But I haven't left for CUSEC yet, so I figured I'd give a little update into my feats (and defeats) as a software engineering student, web developer, hobbyest photographer and amateur graphic artist.

My Dilemma with Operating Systems

Windows is Required

In May of 2010, I had to purchase a new laptop for web development freelancing. I was contracted by eCenter Research to work on their proprietary web software, so I required a larger screen and faster hardware. I chose the ASUS K72Jr for its price and performance, knowing I could dual-boot Ubuntu along side the factory install of Windows 7.

By this time, my entire family and my friends knew me as "The Ubuntu Guy" and were mildly shocked when I kept Windows 7 on my machine. I had been using Ubuntu since Warty Warthog 4.10 and as my main operating system since Dapper Drake 6.06. I figured it was time to stop hating other operating systems, especially since no one operating system is perfect and can suit everyone's needs.

With the new laptop, I used Windows from time to time to play some games with my friends, but found gaming on my laptop awkward and expensive to upkeep -- buying new hardware and games every couple months is too expensive. So in October 2011, after a long hiatus of gaming, I purchased a PS3.

At eCenter Research, I was required to use GoToMeeting, which forced me to use Windows. I would reboot into Ubuntu soon after those morning meetings.

When it came to freelancing, I found myself going in to Windows every so often to use Photoshop. I had Photoshop CS2 running through Wine, but due to the glitchiness of the window handling, including the fact that designers were sending me CS4 or CS5 PSD files, meant I had to use Windows to use Photoshop CS5.

I tried splicing the PSD, exporting the PNGs and JPGs I required and rebooting into Ubuntu to use my favourite text editor, gEdit. However, while working at Whatever Media, I found myself using Windows more and more for work related purposes. Yes, this means I now had to use Windows for Photoshop CS5 and Office 2010. What's a working man to do?

 Apple Makes an Entrance

In the summer of 2011, I purchased an Android phone. Knowing a lot about the underpinnings of Android and watch the Android market boom, I figured it was finally time to jump in. So I purchased an inexpensive LG P500h.

Unfortunately, it was the most frustrating experience of my mobile-phone-owning life and I knew immediately I made the wrong choice. Not that Android is a bad mobile operating system at all, but the hardware LG chose to use made the phone lag even when I was unlocking it. Yikes!

Well in October, my girlfriend, who owned an iPhone 4 for over a year, wanted an iPad for homework and entertainment purposes. Knowing I would use it every so often, we split the cost. 5 months later, we are still using it every day.

Seeing this software in action, from its ease-of-use, to slick display, to new and exciting software, I knew Apple was doing something right. By this time, they were the most valued company in the world, so maybe I was coming to that realization a little late. Truthfully though, I've always loved Macs. I used them as a kid in school, I used them in high school for video editing and even for graphic design when I co-oped for BrandHealth.

Getting sick of my cheap LG phone, I bought an iPhone 4S. No lag, slick animations, never crashes, long battery life, incredible apps, slick camera and records video in 1080p HD. I couldn't believe this fit in my pocket.

Being an amateur photographer and using Adobe Lightroom, I need to have a monitor that displays incredible colour parity to how a photo will print and how it will look to others as a digital medium. I've been using a standard resolution (1280 x 1024) 19" Dell 1905FP since 2005 and it has handled my workload very well, but it has some issues with greys and I found I was often crushing my blacks. Having a need of incredible colour correctness on my screen, getting a Mac was a no brainer. Whatever Media values me as an important employee to their organization, so as of January 2012, I now use a 15" MacBook Pro.

Ubuntu Has Not Been Lost

I still use Ubuntu as a server where ever and when ever I can. I am running an Ubuntu virtual machine on my Mac, just for LAMP. I run an Ubuntu server in my basement for backups and hosting files. I've set up Ubuntu servers at other companies and still support it on my friends' and family's laptops. I haven't lost faith in Ubuntu, but for digital work, it just does not compare with the software available to Mac and Windows.

