1: 3e328b74b2eb9fcc179b2fa93afeccea55b59ca6

For more Qimo news, feel free to visit the Qimo for Kids website, Facebook page, or Twitter feed.

Setting up Pydev in Eclipse for Django development with Python

While researching ways to do Python/Django development using Eclipse, I found this wonderful, though slightly outdated, tutorial video by Nick Vlku that streamlines the process quite well:

As I mentioned, the video is slightly outdated, but very well made. Here are the things that have changed or that I would suggest doing differently than the video:

As I use Ubuntu 10.04, I would suggest installing these packages from the Ubuntu repositories: eclipse-jdt, and eclipse-pde. Without eclipse-pde, you can't install extensions (such as Pydev). You could also simply search for "Eclipse" in the Ubuntu Software Center.

Pydev and the Pydev Extensions have now been merged together as of version 1.5.0, so you now have all of the extra capabilities from Pydev Extensions in the open source Pydev package. Pydev also has a new website- http://pydev.org/.

To add PyDev to Eclipse, Go to Help --> Install New Software.

Then Click on Add in the upper right hand corner and enter PyDev for the name, and http://pydev.org/updates for the location.

Select PyDev for Eclipse, select "Next", agree to terms, and the "Finish".

For Django, To add the Start and Stop Debug server buttons, after right-clicking the Icon bar and choosing "Customize Perspective:, the PyDev Debugger Server buttons were under "Command Groups Availability" -- not "Commands".

You should now have a working PyDev development perspective in Eclipse, including integration with Django. Enjoy!