Now, first of all, this watch band is made from ballistic nylon, and while I don’t know exactly what that means, I’m pretty sure I can use it to deflect bullets like Wonder Woman. And when the description includes words like James Bond, NATO-style, military, police, and divers, that makes my inner geek stand up and take attention. Here’s the description from the website:

Like I stated earlier, the fact that there is no watch band buckle on the bottom of your wrist means that instead of fighting with the watch band like every watch band I’ve ever had since the beginning of time (because resting your wrist on that buckle for 8+ hours a day ends up causing pain and anguish and such), you have just a single layer of ballistic nylon which causes zero interference or discomfort!

The only problem for me was that I didn’t have a watch face that would fit in this band, having previously purchased Diesel DZ7134 Watch (shown at the left). Like most digital watches out there these days, this Diesel uses a very tightly-integrated watch band and won’t work with the new James Bondy watchband I had my eye on. And while I loved the Diesel watch, I was really tired of constantly fighting with its watch band while resting my wrist on it as I worked.

But then I found a new watch that would work with the James Bondy watchband and looked every bit as cool as the Diesel: the Nixon Unit Watch (shown at the right). And it comes in blue! And it uses a more standard watch band that works beautifully with the James Bondy watchband I wanted to try! And seriously, I really do like it a lot. Even with the default watch band, it is probably my favorite watch ever.

But coupled with the ballistic nylon watch from The Watch Prince, it is the most awesome watch in the entire universe. So if you’re a James Bondy guy like me, or a hacker like me, or a fashionable dude like me, or a guy (or gal!) who’s tired of fighting with your watch band while trying to work, you might want to give this watch band (or something like it) a closer look.

After all, it’s what James Bond would do.

Yesterday was an awesome end to an otherwise already pretty good week. I got to play Tetrinet with my team at work and while this may not seem like a big deal, it was to me. Being that I’m currently working remotely, it’s very easy to feel isolated and alone and disconnected most of the time. Until I figure out how to build a virtual presence robot (like Twiki, maybe, except instead of  Dr. Theopolis hanging around his neck, it would be a webcam of me?!?), I don’t get many opportunities to feel a part of my team and get the kind of feedback that you normally get in a job by seeing how people react to you just by being around them. But anyway, it was a WHOLE lot of fun. I had never heard of, much less played, Tetrinet before yesterday, and I got my butt kicked soundly. But the camaraderie and laughter and fun was exactly what I needed.

On Tuesday, I got to spend the whole day in my dining room with a friend and co-worker from VMware and got some really cool Linux work done. It was actually some really sweet stuff that he did earlier in the year as part of his internship, but part of it got backed out due to Windows build issues. We worked through all of the issues (and found a couple of problems in GlibMM along the way) and he brought me up to speed with the features and implementation details and we did a pretty good job at documenting it all to boot. I can’t say exactly what it is, just yet, but if you’re a fan of VMware’s Unity mode (guest VM windows showing up inside your host, like normal windows instead of being contained inside the guest OS window), this work will make things just that much cooler. I’m working on Unity stuff for our next Workstation and Player releases and I’m hoping we get to include this coolness!

I’ve been using the Logitech VX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse for a couple of years now and it is extremely cool. The neatest thing about it (other than the fact that it works perfectly in Linux and has a gazillion buttons, and the little storage compartment inside the mouse for the USB dongle) is the scroll wheel. They call it a “hyper-fast scroll wheel” and it is just that–you give it a good flick and it keeps going and going and going… awesome fun and really useful for long documents/web pages. But last week, I saw the Logitech Optical Marble Mouse and after reading all the reviews and talking to a friend who had 5 of them and loved them, I decided to give it a try, and I absolutely love it. It has the same kind of scrolling awesomeness as the VX Revolution wherein you flick it with your fingers and it keeps going much longer than a normal mouse wheel (albeit not nearly as long as the VX), but it also keeps your hand stationary to help prevent or improve RSI problems. It took just a few hours to get used to it after having used a normal rodent for decades, and it is now my favorite mouse. But it does take a little bit of configuring…