I know, of course, that this isn't Ubuntu's fault. I hope Ubuntu and Linux in general doesn't stay allergic to proprietary software and come up with a solution, like the Ubuntu Software Manager, for Adobe and others to deploy their software. Users that are all about FOSS can ignore the availability, while people such as myself can use an open-source and secure operating system while using the programs I require for work.

What do you think?

Background

As a Web Developer and Computer Scientist, I’ve had to deal with research on both web browsers and operating systems and how each piece of software deals with hardware (memory, hard drives, processors, etc.), users, security and the interaction between all three. What has only been a recent development, with the invention of smartphones (iPhone, BlackBerry, Google Android), tablets (Apple iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook) and netbooks (more compact versions of Windows and Linux), is the merger of the web and operating systems.

Internet in its infancy

Computer research exploded during World War II when we needed faster ways to calculate artillery trajectories and later, a way to exploit the German message-encrypting machine called The Enigma.

Later, but before the Internet was invented and exploited by the public en masse, operating systems handled many scientific and business operations, such as intensive mathematical computations, spreadsheets, accounting ledgers and maybe the occasional game.

When the Internet was in its infancy, it was still used for manly scientific purposes – researchers sharing scientific documents – but it didn’t take long for companies and organizations to setup homepages for their businesses with contact information, store hours and store locations.

By the mid-to-late 90s, websites began to display and work with relevant information of user’s interest, including news websites and online stores. Think CNN, BBC, Amazon, eBay, Google and so on.

The Internet today

By the mid-2000s, smartphones such as the BlackBerry and iPhone began to take foot and now, in 2011, are the main source of communication between individuals in the Western World. We text, e-mail, check Facebook, write Tweets and catch up on the latest news, all from this little magic box attached to our hip. But have you ever encountered a data-outage where you can no longer use these services? Many people feel lost without their smartphone, especially when its Internet capabilities are disabled. It’s how we keep connected.

Enter Google, Chrome & Chrome OS

Google entered the web browser war in late-2008, against Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Opera by releasing Google Chrome. Many people wondered why the world needed yet-another-browser, but little did they realize the importance of such a development. Google postulated that in the next few years, the majority of citizens in first-world countries will completely rely on the Internet for day-to-day operations. Google is a web firm, with their income entirely based on the web through their online search engine, online advertising, e-mail (Gmail), office suite (Google Docs) and so on, so why wouldn’t a company that relies entirely on the Internet, create a program to view and explore the Internet, the way they want?

Google is now going one step further and releasing their own operating system based on Google Chrome, called Google Chrome OS. As you may have noticed, operating systems have slowly been merging with the Web for some time. Although researched since the mid-90s and before, Google is the first major corporation to put their money on the further integration of the two and to start selling devices based on their software.

Will Google Chrome OS do everything I need?

You are probably already using a device that is heavily reliant on the Internet, such as your smartphone, tablet or workstation at work. However, your workstation at work probably has a lot of other important applications other than your web browser, such as Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Quicken and so on. So what good is an operating system that is only a web browser?

Well, did you know that most of those applications now run on the web? Adobe Photoshop has been replicated to a great deal of accuracy through a website called Pixlr, there are online applications that mirror Microsoft Office like Google Docs (with many others following suit), and Quicken has been emulated by your bank (CIBC, Scotiabank, BMO, etc.) and third-party websites such as Mint.com.

So, not only will you be able to use all the same applications you’ve been using since the 1990s, the data you work with will be saved by these third-party websites, so if your laptop gets lost or stolen, none of your data will be lost and will in fact be safe from unwarranted parties so long as they don’t know your password. Even further, Google has a sync program that will allow all your bookmarks, extensions, themes and data to be synced across all your computers, so long as you’re using Google Chrome. So you can have Google Chrome on your home and work PC (running Windows, Mac or Linux), on your phone or on your tablet and your experience on one computer will be the same as any other computer or device you use.

No lost data and seamless integration across your devices. Sounds pretty good to me.

