After working with Alexandria I decided that Ruby was not a good language to write such an application. I also wanted to add some features that Ruby is not suited for such as P2P. Also, Alexandria is Gnome-only and I really didn't like that as most of our users are elsewhere, ie Windows and OSX, so I decided against GTK+.

Enter Perseus. Perseus is completely new application to help you manage your book collection. It is similar to Alexandria in that it borrows quite a few things from Alexandria's design. I also studied Delicious Library and decided to implement a real-looking bookshelf. I also wanted a viewer, so I introduced tabs into the interface. The application is quickly emerging and I do like what I see so far. It is written in Python and QT Screenshot included on the right!

I love books, I have thousands of them! One big problem for me has been in managing my book collection. Until recently there did not seem to be any efficient solutions for managing my e-book collection. I have played with all the usual solutions, but everything seemed overly complicated, difficult, or large. Nothing native to Linux, or to Gnome which is my window manager of choice. All I wanted was a simple browser for my books that would allow me to quickly find the one I was interested in reading so I could read it.

So looking over things I found Alexandria, a book manager for Gnome. It's a neat book manager with interesting features, however it lacks support for e-books. It also seems the author is developing a fork so can't be bothered to add support to the existing application. So I decided to put my ruby skills to the test and hack the application to add support for attaching files to books and it worked -- great!

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

For this site I wanted to create a nice little badge to advertise the fact that we offer free quotes. I thought of all the software that I could use including Corel, but I was feeling adventurous and decided to try to do it in Inkscape, and I must say I am pretty impressed with how well Inkscape works from a graphic illustrator's point of view. In many ways Inkscape seems ideal for web graphics considering it uses a version of SVG to store the file. Granted the SVG might not work 100% with standard SVG used in browsers, it is still impressive as its an open format.

Anyhow, I thought I would share the results of my work, these are in Inkscape SVG format. It was created with Inkscape .46 in Linux in case you are wondering.

I have been struggling with this for some time since I installed the latest Ubuntu on a new Dell laptop. In the previous version of Ubuntu things simply worked, you would plug it in, it would show up as a CDROM and then you would umount that and the modem would show up. In the recent version that did not seem to be the case and I could not figure out how to get usb_storage to let this damn cdrom drive go, but finally after a long series of failed attempts I pieced together how to get this damn thing working.

There are a few different problems to contend with. First Ubuntu 9.04 removed the usbserial as a module and instead compiled it as a part of the kernel. Therefore in certain cases usbserial will not recognize your device.

In the latest version of 9.04 with the current revision of the kernel, this does not seem to be a problem, simply eject the cdrom device and it should see your card; i.e. "eject /dev/sr1". Look at dmesg to see where it is creating the drive, i.e. "/dev/sr1" or something as such in the /dev folder.

If this is the case you need to tell it to do so by adding a line to the kernel... This is messy and not for the inexperienced or the faint of heart. You have to edit your grub menu list and add:

usbserial.vendor=0x1410 usbserial.product=0x1450

So it looks like this:

/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-xx-generic root=UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx ro quiet splash usbserial.vendor=0x1410 usbserial.product=0x1450

Next you have to reboot your computer.

Then insert your card, it will still not detect it, and that's because the damn thing needs to be ejected. So to eject it type:

eject /dev/sr1

Now the system should recognize the modem and you should be able to connect to the internet. There I saved you days of work in figuring out how to get this to work and contemplating downgrading to intrepid. You should hire me!

Just in time for a new year I thought I should write a bit about new year's resolutions in terms of businesses. We all know that businesses are people too, and just like people businesses pick up bad habits. If you look at New Year's Resolution on wikipedia you will find the common ones. I am going to explain how each applies to your business.