Silly me, but I am so used to having to hack things to do my bidding in Linux that I wasted a bunch of hours researching how to get the Marble Mouse to do horizontal and vertical scrolling. You see, the mouse only has 4 buttons, and no scroll wheel, so you use X’s EmulateWheel option and then tell it which mouse button to use (EmulateWheelButton) so that when you hold that button down and move your mouse, instead of moving the mouse cursor, it scrolls in that direction. REALLY cool! It seems, however, that the particulars of how to configure this mouse in X changes with each vesion of X, or at least between distributions. BUT, if you’re using OpenSUSE 11.1 as I am, just use YaST and change one of your mouse definitions to be the “Logitech TrackMan Marble FX (PS/2)” (even though you’re connecting it through USB), and you’ll find that it works beautifully (DOH! Should have tried that first!!!). I set my EmulateWheelButton to “8″, which is the little button on the left side of the mouse. I’m LOVING it! BTW, if you’re using Ubuntu Intrepid, there’s a drastically different way to get this working involving either HAL fdi files or a simple xinput script. Anyway, if you find yourself using this mouse and getting stuck on how to get it to scroll, add a comment to this post and I’ll provide more details.

I also got a chance to spend some time on Ye Olde KPilot this week, which felt really good. Truth be told, it’s darned necessary and scary, since KDE 4.2 is nearing release any day now. But I fixed a bunch of KPilot issues (layout, configure dialog, crashes, sync problems) and even got KPilot to successfully sync my calendar and contacts once. I need to spend some more time this weekend in trying out different sync scenarios to make sure we’re rock solid before the release, but the good news is that contrary to previous versions of KPilot, we’ve tried extra-special-hard to not lose your data. You may find that (right now), we err on the side of giving you  more data than less, meaning possible duplicates until we get those bugs fixed. So, right now would be a really good time for all you KPilot users (both of them?) to come on out and help us test KPilot. We have about a week to find and fix any problems. =:/ Oh, and I also went through the open Ubuntu KPilot bugs and triaged them a bit too, which felt good.

Along those lines, I actually did get a chance to talk to a couple of KPilot users this week (both of them, I think!!) and look through some problems they were having. I spent a large chunk of time looking into a bizarre problem a Kubuntu KPilot user was having from the Kubuntu 4.2 beta2 packages. Along the way, I learned how to find the kde_plugin_version in one of our .so’s (“gdb foo.so” and then “p kde_plugin_version”), and I added some debugging that should have been there all along anyway in KPilot, so it’s not all bad. But it turns out that the Ubuntu KPilot package is missing libkpilot_akonadibase.so, and so none of the new conduits work. I’ve discussed things with Jonathon Thomas on the Ubuntu bug page and this should be fixed for the next Ubuntu KPilot packages.

Before I started testing KPilot, though, I needed to get my PIM data in order. I’ve been meaning to put my contacts and calendar into Google for a while now, and this was the perfect time to do that. So I found this neat LifeHacker page about using Dropbox and KeePass for synchronizing all your private and important information, and cleaned up my contact information and put everything that could be considered sensitive or important into KeePassX, which is REALLY nice, and I highly recommend it. Excellent functionality, good strong encryption, and a beautiful Qt4 GUI to boot. I’ve not looked into using Dropbox yet, but that’s just an added benefit. After that, it was a simple matter of wasting 3 hours trying to format my kaddressbook-exported-to-csv file into something that Google likes, pulling my hair out, finally giving up in frustration, saving my std.vcf file to a shared drive, opening it up with OS X, importing it into the Mac address book, and then using A to G to create a CSV file and then importing that into Gmail’s contacts. *sigh* What a pain in the butt!! Someone seriously needs to write a Python script for this or something. Honestly.

I also discovered, much to my chagrin, that Firefox and Konqueror both consume ungodly amounts of memory with a 16-meg web page (to the point of exhausting all of my real and virtual memory and crashing X), like the error page I was getting from our internal sandbox compile machine, but Opera handles it beautifully. So I’m using Opera again, quite happily. Oh, and since Google now allows you to customize your Gmail keybindings, I can finally get around the annoyance of “#” not working for “delete”!! I’ve set up “d” for “delete” and now my Opera/Gmail experience is glorious again. Now, if we could just get THEMES in Google Apps For Your Domain, that would be AWESOME!