The future

With technologies such as HTML5 bringing patent-free video to our fingertips (which means streaming Netflix for Canadians) and the integration of OpenGL-3D for 3D data display (think engineering, computer animation and 3D video games), there’s no telling where the Web will go. One thing is for certain and that is our reliance on the Web will not be lessened by this evolution, but rather tightened, hopefully making a less painless computing experience for everyone.

If you have a table in OpenOffice.org Word Processor and want to delete the table with out deleting the data,

select Table > Convert > Table to Text...,

then select whether you have the data spaced out by tabs, semicolons, paragraphs or other (if you're not sure, keep the default),

and viola! You have removed the table without sacrificing your data.

Hope this helps!

• Fixed a mistake on the Home page so that 6 slides show instead of the first 4
• Added two new photos to the Design page
• Updated the photo of me on the About Me page
• Attempted to use @font-face property to added the Ubuntu font for those who do not have it installed

Take a look!

A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options.

I for one, would HATE to see Adobe be purchased by Microsoft (and so would Google) as Flash is used by 98% of the World's desktop users and I'm positive they would eventually drop Linux support and integrate with SilverLight. And let's not even bring up Photoshop and how the chances of it being ported to Linux will be zero.

I suggest you read the article as it's important to the future of the desktop.

• Added profile for TrentBookSwap.com, a book swapping website made for my University
• Added TrentBookSwap.com and YourHealthCheck.org to the homepage
• Removed the older FlyingColourCorp profile
• For Ubuntu users, it uses the new 'Ubuntu' font-face. Backup is 'Droid Sans' followed by 'Tahoma'. The font-face was previously 'Helvetica Neue', which I'm sure not a lot of people own
• Updated logo slighty
• Updated the 'About Me' page with a new desktop photo, updated text and updated 'Recommended' links
• Added my github link to Ubuntu Assistant and rsync over ssh

Next up? Redesign!

Novacut is a project aimed to create a multi-source, multi-user, distributed video editor. That means that multiple people can edit a project (television show, movie, independent film) and do so from multiple sources of input (multiple cameras, microphones, graphics, voice clips, sound effects, etc.) They also plan on making a community for video artists where they will publish their content under creative commons licenses.

They plan on using open source tools, such as CouchDB, GStreamer, Git, GTK+, Python and WebKit, while creating their own distributed media library, all while being compliant to the GNOME desktop and therefore available in the Ubuntu desktop. All this means is that Novacut will standing on the shoulders of giants and will thus able to produce an amazing video editor in a shorter amount of time.

Why is This Project Important?

This project, to me, is important because it will bring a TV-quality editing suite to the Linux platform. Not only that, but because multiple people can edit a project at one time, using multiple video sources, work flow will be a breeze for many professionally produced television shows and films.

But what About OpenShot and PiTiVi?

OpenShot and PiTiVi are new video editors for the Linux desktop. OpenShot is a fairly new program developed by Jonathan Thomas which uses the MLT framework. The makers of PiTiVi are Collabora, a company from the UK who have put a lot of time and effort into the development of the GStreamer Multimedia Framework, which Novacut will be using. Thus, although Novacut and PiTiVi are not be related, they will be built upon the same framework. OpenShot and PiTiVi both have their place in the world of video editors for Linux - as just two years ago, the choice of non-linear video editors in Linux was slim - but they represent the at-home user and are not intended (although may be used by) professional video editors and projects.

Why Did I Donate?

I love film. I may be a web developer and currently studying as a computer science undergrad, but I love watching everything from zero-budget stop-motion independent films, to epic Oscar-award winning films that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I've joined a local film society at my school and enjoy watching foreign films such as The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vivre Se Vie and tomorrow night, Floating Weeds.

I have a small background in television, helping to produce local hockey and lacrosse games for TVCogeco for over 2 years and did everything from graphics, instant replay, camera and sound. I have also been an avid video editor, where the first website I ever made was based around strong-man feats that my friend performed and recently memorial videos and other sporting events.

