Paul Howard –

As scary as it may seem, back in the late eighties I used to be a programmer. Luckily after a few years of coding for a living I realised that I was not a bad programmer. I was awful, and so moved into the world of hardware, and then later software, support.

Recently, though, I have found that I want to accomplish certain tasks and there just aren’t the tools available for what I need. A good example is a bit of software that Microsoft supplies (I think it is a snap in for MMC but cannot for the life of me find a link to it right now) that allows you to connect to multiple Terminal Services sessions inside on app/windows. Very hand if, like me, you have to manage multiple Windows servers.

The problem is I don’t run Windows on my desktop PC. I run Ubuntu Linux and although there are many ways of connecting to a Terminal Server (rdesktop, tsclient) there doesn’t appear to be a way of connecting to multiple Terminal Server connections in one application, all in one switchable window.

The nearest application to what I need is Vinagre which does exactly what I need but only for VNC connections.

So the plan is to kill two birds, as it were, with one stone. I intend to get back into coding some basic applications as well as writing an application that fills a gap in my work flow.

Having not done any coding at all for the last fifteen odd years I took a look around and it seems the easiest way for me to accomplish this is to use Gambas. In the words of the Gambas website: “Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, a bit like Visual Basic (but it is NOT a clone !).”

As I learn the basics of Gambas I hope to post a few updates as well as any source code I create. Anything that ends up being release worthy will be released under the GPL.

This should prove interesting.

Yesterday I noticed my macbook battery (model no: A1185) had started to swell.

This was troubling as it was performing well and only a month or so ago I tested it using coconutBattery and found it to be working perfectly.

When I called Apple support today I was shocked and quite angry to find out that not only would they not be replacing my battery, despite it having only had 34 power cycles, but that two of their support staff told me that the swelling battery was a “safety feature” and the batteries could not explode.

After an hour or so on the phone I decided to call it quits and just email a complaint to their customer services dept.

This is the first time I have ever had to call Apple support, despite having owned Apple products for seven years or so. All I can say is that if this is the level of support you can expect, I will be switching back to Linux next time I buy a computer. OS X is a fantastic OS but if you have to run it on hardware that’s so badly supported I’ll forgo the Apple tax next time.

UPDATE:

10th July 2009

Still no word from Apple customer support. 4 days now and no reply. In this economy I would have thought customer services would have been their top priority to keep customers.

UPDATE:

31st July 2009

After a lot of moaning Apple gave in and decided to send me a new battery. The new battery arrived today and is installed and working perfectly. I still think it’s a shame that you have to moan so much just to get decent customer service though.

I recently reinstalled my eeepc with Eeebuntu 3.0 and came across a very annoying problem.

When you try and set up a show at ustream.tv, you would normally wait ’till the flash video software loads, right click, choose “settings” and allow the site in question to have access to your camera and microphone. Only when I tried this the “settings” option was greyed out. I have not quite worked out why it is greyed out yet but have a workaround that will allow you to get the video working.

First of all you need to go to the following site in the browser on the computer you have Eeebuntu installed on:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html

Once there a settings manager box will appear at the top right hand corner of the page. This is not an image, it is the actual Flash settings for the browser you are using.

Add the necessary sites for ustream to work (ustream.tv, www.ustream.tv and cdn1.ustream.tv). The image below does not contain cdn1.ustream.tv as this post was written on my mac which hasn’t been used to broadcast using ustream.tv yet but it should show up in your window if you have tried to broadcast at all.

Now make sure that all three sites are set to “always allow”. Close the browser, reopen it and you should now have full access to your webcam and microphone inside the ustream broadcast flash app.