And in closing, the latest Street Fighter IV videos from shoryuken.com look amazing! I’m going to have to go to GameStop today and plunk down my pre-order money.

VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free

With Customers Deriving Value from More Than 20 Products in the VMware Portfolio, Company Makes #1 Hypervisor Free

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 28, 2008 – VMware, Inc., (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced its stand-alone ESXi hypervisor will be available at no cost to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of virtualization. Since 2001, VMware has provided the industry’s most popular and reliable hypervisor, which is now used by more than 120,000 customers. In December 2007, VMware announced significant improvements with ESXi – its third-generation stand-alone hypervisor. With the industry’s smallest footprint and OS-independence, ESXi sets a new bar for security and reliability. ESXi 3.5 update 2, available today, meets the criteria for mass distribution: (1) ease of use and (2) maturity and stability now having been ‘battle tested’ for six months with customers. The leading server manufacturers have all embedded VMware ESXi, including Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, and NEC. ESXi can be downloaded now from www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

Now, speaking personally, I’ve always used VMware’s desktop virtualization products, namely Player and Workstation. In fact, looking back at my serial number history, I see that I first convinced my boss to splurge on me with a license for VMware Workstation 3.0 (for Linux systems of course) on 2/7/2002. And that’s just the first license I bought. =;) I’m really excited about the next release of VMware’s hosted products and the really cool features in them. The irony of it is that now that I have an awesome job that doesn’t require me to use Windows apps, I won’t actually need some of the cool features that are coming out and definitely won’t appreciate them as much as I would have working in my Corporate USA jobs of yesterday.

But being a geek and all, I have quite a few times wished that I could afford VMware’s enterprise hypervisor (ESX) so that I could use it at home and run several virtual machines on the physical box that I have downstairs right now, being horribly under-utilized. And now that cost is no longer an inhibiting factor, I’m already planning an upcoming geek weekend to do just that. Cool!! Oh, and before you tell me that I should just use Xen or KVM, I’ll pre-emptively answer that I’d really like to use something rock-solid, enterprise-class, and world-proven, thank you very much. Given the choice of yesterday between a costly enterprise-class VMware hypervisor and the young and comparitively unproven Xen or KVM solutions, I might have eventually given in and tried one of the free solutions. But now that VMware ESX is free, it’s pretty much a no-brainer for me to choose it over the other free solutions.

Sweet mama! Go virtualize your toaster or something!! =:D

Disclaimer: I work for VMware and have never been shy about how much I’m loving it. =;P

I am seeing the world through new eyes, truly. I am in awe. I am absolutely having the time of my life.

Maybe some of it is due to the “having been hitting one’s head against the cement wall for so long, anything else feels downright wonderful” syndrome, but I think it’s more than that. VMware actually gets Open Source. The movement, the power, the people, the world-wide community, the whole thing. For the last three days, I’ve constantly been thinking how refreshing it is to not have to fight my employer every step of the way, trying to introduce Open Source solutions, getting permission to use Linux, getting support for it, etc. I’ve been fighting that uphill corporate battle with little support and few victories for so long that I’ve not fully realized how tiring it is before just now. But here, to not only not have to fight policy, culture, etc., but to even be encouraged and supported in using Open Source and Linux… it is wonderful. Like coming home to a family that you never knew you had (see paragraph 1).

Thus far, (3 days into it, all brand-spanking new, wet behind the ears, and what-not), I’ve managed to uncover a small inconvenience in our gtk24 wrapper script that shows up when you don’t have libgtkmm installed at the system level, as I do not being that I am infinitely more comfortable using KDE with a small smattering of GTK-based apps (xchat (hi Thiago! please fix the SOCKS proxy issue so we can get app-specific settings! =;)) and pidgin mainly). So I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to poke enough at that one to be productive on my first week at work. =:)

But I digress…

Oh, by the way, San Diego (my home until 9 years ago) is on fire. Film at 11.

VMware is beyond uber-cool. Unspeakably so. I love it here.