My friends and I have also thrown around script ideas and will be looking to produce a small, independent film by Summer 2011.

Plus, for donating $200, I will "get the producer credit in one of our test-pilot episodes." Helping the future of an exciting Linux-based project and helping to produce a pilot episode? Sounds pretty exciting to me.

But Wait, You Don't Have Money

It's true. I am a student and donated this money from my student loan, which will further force me to get a job while I attend full-time university. I tried to get sponsorship to go to UDS-N from Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, but they rejected my request (which is really too bad because it falls on my reading break, which means I would have been able to go without missing school). The Novacut team will be flying to Florida for UDS-N, so my $200 donation will go towards helping them meet fellow programmers and gather excitement around the Novacut project.

Finally...

You can read more about the Novacut project from their website, their blog and a one-on-one interview by my friends at OMG! Ubuntu!.

I urge you to help out with the Novacut project by donating to their cause or by helping them out with your programming skills.

My 1.5 TB external was hooked up to my Dell Mini 9 netbook and used as a media server as I found it far too small (dimensions-wise) to be used for programming or school. Since the old external was already attached, I threw on the new external, formatted it to ext4 using gparted and started transferring the data.

Here's the command I used:
sudo rsync -avrz /media/external/ /media/external_/

D'oh! Can anyone catch what I did?

My Dell Mini 9, equipped with a less-than-powerful Intel Atom N270 was gobbled up by the command, almost making the netbook unusable.

You see, I'm used to using the tar command tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz which extracts an archive of files.

For tar, '-z' means

-z, --gzip, --gunzip --ungzip

meaning that the file is compressed with gzip.

For rsync however, '-z' means

-z, --compress compress file data during the transfer

Yikes! My little Intel Atom N270 was trying to compress all my files before transferring them! Not good nor efficient for local transfer.

If you're transferring MB or GB of data over a network (and have the time and CPU power to compress files), then by all means, use the '-z' with rsync. But don't use the '-z' flag when copying data from one local hard drive to another, especially when using a netbook. That's reserved for people by the name of Brett Alton.

So i switched the transfer over to my new latop, sporting a Core i5 430m, transferring 1.5 TB of data without sweating

Here is the suggested command to use (changing the path names of course):
sudo rsync -av /media/external/ /media/external_/

Good luck!

Run the following in the terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/wacom-plus
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wacom-dkms xf86-input-wacom

Then reboot.

Don’t forget to register your tablet at the Wacom website, because you can specify Linux as your operating system. We might get even better support if a lot of people do this.

Good luck!

I recently purchased a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch for my girlfriend's birthday so she can transition her artwork from pen to vector.

Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch

I plugged the device in hoping it would be plug & play but unfortunately it wasn't. I found a post by Frank Groeneveld which compiles newer Wacom support, critical for the product to work in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

As of this writing, his post is more than four months old and two newer releases of the driver have been posted, so I decided to update his script and post it for others.

sudo apt-get install build-essential libx11-dev libxi-dev x11proto-input-dev xserver-xorg-dev tk8.4-dev tcl8.4-dev libncurses5-dev; wget http://iweb.dl.sourceforge.net/project/linuxwacom/linuxwacom/0.8.8-8/linuxwacom-0.8.8-8.tar.bz2; tar -xf linuxwacom-0.8.8-8.tar.bz2; cd linuxwacom-*; ./configure --enable-wacom; make; sudo cp wacom.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/input/tablet/; sudo rmmod wacom; sudo modprobe wacom; echo "modprobe" | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

You should be able to copy and paste the code above and it will install necessary software needed to compile the new driver, download and compile the new driver and enable the driver automatically for use immediately and after reboot.

I tested this script on my ASUS K72JR and my girlfriend's HP Pavilion 6000. If successful, your Wacom tablet should be able accept pen, touch (or combined if available) input.

As Frank states, "don’t forget to register your tablet at the Wacom website, because you can specify Linux as your operating system. We might get even better support if a lot of people do this."

Good luck!