The Geekette Speaketh

Sometime last year I received snail mail stating that I had recently won in a raffle. I was quite surprised by the news since I hardly remember entering any contest. Nonetheless, the letter was real and after a month of waiting, I finally got the word to pick up my prize: a new 10.1-inch netbook. It's a far cry from the former 8.1-inch netbook that was loaned to me by my best friend. Finally I have a more decent travel gadget in the form of an Intel Atom processor with 2 GB of memory and 160 GB of hard drive space. The bigger footprint made typing easier. I also started experiencing problems with my touchpad.

There are a lot of online storage providers nowadays.  All of them taking advantage of cloud computing.  I first started off with Dropbox and I've yet to try out Box.net.  Sometime in May 2009 I signed up for yet another online storage provider.  Ubuntu One is similar to dropbox. It offers free 2GB of space just like Dropbox.  They also offer a paid plan of 20GB for a monthly fee of US$10.  A tad more pricey than Dropbox's 50GB for US$9.99/month.  So, why pay more for the same thing?  Well, it isn't the same thing.

I have two web cameras. One is a Logitech Quickcam Messenger which I bought a few years back. I had lost the drivers to this webcam and I was never able to use it again. So when the time came when I needed to use a webcam, I ended up buying a cheap webcam from a local low-cost gadget store. Take note, these events happened when I was still using MS Windows.

Fast forward to today. I'm planning to join a website for technology freelancers and realized I needed a webcam. I unearth my two webcams and begin my attempt to get either of them to work under Linux.

The problem with my current laptop is most likely the fan. Recently, when the weather here gets really hot the laptop would just suddenly shutdown. On MS Windows, this "sudden death" happens under 3 minutes. In Ubuntu, it happens in 30 minutes. Still, it doesn't leave me happy.

I decided that if it ever shuts down again on me, I'd continue my writing using my netbook. Eventually, the laptop overheats and I take out the netbook. I then find out that even my netbook had a slight problem.

Recently I received an email from the community manager of Box.Net. He wanted to talk to me about their product.  I didn't know how he came upon my blog and why he decided to contact me to talk about Box.Net.  Perhaps it was because of my recent post about DropBox.  Nevertheless, I thought it would be great to know more about his product.

But this post isn't about that interview. Actually it's about the challenges I went through in preparation for the interview.  You see, the community manager wanted us to talk about their product.  By talk I would think he wanted to contact me via Skype.  And that's when my interesting journey started.

When I first talked about OpenCards, I was still using OpenOffice.org on my MS Windows XP partition. But on moving to Ubuntu, I was puzzled as to why I couldn't install the extension, or most any OpenOffice.org extension, at all. Turns out it has everything to do with making OpenOffice.org "see" the Java runtime.

For those who have had trouble with their ATI Graphics Card on Ubuntu, you might actually have hope now in Hardy Heron!

From the old TGS site

This was way back when I was still playing around with an Ubuntu machine. I haven't had the luxury of installing ubuntu again on my laptop since most of the freeware I needed is on Windows XP. Nevertheless, I'm still able to play around with linux on my virtual private server.