But I am extremely excited about working for VMware!!! I’ve accepted a (totally cool) position with them as a Linux UI Engineer, and will be working on the Player team. Awesome!!! =:) Open Source && Linux && C++ && an awesome team && a company that just might actually get Open Source == 1 happy me.  I am stoked.  =:)

However, this means that my focus will be diverted from KPilot for the next few weeks, at least.  The last time we went through this transitional period 2 years ago, we ended up with KDE 3.5.5′s version of KPilot which caused no shortage of problems.  I hope that this transition period will be smoother and less disruptive.  But I can say that I will have zero time to work on getting KPilot in shape for our KDE 4.0 release, which unfortunately also coincides with Adriaan’s complete lack of time due to work and Bertjan’s lack of time due to school.  So KDE 4.0′s KPilot will ship with our new Keyring conduit and the memofile conduit working, but precious little else.  You can call this a regression, failure, disappointment, or whatever else you feel like, and believe me when I say that there is nobody more disappointed in this little turn of events than me.  I’ll also say that I would thoroughly relish any and all help that would step up and help us get the Calendar, Addressbook, and ToDo conduits ported, if nothing else, for KDE 4.0.  =:)  If you care, can code, and are willing to help, please let me know.

So, stay tuned to this channel for more updates as time goes by.  I find myself having to use my old Powerbook until I get my new work laptop (hopefully Monday!!), so I’m limited on how much I can do outside of checking e-mail, etc.  Oh, speaking of…  I believe I’ll be getting a Thinkpad T60 (yeah, I know, very unsexy, but pretty Linux friendly and decently speedy), and I’ll most likely install OpenSUSE 10.3 64-bit on it.  Anyone have any good/bad experiences with any of the afore-mentioned mixture of hardware/software?

As Bowie sang… Ch… ch… ch… ch… changes….

Strap on yer seatbelts and hang on tight….  =:)

I had a great time with you guys.  Thanks so much for your time!  I had an awesome day.  Here’s hoping we’ll be seeing more of each other!  =;)

Here’s hoping….

I really do look good in red and white, guys!! =:)

• Getting two problems (ABS light and Airbag light were both stuck on) with our new-to-us 2005 Town & Country fixed only to find another problem (2 radiator fans refused to turn off when car was turned off). Had to disconnect battery overnight to turn off fans and prevent battery drainage. Took said vehicle back into the dealer who promptly and courteously fixed it. Again.
• Finding out that the family dog (who just yesterday started limping–refusing to set any weight on her left, front paw) has Lyme disease. $200+ later and doggie is now feeling much better, apparently.
• Beating head repeatedly against same problem at work for a week now is still not yielding any noticeable results, other than in softness of head.
• Compiled 2.6.17-rc4 kernel from kernel.org in an attempt to prove that same palm-pilot-related kernel crash existed in upstream kernel. After several iterations of fun and frivolity and make-kpkg’s and reboots, discovered that it does not seem to after all, which means that the problem must lie somewhere in either 2.6.15 or in the patches that ubuntu has made to it. Yay! This is, I think, the last major show-stopper from me being able to run Linux on my powerbook. About the only large annoyance now is the lack of Flash. Oh–I’ve decided that manually downloading QIF files and importing them into MoneyDance whenever I need to balance the checkbook is not such a horrible thing (refer to earlier post about MoneyDance, IBM’s PowerPC Java, and the inability to do OFX transactions).
• Started listening to Switchfoot’s Nothing is Sound CD. It’s pretty good. I think my favorite song thus far is the simultaneously deep and also infectiously make-you-want-to-scream-at-the-top-of-your-lungs-too track, “Stars”. I will say this, though, and I mean no disrespect to Switchfoot, nor do I know anything of their contractual obligations or personal lives…. But this CD seems on an initial listen to be less hope/God-focused than their previous CD, The Beautiful Letdown, which was REALLY, REALLY good. I’ll not say much more because I’ve honestly not listened too closely, nor have I dug up the lyrics from the new CD yet. But I do hope that the Switchfoot guys are still as focused and passionate about God as they were in previous years. I also sincerely hope that their record label hasn’t pressured them into producing a more commercially-palpable product for the sake of being more commercially-palpable. It is a good CD, though, and I do like it. Here’s to you, Switchfoot, my home (town) boys. =:)
• Finally watched Jet Li’s latest film, Unleashed, and I was REALLY impressed! It was very artfully done, all around. I mean, it had the bad language that my TV-G couldn’t seem to filter out (no closed captioning on the DVD??), but other than that, I think it was a pretty good movie. It was certainly the best all-around martial arts movie I think I’ve ever seen. Morgan Freeman was (as always) excellent in it. His father figure role provided stability, peace, and focus for the entire film. Without him, I don’t think the film could have gone the distance. And Jet Li took some very brave steps in this film to try to grow in his abilities as an actor, and he pulled it off fairly well! I swear, Jet Li is the best martial artist that I have ever seen on film. I know I’m committing heresy here, but I would put my money on him over Bruce Lee (duck), Jackie Chan (sorry Jackie baybee!!!), Steven Segal (pfaw, yeah, like that’s even a challenge), Jean-Claude van Damme in his prime (*twitch*), and anyone else I’ve ever seen (hmmmm, David Carradine???). So, go put the kids to bed early, rent Unleashed, and enjoy some kick-butt fight scenes, a really touching story, some seriously M.Night-esque tense scenes (Victoria taking off his collar, anyone??), and the absolutely best close-combat fight sequence that I’ve ever seen.

