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Welcome To Brettle Development
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Here at Brettle Development, I'm interested in several kinds of development. First and foremost, as a homemaker and father to 2 young children, I'm interested in child development. Second, since I don't have a traditional job, I have the luxury of spending a fair amount of time on my own personal development. This includes, everything from staying healthy, to financial planning, to becoming a better husband and father. Third, I'm interested in software development, particularly open source software development.
This site contains information related to all 3 kinds of development. I add to the site on a very ad-hoc basis and welcome feedback and additional content from others. If you're interested in contributing, please register. |
I just spent most of the last week revisiting ways to fund the development of free software, which is something I've thought about off and on for years. If you're curious what I've come up with, see my new article on funding free software.
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I bought a Gateway MT6916 notebook at Circuit City yesterday and I've been working getting Fedora 8 to run on it. Here are my notes so far:
Because of the layout of Vista on the hard drive, Vista won't shrink the main partition to give up more than about 40GB even after disabling system restore, the page file, and hibernation. Supposedly you can use a proprietary tool (go through a very risky procedure with gparted) to shrink the partition. I decided to just reinstall Vista onto a smaller partition using the installation DVD that came with the laptop. I needed to install the webcam driver/app from the website and some of the other bundled software might be missing but I didn't need it.
After installing Fedora 8, I made the following tweaks:
- After logging into X, from the commandline I ran "xrandr --output TV --off". Without that, X would hang whenever I clicked "Lock Screen" or left the machine unattended for a few minutes. To avoid doing that every time I login, I added that line near the top of /etc/gdm/Init/Default.
- Made the wireless network connection not start on boot because I have a WPA network. System > Administration > Network > wlan0 > Edit > uncheck "Activate device when computer starts".
- Enabled and started the NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher services via System > Administration > Services. Without that, it couldn't connect to the wireless network. With that, I get prompted for the WPA password. I also get prompted for a password to add something to a keyring, but I click "Deny" on that dialog and I still get connected to the network after a few seconds.
- To get the webcam working in Ekiga, I built and installed the uvcvideo kernel module. Unfortunately Cheese (and gstreamer-properties) can't access the webcam, probably because the driver currently only supports mmap() access, not read() access. Note: Ekiga currently crashes when I try to make a call but that seems to be audio related.
Sound output works. Recording from the microphone doesn't seem to work by default, but I haven't looked into why yet.
I have suspended and resumed successfully a couple times, but it seems like I need to switch to a text virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-F1) and back to X (Alt-F7) after resuming in order to see anything. If I don't do that the display is so dim, it looks like it is off.
I haven't played with hibernation yet.
I'll update this blog entry as I have more info. If you have any tips or tricks related to this laptop, email me (dean at brettle dot com) and I'll probably add them to this blog post. Eventually, I'll try to put together a full report for Linux on Laptops.
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A lot has changed since my last post... Jennifer has accepted a position with Genentech and as a result we've moved to the San Francisco area. We put our old house on the market in early-December and haven't received an offer yet. Hopefully things will pick up now that the holidays are over. Getting the house ready to sell and moving has kept us very busy for past few months.
We have a bunch of boxes in our temporary apartment in San Mateo that still aren't unpacked. I figure we'll finish unpacking just in time to repack and move to a more permanent location. We haven't decided on a permanent rental yet, but we weren't planning to look very hard until next month. The big news at the moment is that I've decided to use the time we are in temporary housing to experiment with homeschooling Julia. I've enrolled her in the California Virtual Academy @ San Mateo (a public charter school for homeschoolers) and we've been homeschooling for almost 2 weeks.
It seems to be going OK so far but I'm withholding final judgement until we've been doing it for at least a month or two. Several things are a bit abnormal about these first couple weeks. First there is the normal learning curve you'd expect with something new. Second, we've been working on finding Julia's level. She placed into 1st Grade second semester for Math, and 1st grade first semester for phonics/language arts. However, most of the first semester phonics/language arts lessons have been things she already knows, and I'm intentionally doing some of the 1st grade first semester math lessons because they require her to know how to spell 1-12 and she only knows how to write them in Chinese. :-) Third, we don't yet have the materials the school provides and we haven't been contacted by the teacher that we are suppose to meet with regularly -- that should change next week, but in the meantime I'm sort of winging it...
One of the major upsides to homeschooling is the flexible schedule and location. We've spent the past week in southern California with Jennifer's parents, and have been homeschooling here. Yesterday, we went to the Knott's Berry Farm theme park for the day and just did a little school in the car on the way there and back. Since all the other kids were in school there were no lines at all. Can't beat that!
We all miss our old friends, our old neighborhood, and our old house, but we've been so busy lately that we haven't had much of a chance to dwell on it.
