Well looks like I have some catching up to do...as usual. Sorry Dr. B. Just extremely busy lately and I get this in when I can.
So POSSCON was a cool experience and I would recommend keeping this trip going in the years to come. The presenters where interesting people with lots of information to share. Lunch was good as well, I ended up having seconds! I had plans to speak with some of the presenters at POSSCON and was able to do so as these people were readily available and willing to speak with the conference attendees.
The first workshop that I attended was hosted by Jim McCracken and Neil Underwood. These guys hosted the 3D printing workshop, which I found really interesting. So interesting that I am looking into buying a 3D printer off Ebay to play around with. I think my daughter will enjoy designing little objects and then printing them out. I think I will too, hahah! Just another way to get her involved with and interested in computers. I am trying to mold a little computer whiz!
So my question to these guys was, “When do they think this sort of technology will be readily available for household use?” Mr. Underwood tried to convince me it is here and ready now. But after their demonstration and watching the configuration process I realized that it is clearly not. The configuration process is lengthy and a bit difficult for the average user. I mentioned this and they agreed that it was still a few years off for the technology to be user friendly enough for the average person.
Another drawback to this process is that the printer creates these objects but you can clearly tell they have been printed. The printed objects are covered in ridges. This could cause a problem if trying to produce a precise part. The solution to smooth the ridges is expensive so this is another reason why it is not quite ready for household use.
Although a breakthrough has been made very recently. So recently that the guy who made the discovery has not released his technique and no one is sure of how he is doing it. He has created a printer that prints so finely that there are no ridges. This is what I would expect the hardware to do if it is going to be made available for houses. Seems that it is on its way.
The second workshop I went to was hosted by David Duggins. This one turned out to be somewhat of a disaster but I did get some helpful information after the workshop. The priority of the workshop was to show the audience how to set up a workstation, using FOSS, free of charge. Great concept! He wanted to start out by showing us how to setup Linux, this is where he hit his first snag. There was intermittent and slow Internet connection so he could not download the setup files, it was going to take a very long time. So he decided to show us how to setup open source programs, that he was going to setup in Linux, in Windows but he was missing dependencies for many of programs on his Windows machine. A little preview of how this show was about to go down.
So he decided to set the programs up on his Debian machine, but it would not startup and kept crashing after a kernel panic. After about forty five minutes of floundering through failed setup attempts David called a break and we resumed about 15 minutes later. Nothing improved though. He stalled for a bit then revealed he had no further plans so we broke into a question and answer session then he called the workshop. Several people stuck around to ask more specific questions and I was one of them. I had to wait for a bit but I get to ask him about some FOSS options for my father's ticketing system. He mentioned two in particular, GLOM and SugarCRM. I am going to look more into both of these applications when I have some time. Just by talking with David though I feel one of these will do what I am looking for.
David Trask slipped through my hands. I wanted to make it over to the end of his workshop but did not make it after speaking with David Duggins. I was somewhat disappointed by this because I was going to ask him about FOSS software for my daughter to use because, as mentioned before, I am always looking to teach her new things using a computer. I was able to get his email from the program by scanning his bar code, handy, so I am thinking of emailing him instead. I did see him passing a few times and he seems like a really nice guy.
I'll mention our project progress to finish up. Progress on the plug-in is coming a long but is a bit more difficult than expected, as I suggested it would be. The project is very large but we are figuring things out. There are plug-ins that require the same functionality that we require so right now I am going through plug-ins code and trying to implement the same thing they have done.
I have found a plug-in that implements a couple of the functions we need. Hopefully this will prove useful! I think I am close to getting an option for our plug-in to come up in the right-click menu. Clicking this menu option will bring up our gwibber window. I have also found code that retrieves the needed track information. This will be helpful when it comes to grabbing track info for the gwibber window. I think we need to pick it up a bit though. Not hearing a lot out of a few others. I was really sick last week so I have not been with the group in a while so I am not sure where they are at. Hopefully they will have some breakthroughs to share tomorrow as well.
Back to playing with the project for a bit then bed, night!
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