Yay, me!

Two things I’ve found this morning that have helped my noggin’ and I’ll list them here for future reference for myself as well as in hopes of helping some other poor concrete/geek/proverbial/noggin’-banging soul.

First, I’ve found this post which lists a very helpful step-by-step approach for getting things almost working:

OK, here is how Mozilla/Thunderbird LDAP works with Exchange 2000-2003:

1. The default LDAP port for Active Directory is 3268 (not 389) so make sure you’ve got this port open thru the firewall, and make sure to configure it in your LDAP account settings in Mozilla/Thunderbird.

2. For Base DN, you MUST enter something like dc=yourdomain,dc=com (whereas Outlook Express lets you get away with putting NULL).

3. For Bind DN, you must enter a domain user which has permission to search the directory. You should enter it qualified by the NetBIOS domain name, for example: mydomain\username

4. For some reason, Thunderbird doesn’t always seem to recognize that it needs to log on before querying. The easiest, most reliable way I have found to force it is to go to the Offline tab in the Directory Server Properties and click the Download button. This function seems to “see” that Active Directory wants a logon, so Thunderbird will display the logon dialog to let you enter your domain credentials. For the username, specify exactly the same thing you put into Bind DN.

5. Results are returned asynchronously to the Thunderbird Address Book, so you might see “No matches found” immediately after clicking the Search button. Wait a few seconds, and your results should show up.

6. Mozilla and Thunderbird default to a Search Filter of (objectclass=*) which will return lots of useless (non-email address) entries from Active Directory. You can override this with something like (objectclass=person) on the Advanced tab of Directory Service Properties. Depending on what kinds of addresses are in your Active Directory, you may need to refine this filter more (for example, if you’ve got mail-enabled Public Folders which you want to display).

7. The Address Book UI in Thunderbird is just clumsy. You CANNOT search an LDAP directory by simply selecting it on the left hand side and then entering your search in the “Name or Email contains” textbox. You MUST click the Advanced button to define an LDAP search. After you find your desired address(es) in LDAP, you “should” be able to copy it to your local addresses but the stupid UI only lets you look at the Properties or add it to the recipient list for a new message (by clicking the Write button).

And then there’s this page that helped me finally get it all working:

You can add a new address book with the following properties:

General tab:

Name: …
Hostname:
Base DN: dc=company,dc=com
Port number: 389 (non-secure) or 636 (secure)
Bind DN: YOURWINDOWSLOGONDOMAIN\yourwindowslogonuser

Advanced tab:

Don’t return more than [ 100 ] results
Scope: Subtree
Search filter: (objectClass=person)

If your organisation is large you may have to change the Bind DN so it only returns your unit (e.g. ou=yourdept,dc=company,dc=com) as otherwise Thunderbird may decide to act a bit strange.

You can force a read by clicking the Download Now button on Offline tab, although you won’t see any contacts afterwards, you have to search in the Compose window.

