Ubiquity for noobs, and such.

My first open source related blog! The amount of open source documents I read out of boredom, for helping resolve my extreme n00b Linux problems and the general help I got from random people sacrificing their time to tell me the bugs i experience (and pester them with) were resolved a year ago. Time to give *hopefully* some of that back, with a fraction of how people had to deal with me!

So, ubiquity! The super cool addon for Firefox that makes old traditional browsing look.. old and traditional. Its a fun addon, I mean give it a tiny bit of time and most home users will use it with the built in functions available to them in websites, until a few of their credit card numbers get stolen and such but.. yeah, life will prevail. And Ubiquity will remain AWESOME!

So what is Ubiquity? Its a program what can be used to execute commands within the browser to enhance surfing experience. Want to Google something? Wiki anyone? Feel like youtubing SNL for some after work laughs? How about emailing a random friend telling him how cool an addon you found was? Those are all built in commands ready to do your bidding. But here comes the interesting part.

You want to develop a command that snoops every other user that sits on your computer, because someone has been sitting down and finishing your limited bandwidth on online flash movies because they have nothing to do, and your phone bill reflects your unhappiness. Thats something Ubiquity would actually be able to do, but sadly not up to my standards yet, so back to reality, one week ago..

Was my second open source lab, we got introduced to Ubiquity by a video a colleague hooked up for us. Now I know coming from a 5th year computer engineering student this is kind of extreme, but thankfully many others suffered my fate... the wireless didn't work. For ages. I eventually restarted and tried jumping between openSuse (whose Yast2 went haywire and had to be put down =( ) and windows 7, somehow making the wireless decide to work halfway (wierd).

So the first two hours consisted of me reading through the source code, I haven't really grasped our object and hence was trying to backtrack the function from where its written until where the commands themselves are stored within Ubiquity itself. I wish I could say the code was as easy to read as English, hacking open source software isn't as hard (thank god for amazing documentation). Anyways two hours later we think we got a grasp of how stuff works (on a very, very, very small scale), and we realize were meant to create an external command *grrr*. But we managed to get some pathway way, sadly due to contradicting versions of the libraries/documentation and latest available beta code we haven't really managed to get it working in time. But we live, learn, and hope that the next class will be a continuation into the vast, and quite fun world of open source!