I bought a Drobo about a year ago. Recently I got this pop-up window:

Wait a second — I bought this storage device, and now want me to extend my license “to continue to receive the latest updates”? If you go to the url mentioned in the pop-up, you see that for $49 for a year’s coverage, you get

Continued access to software updates to Drobo Dashboard, Drobo Firmware and DroboShare Firmware including performance enhancements and new features.

Both the program pop-up and the web page imply that I need to pay $49 to continue to get firmware updates. That’s extremely uncool. The ironic part is that apparently Drobo changed their mind in February and they won’t make you pay for firmware updates now. It’s been a month; why does the DroboCare web page still imply that you have to pay $49/year for firmware updates? They need to fix that ASAP, because people appear to be confused by the language.

Let me tell you a little story: back in the 90s, before eBay existed, I was a poor college student who wanted to connect a CD recorder to his computer. I bought a used Adaptec SCSI card over Usenet. When the SCSI card arrived, the four floppy disks of driver software were scrambled. When I tried to get drivers from Adaptec, I learned that Adaptec charged for the drivers for that SCSI card. I never bought another Adaptec product again. The End.

So I don’t plan to buy any more Drobos in the future. Why would I buy from a company that tried to charge me for firmware updates for my consumer hardware? Sure, Drobo changed their mind after people complained, but the fact that Drobo even considered it will make me avoid them in the future.

Update: read this blog comment by Jillian Mansolf from Drobo. Evidently Drobo’s Sarbanes-Oxley auditors classified Drobo as a software company. The auditors “wanted us to recognize revenue for Drobo over the ‘life’ of the warranty (forever) if we included performance enhancements through free software updates.” DroboCare only pertains to hardware as of January, so a future version of the DroboDashboard software will remove this pop-up. Read the comment for more about this from Drobo.

Suppose you want to write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script. Here’s an example spreadsheet that you might want to update from a script:

I did some searching and found this page, which quickly led me to the Python Developer’s Guide for the Google Spreadsheet API.

There’s a simple “Getting started with Gdata and Python” page. The upshot is 1) make sure you have a recent version of Python (e.g. 2.5 or higher), then 2) install the Google Data Library. The commands I used were pretty much

mkdir ~/gdata
(download the latest Google data Python library into the ~/gdata directory)
unzip gdata.py-1.2.4.zip (or whatever version you downloaded)
sudo ./setup.py install

That’s it. You can test that everything installed fine by running “./tests/run_data_tests.py” to verify that the tests all pass. The program “./samples/docs/docs_example.py” lets you list all of your Google Spreadsheets, for example. An extremely useful program that lets you insert rows right into a spreadsheet is “./samples/spreadsheets/spreadsheetExample.py” and someone has also got a really nice example of uploading a machine’s dynamic IP address to a spreadsheet.

The most painful thing is that InsertRow() must be called with a spreadsheet key and a worksheet key. If you find out those values, you could hardcode them into the script and probably cut the size of the script in half. Or you could just look in the url to see the key value. That’s what I did. So here’s an miniature example script to write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script:


#!/usr/bin/python

entry = spr_client.InsertRow(dict, spreadsheet_key, worksheet_id)
if isinstance(entry, gdata.spreadsheet.SpreadsheetsList):
  print "Insert row succeeded."
else:
  print "Insert row failed."


That’s it. Run the script to append a new row to the current spreadsheet. By the way, if you make a chart from the spreadsheet data, you can right-click on the chart, select “Publish chart…” from the menu, and get a snippet of HTML to copy/paste that will embed the chart on a web page. It will look like this:

That’s a live image served up by Google, and when the spreadsheet gets new data, the image should update too.

To add Wiimote support on Ubuntu 8.10, start by running the command “sudo apt-get install wminput wmgui lswm” to install the CWiid library and associated software.

If you’re using a desktop machine, you probably don’t have Bluetooth capability. If you run the program “lswm” and see the message “No Bluetooth interface found” then you need to get a Bluetooth adapter, which is a dongle that uses a USB port to add Bluetooth abilities. I bought the IOGear GBU421 because it seems to be well-supported in Linux and only costs about $20. It’s also so tiny that it’s cute. It looks like this:

I told you it was cute. Now put your Wiimote in discoverable mode by pressing the 1+2 buttons at the same time and then within 15-20 seconds, run “lswm” again and you’ll get a Bluetooth identifier back:

lswm
Put Wiimotes in discoverable mode now (press 1+2)…
00:17:AB:2A:3C:BD

Congrats, your Linux machine can see the Wiimote! Now run the “wmgui” program to get a very nice user interface that will show you the sensor readings on your Wiimote:

That’s really all there is to it. Once your Ubuntu machine can see the Wiimote, you can do all sorts of tricks with it. You could do head tracking, camera tracking, control MythTV with it, etc. Linux/Ubuntu 8.10 handles the IOGear GBU421 plus a Wiimote really well.

Update: I made a video of using a Wii mote with Ubuntu if you’d like to watch: