It was an exciting first day at PyCon. I met Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian Fitzpatrick (who is just as down to earth as he appears to be), Ted Leung, Steve Holden (Director of the PSF), and many, many other great contributors to the community.
So, I bought IWork ‘08 the other day and started playing around with it. I was glad to see they fixed a couple of things with IWork ‘06–there was some bug with gradient fills and tables that ended up leaving a thin line of background near the top edge of the cell… but only when you printed or made the PDF.
Yesterday I was setting up a new VM under VMWare Workstation when I noticed that mouse grabbing was not working. Now I use my VMs extensively, so I expect this feature to work as it slows productivity when it doesn’t. After digging around, I found that the VMWare Tools installer hadn’t modified the xorg.conf to handle the mouse. It turns out that they released the Xorg drivers as open source and now they’re maintained by the Xorg team! So, in this case, I fired up Synaptic and installed the vmmouse input driver, modified the driver line in my xorg.conf to be ‘vmmouse’ instead of ‘mouse’, and restarted X. Tada! I now have mouse grabbing without having to start the vmware-toolbox.
So, I was at work yesterday, trying to troubleshoot a problem we were having with our customer’s build system. For some reason, we’re seeing make fail with a complaint about a missing endif—an error that they’ve never seen. So we proceed with the usual check of tools and found that we were using the same versions of everything. Same gcc, same make, same binutils, same everything… except the Linux distribution.
I’m very excited to be attending this year. I wanted to attend the last couple of years, but had some family matters to attend to. I’m hoping to learn a few things and run into a few people while I’m there. If you haven’t signed up already, click the badge and do so!