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Yesterday was Julia's first day of kindergarten and Joshua's first day of preschool. After breakfast, Julia and I dropped Josh off at preschool where, as expected, he had absolutely no problems separating. Next, we drove home and walked to her bus stop, arriving only a couple minutes before the bus. She got on the bus without even a hint of hesitation ("Bye daddy!") and I walked home. Alone. Within seconds I felt like I'd forgotten something - my hands were literally twitching. I knew it was just that I wasn't use to walking around during the day without holding someone's hand or pushing a stroller, but it was a pretty powerful feeling. My eyes got a little wet but I managed not to cry... When I got home I grabbed my basketball and ran up to the basketball courts to shoot hoops for 30 minutes. It was the first time I'd gotten any sort of aerobic exercise in at least a couple years, and boy am I sore today!
When I picked up Josh at school just before lunch, his teacher said he hadn't cried at all. He didn't particularly want to leave either, mostly because his teachers had just given him a handful of crackers...
Later in the afternoon, we went to wait for Julia at the bus stop. We ended up waiting for 35 minutes. Luckily it was a relatively nice day. Julia said she didn't have any problems during the day but she was pretty negative about the whole experience ("It was boring", "They just talked about the rules"). By dinnertime though she was much more upbeat. She enjoyed telling us about the detailed logistics of things like eating lunch and going to the bathroom. She'd also liked some of the games they'd played in the afternoon during Chinese immersion.
Today she said school was a little better and that she thinks it will be even better the day after tomorrow.
All in all, the transition seems to be going fine.
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If you're like me and haven't gotten around to installing a news aggregator (or just don't read enough blogs to care), you can do what I do and use RssFwd to have new blog entries sent to your inbox. I've been using it for several months now and have been very happy with it. It's free and I haven't noticed any significant increase in the amount of spam I get so their service gets high marks. There are other similar services out there, but this is the only one I've tried so it is the only one I'm willing to recommend.
If you're interested, you can subscribe to this blog. Just follow the link and enter your email address when prompted.
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Last Thursday evening we went to the playground at Lakelands Park for the first time. It's a very nice playground with both a small and large jungle gym. As usual, Joshua (now 2 years old) decided to follow his big sister and climb on the large jungle gym. Specifically, he decided to climb a slanted metal ladder up to a 9 foot high platform. When I realized what he was doing, I did my best to spot him. When he was at the top, I couldn't even touch him, so all I could do was hope to catch him. He's been climbing ladders for several months now, but the sheer height had me very worried. When he made it to the top, I breathed a sigh of relief. A couple seconds later, Jennifer came over and said that he'd done it twice earlier while she'd been watching him. Right about then I noticed Joshua trying to start climbing down inside a metal tube ladder that went from a hole in the platform straight down to the ground. As I walked over to spot him, he missed the highest rung and fell 7 feet onto the wood chips below, hitting a few rungs on the way down for good measure! I let out an involuntary scream and ran over to the crying heap at the bottom of the ladder. He was very scared and upset but, amazingly, not injured at all -- not even a scratch or bruise! After a few minutes of comforting, he wanted to go climb the ladder again. We redirected him to the smaller jungle gym for the remainder of the evening. 
What about the broken bone mentioned in the title of this entry? Well, that would be Julia's left arm. She broke it on Saturday playing in the tot lot behind our house after her 5th birthday party. She jumped off a 3 foot high platform (a very tame stunt by any standard) and hit her elbow on a plastic slide on the way down. She was in a lot of pain when she tried to move it, so Jennifer took her to the ER. They X-rayed it and found a fracture at the bottom of her humerus (a.k.a. her elbow). She got a temporary splint for the remainder of the weekend and today she got a cast. The orthopedist said she's lucky. Most of the time they have to operate on fractures in that location but since the bone hadn't moved significantly, she just needed to wear a cast for the next 3 weeks. She finds the cast a little annoying but really likes the idea of people signing it.
It seems like there should be a lesson here, but I'm not sure what it is. Perhaps it's just an illustration of the limited effect parents can have on their kids' safety. In the end, chance has a huge effect. Next time, I probably won't let Josh climb such a tall ladder (if only for my own sanity), but I'll still let Julia jump off something 3 feet tall.
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I recently came across a couple things on the net that really made me laugh. First, there was The Best of Clementine site which has an MP3 of the Clementine lyrics being sung to the tune of various famous songs by a very good impersonator. Second, for anyone who knows what hexadecimal is, I read a post at The Daily WTF that made me laugh out loud. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did...
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I know the point of Labor Day weekend is to relax, but we decided to spend it working around the house, and found it both productive and enjoyable. We spent Saturday and Sunday painting Julia's room and Monday putting up a screen door. Our neighbors Don and Marilyn were a big help. They watched the kids on Sunday and yesterday Don helped me put up the door. What great neighbors!
Here's a picture of Julia's newly painted room.
Yes, that's 3 colors, plus a border...
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It has been only 1 week since I released NeatUpload 1.0, but it has been a busy one. I've finished my "marketing blitz", seen over 175 downloads, and received my first few bug reports (and released fixes for them). I've also responded to a handful of feature requests and received lots of praise for NeatUpload and the support I'm providing. It has all been very gratifying. I'm looking forward to continuing my work on NeatUpload and other open source projects.
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I just uploaded a home video covering our adventures during the month of August, including not one, but two trips to Port Discovery children's museum in Baltimore. Needless to say, I highly recommended the museum. Registered users can find the video on the Videos page.
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