++day

as the week goes by things keep getting better. first a fellow by the name of johan stepped me through the rather simple process of getting the card reader on my laptop to work. while it didn't work out of the box, all i had to do was:

aseigo@freedom:~$ lspci | grep SD
0000:06:04.4 0805: Texas Instruments PCI6411, PCI6421, PCI6611, PCI6621, PCI7411, PCI7421, PCI7611, PCI7621 Secure Digital (SD) Controller
aseigo@freedom:~$ setpci -s 06:04.3 4c=22

and voila! card reader works. i put the setpci command in /etc/rc.local and the world is good. or at least better. thanks johan! you rock =)

i also noticed that the trackpad on this machine has a scroll strip on the right side of it; so if i run my finger up or down the right edge of the trackpad it scrolls the window like a scroll mouse. huzzah!

i have kde4 up and going on the machine as well. so i took the opportunity to port kdebase to trunk/kdelibs. got to write my first bit of phonon code in the process. i also met with the kbfx team regarding bringing their efforts into kde4. they are a dedicated group of people with an eye for pretty things and the commitment to make the code match that. it'll be interesting to see what exactly comes from their minds and hands as they work closer with the main project and bring on additional usability expertise. i'm excited, in any case =)

tomorrow i'm attending and speaking at the calgary linuxfest which should be a lot of fun. finally, a linux event in my own backyard! though it will feel a bit odd not driving to the airport before walking through the doors ;)

it'll almost certainly be a lot more fun than the morning i spent at the microsoft-on-linux event on tuesday as well. barnaby jeans is a cool guy who i always enjoy talking with, and i really appreciate microsoft travelling around telling the world about linux. lord knows we would have a much harder time getting their die hards into a room like they can to talk about open source, so they are, imo, inadvertently helping us out. there was the expected amount of decete and even outright falsehoods, but it's getting harder for them to say nasty things about our efforts. in fact, they are now touting how they are working more with the open source community which is a testament to how much credibility the community has gained. either way, it's better than being ignored.