If you still get no joy you can download and install Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Support Tools and run ldp.exe against the exchange server. You don’t even need to install it if you decompress with WinRAR (or possibly WinZip) and look for the executable.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892777

That way you can find out the Bind DN and search filter. First use Connection > Connect against the server, then Connection > Bind with your user and password then use View > Tree with a blank string and you can find a tree view of your Base DN and go into departments and retrieve user data to find out their objectClass if it’s not person.

Finally in Tools > Options > Composition > Addressing tick Automatically add outgoing e-mail address to my [ Collected Addresses ] as it’s much faster than searching the server.

Granted, these are instructional in getting Thunderbird to work with Exchange, but the same applies to KDE’s kaddressbook.

In general, I think the sticky wicket that really got things working for me was using Microsoft’s ldp.exe tool to browse the Exchange LDAP tree and see its innards. Specifically, I had to do this:

server: [active directory server]
base dn: CN=Users,DC=XXX,DC=XXX,DC=com (important to start with Users for me!!)
port: 389
bind dn: [windows domain]\[username]
search filter: (objectclass=*)
scope: subtree

The trick was, I think, that I had to provide a more specific base dn to the address books.

Hope this helps someone else out there, wherever your geeky proverbial concrete-bashing noggin’ may find you. =:)

Anyway, in using cvs2svn to convert my existing CVS repositories, I faced a problem that was covered in cvs2svn’s FAQ:

How can I convert project foo so that trunk/tags/branches are inside of foo?

Given a CVS repository with the layout:
/project_a
/project_b

cvs2svn will produce a Subversion repository with the following layout:
trunk/
project_a/
…
project_b/
…
tags/
…
branches/
…

However, you may want your Subversion repository to be laid out like this:
project_a/
trunk/
…
branches/
…
tags/
…
project_b/
trunk/
…
branches/
…
tags/
…

Currently, cvs2svn does not support converting a repository in this manner (see Issue #86 for details), however, there is a workaround. You can convert your repository one project (or module) at a time and load the individual dumpfiles into your Subversion repository using svnadmin with the –parent-dir switch. See the answer to How can I convert my CVS repository one module at a time? for details.

However, what I couldn’t find was a script that would help me do this (of course, there’s most probably one out “there” somewhere, but I didn’t honestly have time to look that hard). So I created one and here it is:

#!/bin/bash

. ~/.profile.common

OLDCVSROOT=/home/cvsroot/blah
NEWSVNROOT=/home/svnroot/blah

CVS2SVNDIR=${HOME}/builds/cvs2svn-1.3.0

TMPCVSROOT=$(pwd)/tmpcvsroot
TMPWORKDIR=$(pwd)/tmpdir
TMPSVNDUMP=$(pwd)/tmpsvndumps

mkdir ${TMPCVSROOT}
mkdir ${TMPWORKDIR}
mkdir ${TMPSVNDUMP}

STARTDIR=$(pwd)

# create svn repository
# (commented out because this should be done before this process starts)
#svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs ${NEWSVNROOT}

for module in $(ls -1 --color=never ${OLDCVSROOT}| grep -v CVSROOT) ; do
module=$(basename $module)
echo "now working on module->$module< -"

# copy one module at a time (don't work on original repository)
mkdir ${TMPCVSROOT}/$module-root/
cp -r ${OLDCVSROOT}/CVSROOT ${TMPCVSROOT}/$module-root/
cp -r ${OLDCVSROOT}/$module   ${TMPCVSROOT}/$module-root/

# create an svn dump file from the copied CVS modulesitory/module
cd ${CVS2SVNDIR}
./cvs2svn -q --tmpdir=${TMPWORKDIR} --dump-only --dumpfile=${TMPSVNDUMP}/$module.dump ${TMPCVSROOT}/$module-root/$module
cd ${STARTDIR}

# create the parent directory in svn...
svn mkdir file://${NEWSVNROOT}/$module -m "Added $module directory."

# now load the dump into svn
svnadmin -q --parent-dir=$module load ${NEWSVNROOT} < ${TMPSVNDUMP}/$module.dump
done